Cyborg Babies on Adderall
thought digest, 01.28.2025
I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. 😓 I’m an Internet ethnographer, sometimes podcaster, and reporter. I spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. It’s hard work. Consider sending me $5 for my efforts:
A long while ago—maybe 2022—I pitched a story I never followed through on, and I still wish I had. It was about Adderall narrating the mood of our age: affectless, prone to mood swings, hyper-fixated, irritable, and asocial.
Pharmaceuticals have always shaped culture. The sixties had LSD, the seventies cocaine, the eighties crack. More recently, we’ve seen the rise of Adderall and SSRIs. Right now, we’re arguably in the ketamine age. As Freya India once quipped, “You’re not asexual; you’re on SSRIs.” In a similar vein, I often wonder: Are you actually autistic or have 14-hour screen time and perpetual stimulant use turned you into a rigid, hyper-focused automaton? Adderall and internet overexposure both condition the brain to fixate, flattening emotional affect and amplifying irritability. And if you’re actually taking Adderall, you get the bonus of mood swings. How many Culture War battles can be traced back to someone’s Adderall comedown?
Adderall’s cultural footprint is, of course, most visible in our writing culture. I keep thinking about how funny it is that the Adderall generation preceded generative AI. The timing is incredible. There was a whole cohort of millennial writers who didn’t become writers because they were literary. They became writers because they already were writing, and they were writing because you write on the computer. Writing on the computer—even roleplaying—is not the same as reading or writing literature. What emerged was a style once called “Asperger’s writing”: deliberately flat, mechanical, with little interiority. Deadpan descriptions of the world around you. Alt-lit minimalism, popular in the 2010s, embodied this ethos, reflecting the influence of both Adderall and the internet on our psyches.1
Recently, I’ve noticed a shift.
The affectless style characteristic of the 2010s has given way to a new form of writing, particularly present on Substack. These pieces are almost always all lowercase, confessional, breathless, and moralizing—and they’re always too long! I’ve called them “essays as objects,” because their creation feels more important than their consumption. It’s important that you wrote it at all. I also suspect they are only “read” insofar as people scan them for quotable, shareable, “relatable” sections. The virality, as opposed to a conversation, is its own reward. It’s a little sneaky.
I noticed this style of writing starting to simmer around 2022. Now, I feel like it’s everywhere. This shift makes sense in the context of generative AI. AI writing, like Adderall-driven writing, often feels hollow. Maybe it’s technically proficient but it’s emotionally thin. In reaction to both, we see a turn toward florid, impossibly long essays that perform authenticity.
Whether this trend revives a literary culture or merely postures as “literary” is anyone’s guess.
Cyborg babies. Here’s a question that might out me as the “r-slur.” Could humans ever have a child with a robot? I’m not talking about a metaphorical “child,” but a child whose genes somehow combine human DNA with synthetic DNA, to whatever extent the latter is possible. I’m not sure how it would work, but if anyone could talk me through something like this, reach out…
?ME AROUND THE WEB
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It’s worth noting that not all of this writing was bad, nor did none of these writers read. Tao Lin, for example, stands out as someone who was literary. Though I don’t think the same can be said of his myriad copycats.
Some of this you (Katherine) know about me already, but for the purpose of this comment: I've been diagnosed ADHD for sixteen years, know quite a lot about the pharmacology of Adderall and recently stopped prescription stimulants five months ago. I'm sure someone will think I'm still taking it because of the length of what I'm writing but I need to cement that my brain is just this way, and if I was on medication this comment would probably be double in length.
Most of what I could say about prescription stimulants has been said, so I'll keep to what's novel: the biggest difference I'm noticing is in memory formation. I could go into detail about this if you'd like and going into detail would probably require an article of its own, but my theory which I have no evidence for is that Adderall increases fluid cognitive ability at the expense of long term memory formation, or output at the expense of input. (For transparency, my dose was 15mg/day of IR and I averaged ~215lb bodyweight during my prescription.)
To use an analogy to AI, the Adderall tradeoff is like the difference between ChatGPT4o - which stores memory for induction - and ChatGPT o1-mini, which is a more powerful reasoning engine but tunnelvisioned and contextless.
The biggest on/off prescription-stimulant difference is how you negotiate memory to yourself; I can put off thinking about something because I know the thought will come back to me. The universal Adderall Experience is a burst of thoughts on a topic that drive you to expel them from your brain **right now**, and they'll be lost if you don't. This is beneficial in some ways and detrimental in others, because when misused it's the impulse that drives you to clean your room for three hours and fixate on a stain that won't go away.
In essence, the Adderalled brain limits intrusive thoughts for higher performance in-the-moment. This sound good on paper, but intrusive thoughts are also what allow our memory to help us remember details by osmosis and enable our creative thought processes like divergent association.
What I don't want is for someone to take away that prescription medication is bad and needs to be limited, because there's always someone who immediately infers a prohibitionist action item the moment a drug is deemed problematic in any respect. I need to reiterate the point that what I've described is a tradeoff, because tunnelvision can be beneficial also. This is why stimulant medication has a purpose and should be taken at low doses and cycled when tunnelvision is more useful than divergent intrusive thought. But I think the fact that there **is** a tradeoff is important on a basic level, because the discourse over the last few years has been "is it a Nootropic? y/n".
I hope that this kind of discussion creates more nuance. I am reluctant to even talk about this because I don't want someone to jump to an irrational conclusion. But if you view the Adderall trend through the phenomenology of Adderall, you'll see these aspects everywhere: people who are able to focus and pay attention but whose front-of-mind thoughts drown their listening.
I really don't understand abusing ADHD drugs. They gave me those when I was a teenager and it made my heart race and never helped me actually do anything.
I think a lot of people's actual problem is exercise and these organic dyes. I didn't realize until I got to college and experimented carefully but some of the red dyes they use in candy is absolutely psychoactive.