The Infrastructure of Belonging
The Infrastructure of Belonging - Social media capture interoceptive regulation the role of Retail CBDC and DREX Citizen
If the previous texts began with the body — and then moved into the inner images that shape it — we now arrive at the unavoidable question:
Who regulates the environments where belonging is produced today?
In the 21st century, this answer has shifted dramatically.
When belonging leaves territory and enters the algorithm
Historically, belonging was regulated by physical ecosystems: community, language, land, spirituality, and shared rhythms. These systems functioned as collective interoceptive regulators, stabilizing identity and meaning through embodied continuity.
Today, much of this regulation has migrated into digital environments.
Social media platforms do not merely transmit information — they engineer bodily states at scale. They operate directly on comparison, intermittent reward, symbolic surveillance, and public humiliation dynamics.
In BrainLatam terms, they are not only competing for attention —
they are competing for Utupe and Pei Utupe.
In other words, they compete for the internal images that organize the body itself.
The silent capture of interoception
The central issue is not ideological but physiological.
Digital platforms are optimized for retention, not human regulation. The downstream effects are increasingly consistent across studies:
intermittent dopaminergic stimulation,
anticipatory anxiety loops,
chronic comparison states,
instability of belonging.
These are not merely psychological outcomes — they are interoceptive disruptions.
Without predictability, the organism struggles to return to integrative states (Zone 2: fruitional awareness and metacognition). Collectively, this increases contraction dynamics: reactivity, polarization, and diminished critical flexibility.
This helps explain a paradox of hyperconnected societies:
more information,
less coherence;
more expression,
less belonging.
The economics of symbolic capture
A second layer often overlooked is the interaction between material instability and symbolic capture.
Economic uncertainty increases baseline interoceptive vigilance. Under survival-mode physiology, individuals become more susceptible to environments that promise validation, status, or future security.
Digital ecosystems exploit this vulnerability by offering symbolic belonging where material belonging is unstable.
This creates a reinforcing loop:
material scarcity → symbolic capture → trapped anergy → reduced autonomy → deeper capture.
Breaking this cycle requires more than media literacy. It requires belonging infrastructure.
Retail CBDC as a regulatory technology
This is where a largely misunderstood concept enters the discussion: retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
Most debates frame CBDCs as financial tools. But there is a deeper layer rarely explored — collective interoceptive regulation.
When designed as a citizen-layer infrastructure — as in the concept of DREX Citizen — a retail CBDC can function as:
a stabilizer of baseline predictability,
a reducer of chronic anergy,
an amplifier of embodied autonomy.
This is not primarily an economic argument. It is a physiological one.
Just as biological cells require stable energy flow to maintain function, human systems require minimal stability to sustain cognitive flexibility and social coherence.
Without it, the brain remains in survival mode.
DREX Citizen: belonging as social metabolism
The DREX Citizen proposal introduces a structural shift:
money stops being only a market instrument
and becomes also a metabolic layer of citizenship.
This reframes the core societal question.
Instead of asking:
“How much growth do we generate?”
We begin asking:
“How much interoceptive autonomy can a society sustain?”
Baseline financial stability does not produce happiness directly. But it reduces physiological noise. And reduced noise increases:
cognitive updating capacity,
creativity,
cooperative behavior,
uncaptured future orientation.
In BrainLatam language: it increases the probability of collective return to Zone 2.
Regulating platforms is not censoring ideas
The second half of the equation is frequently misunderstood.
If digital environments modulate bodily states at scale, regulating them is not merely a free-speech debate — it is a civilizational health question.
This does not imply ideological censorship. It implies structural regulation, such as:
algorithmic transparency,
limits on addictive design architectures,
interoceptive protection frameworks for youth,
systemic auditing of humiliation-amplifying environments.
The goal is not to control thought.
It is to protect the collective body from architectures that capture belonging.
Politics as the regulation of collective physiology
This may be the most difficult — and necessary — reframing.
For centuries, politics has been framed as an ideological contest. But through an interoceptive lens, politics reveals another dimension:
politics is the engineering of collective bodily states.
Economic infrastructures regulate predictability.
Symbolic systems regulate belonging.
Digital systems regulate attention.
Together, they shape the quality of collective consciousness.
Toward a new civilizational metric
We may be entering a moment where societal maturity is no longer measured only by GDP, technological output, or military strength.
A new metric is emerging:
The capacity of a society to sustain belonging without symbolic capture.
Under this lens:
unregulated networks fragment,
chronic scarcity contracts,
stable belonging expands.
This is not an ideological thesis.
It is a regulatory hypothesis.
Closing the trilogy
If the first text began with the body,
and the second with the images that organize the body,
this third closes the loop by addressing the environments that shape those images.
Body, culture, and infrastructure are not separate layers.
They are different scales of the same system.
And perhaps the defining question of our time is not technological, nor economic, but profoundly human:
What environments do we allow to shape our inner images?
The answer will determine not only future policy, but the quality of collective consciousness for generations to come.
References (Post-2021)
Interoception & Neuroscience
Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2022). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry CNCN.
Chen, W. G., et al. (2021). The emerging science of interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Seth, A. (2023). Predictive processing and embodied selfhood updates. (Recent reviews on embodied cognition).
Social Media & Mental Health
Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2023). Adolescent well-being and digital technology. Nature Human Behaviour.
Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2022). Social media use and mental health updates. Journal of Adolescence.
Cultural Systems & Latin American Research
Gómez-Carrillo, A., et al. (2023). Cultural–ecosocial systems in psychiatry. The Lancet Psychiatry.
Flores-Cohaila, J. A., et al. (2025). Decolonizing mental health in Peru. Scientific Reports.
