I Want It Now.

The dopamine economy didn't create entitlement. It just put it on a bike. Roald Dahl saw it coming. The rest of us didn't.

[Scroll Puppets — original image © 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. Created to accompany 'I Want It Now' — thealmightygob.com]

You picked this up because something in the title recognised you. Stay with me.

Once or twice a year, I order a takeaway.

Not because I cannot afford to do it more often. Because I choose not to. And, to be honest, I’m never really that interested, on a regular basis.

So. When that occasional urge kicks in, the app goes on and the order goes in, somewhere across Bristol a rider picks up a bag with my name on it.

Then, for all of a moment — that brief, warm one — the stomach and the brain do a little deal with each other.

Something’s coming. On demand. Right now.

Well. The KFC arrived. It filled a hole. It was fine. Quite unremarkable, really. Momentarily, as it so often happens.

Now. Here is the thing about holes.

They do not stay filled.

Unless, of course, they’re potholes, which is an ongoing feature of other articles I have written, just not this one.

You see. The gap between the wanting and the having — between the tap and the arrival — is the most important gap in modern life. Because we have spent the last decade engineering it out of existence. Of course. Nobody noticed. That was rather the point.

Having absolutely no idea what we lost when we did.

Somewhere around 2012, the phone became the portal. The gap closed. The wait ended. And something else ended with it.

Or, are we beginning to discover. One scroll at a time. Well. Some of us, at least.

Go on. Open your phone. I double dare you.

Then. Pick a platform. Any platform, and scroll.

Take a pause. A longer than perhaps, usual one. Notice that feeling? That feeling? The little deal the stomach and brain just did with each other?

Did you notice? Same architecture. Same hole.

Well. Whether you did, or didn’t — something just shifted. You felt it. Even if you can’t quite name it. Social media has become a running menu for society.

It’s not something you sat with once. More like, you scan it, go back, change your mind, order something that looks better than it tasted, and then — because the menu never ends — you start again from the top. We’ve all been there. Haven’t we?

Because it’s never really about what you find. It’s about the looking. One thing gives you the hit. Then it’s something else. Then something else again. Curiosity. Frustration. Anger. Repeat.

So. What are we ordering today?

“Let’s see.

We’ve got mild... no.

It’s not a mild day though, is it. I mean, potholes!

Let’s see what else we’ve got.

Oh, okay.

We’ve got a hot Trump or an extra hot Palestine.

Okay. Let’s take a look at the reviews.

Hmmm. The extra hot Palestine is getting really good reviews at the moment. Lots of shares too!

That’s it.

We’ll go for the extra hot Palestine.

Now. The sauce. Let’s see what there is.

Well. That’s a hard one.

Actually, let’s see what the meal deal has to offer.

Right. Main course, an Extra Hot Palestine. Complete with a free protest invitation, and a side order of increasing anger and frustration. With extra ‘Hostility Sauce’ and the possibility of a prison sentence.

Wow, if I accept this offer before delivery I get free banners and placards included!

Yeah. That’ll do.

Let’s place the order.”

Tech puppets. Every last one of us.

The strings were always there.

Of course. Like all menus, it is subject to price increases.

Always price increases. Thanks, Straits of Hormuz. You know. For nothing.

Probably because it’s usually in the small print somewhere. Or, disguised as a ‘By the way. Our terms and conditions are changing.’ Because no one ever reads these anyway.

The cost of not reading it is something else entirely. You’re paying it now.

Because the currency is not money. It is attention first. Then time. Then the ability to sit in a room without reaching for the phone. Then the capacity to hold a single thought long enough to finish it. You know. Before that pressing engagement with the bathroom, suddenly.

The bill arrives whether you open it or not.

While you are paying more every year. The menu looks exactly the same.

Were you aware that there are currently an estimated 210 million people globally affected by social media and internet addiction? That number is not a scandal. No. Me neither.

As it turns out, that number is a business model.

The science, some will say, is not fully settled. Interestingly, the platforms have spent considerable sums ensuring it stays that way. The tobacco industry had a similar approach to uncertainty. It bought them decades.

The menu was designed to make us hungry. The price increases were always part of the plan.

Roald Dahl saw this coming in 1964. You did too, didn’t you? Of course you did. You just called it something else.

He just dressed it up as a little girl in a chocolate factory.

Of course, it goes without saying, the work is being cited here, not the man endorsed.

Veruca Salt — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — did not want things eventually. She did not want things when they were ready. She did not want things in exchange for patience, or effort, or the basic acknowledgement that other people existed.

She wanted them now.

Her father. A reasonable man who loved his daughter. Mind you, completely spineless about it. Some would say.

Well. Somehow, by sheer default, the algorithm you may have been following, does exactly the same. Loves you, and caves every time.

When Roald Dahl wrote Veruca Salt, he dealt with her efficiently. The squirrels made their assessment, and, that was that. No algorithm to consider. Probably just as well really. Considering what followed after his demise.

Of course, unlike Veruca Salt, the dopamine economy did not send anyone down a rubbish chute.

It sent them down a million and one rabbit holes. Looked at Veruca Salt and thought — there’s a market here.

Then, almost like the answer to a somewhat distorted prayer that got lost in translation mid-journey, came Greta Thunberg. A verruca that there was no immediate remedy for. One that would rub sores in existing wounds they never realised they had. To a scale of impending ‘emergency’.

That word. Emergency. Remember it.

Now. Whatever your position on the climate — and the climate is not the point here, so stay with it — what Thunberg exported to the world was not a cause.

It was a register.

The demand register.

Not “we ask.” Not “we urge.” Not “we propose a framework.”

We demand.

She was a teenager. She was angry. She was, in the most precise and clinical sense of the word, petulant. Who, single handedly (with some minor assistance from the media), revitalised the petulant teenager in every adult.

This is not a generational complaint. The demand register did not stay with the young. It went everywhere. Into boardrooms. Into parliaments. Into television studios at six o’clock in the evening.

She gave them the permission they were waiting for. She gave them a change in language as well. Two significant words. Demand. And emergency.

The diagnosis here is systemic, not personal. The system needed a face. She provided one. The system did the rest.

This became the epitome of what was once an advert for an insurance company whose slogan was — don’t make a drama out of a crisis.

The cameras loved every second of it. Lenses must have malfunctioned at record rate due to over use.

So you learned what you always learn when the delivery is instant — demand works. Ask and you might wait. Demand and the dopamine arrives on a metaphorical bike. The instant hit. Being physically hit by a bike, of course, being something more current.

The Fridays for Future movement that followed her was not really about Friday. Any other day of the week of your choice ending in a ‘y’. Or, the future.

It was about the register. And the register was contagious.

Past tense. As if.

Because a brain trained on instant delivery — yours, mine, everyone’s — has very little patience for the word no.

The register spread. Quickly. Everywhere.

Stop the War. Extinction Rebellion. Palestine solidarity marches filling the streets of every major British city, including this one, came out like measles in a primary school.

To be clear — the argument here is not about the validity of any cause. It is about what the demand register does to the possibility of resolving one.

No placard read, “we urge a negotiated ceasefire through sustained multilateral pressure.” To find one would have been rarer than rocking horse droppings. Though, in Roald Dahl territory, I suppose anything would have been possible. Diamond encrusted too.

The placards read stop it now.

As if the war is an app someone just needs to close. They still do.

Somewhere, in a room that smells of instant noodles and righteous certainty, someone is already designing the next placard.

Because “how?” takes too long. It is too slow. Too uncomfortable. Too much like waiting for a delivery that has not arrived yet.

So it skips straight to the demand. Right now. Or the volume goes up. And if the volume going up does not work, the volume goes up again.

That is what petulance looks like when it gets a platform.

It does not negotiate. It does not reflect. It demands harder. It demands the emergency that has since been conveniently dropped into any particular conversation on any day of the week about anything at all.

There it is. That word. Emergency. Right on schedule.

Demand. Emergency. Two words. One generation. One menu.

What the dopamine economy actually produced was not just scrollers. Not just screen addiction.

It produced a generation trained — tap by tap, demand by demand, delivery by delivery — to believe that wanting something loudly enough is the same as having a solution.

The food arrives on a bike.

The content arrives in the feed.

The outrage arrives on the placard.

(The bike, at least, has a bell.)

All of it leaving the same hole it arrived to fill.

On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for the addictive design of their platforms — Instagram and YouTube deliberately engineered to hook a generation of young users. The penalty, six million dollars in damages. The first verdict of its kind.

The platforms were designed to be addictive. The dopamine-driven reward loop — the like, the share, the notification, the infinite scroll removing every natural stopping point — was engineered deliberately, in full knowledge of what it would do. The Almighty Gob has been saying so for some time.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley, someone looked at the data and said nothing.

The menu was always designed to make us hungry.

The price increases were always part of the plan.

And the plan is still running.

Finally.

Roald Dahl sent Veruca Salt down a rubbish chute in 1964.

The squirrels made their assessment. The Eggdicator gave its verdict. Bad egg.

Down she went.

The dopamine economy has no Eggdicator. No chute. No moment where the machine tips and consequence arrives.

Just the demand. The tap. The hole that the rabbits no longer occupy since us humans found them.

Anna Lembke, Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University, once described the smartphone as the modern hypodermic needle — delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation. The needle does not fill the hole. It just makes the hole harder to feel.

The slot machine does not pay out every time. Neither does the scroll. That is precisely why both work. The uncertainty is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. Unpredictable rewards trigger the dopamine system harder than predictable ones. The platform engineers knew this. The squirrels, one suspects, did not.

And the harder part — the part nobody mentions — is that knowing this changes almost nothing. The pull remains. The loop remains. The menu remains open.

Maybe I’ll just choose a different food menu item for next time. Though, I have to say right now, the Dal’s looking good.

You’re still here though.

Scrolling.

Aren’t you.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent Bristol mayoral candidate 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with over 600 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either. Thank you, and goodnight.

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© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Reproduction, redistribution, or republication of this content, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.