The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Paul Graham wrote about the acceleration of addictiveness and it troubled me.

He wrote:

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn’t want to stop it. It’s the same process that cures diseases: technological progress.

I disagree as technology has no wisdom. I can use a hammer to build a house, or kill my neighbors. The hammer doesn’t care. Technology is a kind of power, nothing more, and a technology on its own is not a kind of progress. It’s how the technology is used that makes it progress or not. People who make hammers, or software, don’t control how the world will use what they make simply because they made it. They think they do, but they don’t (e.g. Edison believed the phonograph would be used exclusively by businessmen, the Wright brothers thought airplanes would end the need for warfare).

Using technology to cure a disease is not the same thing as making a new, cheap, super-addictive drug. The same lab tools might be involved, but the goals are entirely different. Yes, with my kitchen oven I can make a cake, or cook my neighbor’s children, but would anyone call them the same? No. We’d say we’re using the same means to achieve two very different ends.

A simple rallying cry for technologists could be: make things that are useful but not addictive. But this runs against the capitalistic drive of most start-ups, who want to be viral, they want to be addictive so they can profit. The problem is ethics, not technology. Graham runs the venture firm called Y-Combinator – and I bet the viral / addictive element is a plus in what products they choose to fund. They want products that people will spend lots of time, perhaps too much time, using. The real problem is addictive things are very profitable. And once you admit this, the the challenge is again not technological, but ethical. What kinds of things are you okay profiting from?

It also raises the question about what addiction means. Is air addictive? Food? Water? I think something you need becomes an addiction when it negatively effects other parts of your life. But if people suffer from internet addiction, wouldn’t any tool used over the internet exacerbate that addiction? The easy answer is to say it’s not the maker’s problem, it’s the consumers. But at some point a technology could be powerful enough that this is not true: but where is that point?

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

I’m not sure what it means for the world to be addictive – alcohol, heroin, etc. have been around for a long time, and we’ve always had people who abuse them. But I agree with Graham’s general point: some corporations have mastered manipulating consumer need. The technologies of advertising and marketing are amazing. And that mastery has led to great profits, but also epidemics: 1 in 3 American’s are obese, and will have reduced life expectancy (diabeties is following along). Food Inc. details how the majority of the food Americans are sold is engineered to be as cheap and addictive as possible.  We are using our hammers to engineer this ‘food’, but to what end?

Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

I agree here and there is a long history. The Greek ascetics, and monks throughout the ages, rejected many of societies behavior for similiar reasons. Progressives in any era are always seen as weird: the status quo can’t sort out yet whether the new behavior these people are engaging in is good or bad, and they tend to assume it’s bad, or fail to see the good aspects (e.g. what we say of neo-luddites and the Amish).  But some things do change fast: Whole Foods has made it easier than ever to be, say, a vegetarian in the U.S. – a huge change in the last 10 years.

It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.

There are some social movements/antibodies afoot – it’s just they’re laughed at by the status quo American or business/tech culture, that is still in awe of all the shiny new hammers we have.  Start with the slow food movement (started 1986), Slow news movement, books like James Gleick’s Faster, or Neil Postman’s Technopoly (this should be air-dropped by the 1000s over silicon valley).  There is a long thread of thinking and behavior here, it’s just not the things people addicted to the internet are likely to think to find.

In the end, my mind is spinning about the idea of personal responsibility. When do we teach our children they are responsible for what they put in their mouths and their minds? For the life of me, I still can’t see where in all of this that is supposed to happen. Just like the crusade for seat belts, and food labels, there is an important role for government, but many solutions begin by finding the off-switch and learning to take comfort in doing less, not more.

9 Responses to “The Acceleration of Addictiveness”

  1. Greg Linster

    Hey Scott,

    “A simple rallying cry for technologists could be: make things that are useful but not addictive.”

    That’s a difficult task. Could it be possible that something is both useful and addictive? The internet seems like the perfect example. Along the lines of Graham’s argument, I’d rather live in a world with the internet than one without it despite its addictive qualities. I think this is the central problem: useful technological improvements can be addictive.

    Also, caffeine and sugar are both addictive, but are more socially accepted addictions. What is and isn’t ethical to profit from has become increasingly blurry.

    -Greg Linster

    Reply
  2. Scott Berkun

    Greg:

    > What is and isn’t ethical to profit from has become
    > increasingly blurry.

    I agree – I like my rallying cry but I’d never claim it was easy :)

    I do agree with you and Graham that I’d rather be in a world of potentially addictive things. No doubt. But that doesn’t mean the makers of things should be thinking through the impact of what they make (e.g. seat belts, food labels) – nor that individuals shouldn’t be encouraged to take responsibility for their own behavior.

    Reply
  3. JohnO

    I agree 100%, it is the standard philosophical problem we’ve been suffering from ever since modernism. And modernism has no solution. Glad we’re still talking about personal responsibility. Now only if companies were actual persons such that they had a responsibility. That would be great. But they aren’t, and they don’t. They just want to be persons and avoid the ethical dilemmas that actual people have.

    Reply
  4. Paul

    I clicked through on the Technopoly link to see what it was about. I find it highly amusing that the book title “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” is followed closely by Amazon’s plug to “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle.”

    An interesting post. The ‘internet’ is just a newer form of TV.

    – Paul Shewmaker

    Reply
  5. Sean Crawford

    Say, a good meditation on responsibility is the sf Chtorr war series where the world and the hero have to grow to be more effective if they are to win.

    Yes, modernism is a plight. To take a quote from the Puppet Masters out of context, “We will have to live with this horror, as we do the atom bomb.” We tend to forget how bad things (like bombs) are. Hence I get irritated if some one reminds me by being organic or asking congress for funding for peace studies.

    Regarding personal responsibility: Yes, overnight we could all start behaving healthy, being citizens not passive civilians, and stop using cell phones in public… but …

    …I am still amused by the reply of the editors of the pre-computer age Strategy and Tactics magazine. One month various rail road enthusiasts wrote in to correct S&T’s calculations of how fast the Soviets could move armies and war material out of Siberia using the trans-siberian railroad. Apparently S&T had been too conservative, given the numbers of Soviet rolling stock. The editors replied something like, “We made our estimates based not on what the Soviets could do, but on what, given human nature, they probably would do.”

    In my condo there is excellent sound proofing between the units, but the hall doors have a floor gap to allow positive pressure air flow. No one anticipated that people would “need” to start talking before they had even left their unit, or “need” to talk from their car right down the hall to their unit. Some individuals will take responsibility, but I don’t expect the masses ever will, just as many won’t attend a condo AGM or vote in a federal election. They could do so, but given human nature…

    Reply
  6. Chris Mahan

    Just remember than like all machines, computers, the Internet, and even (gasp) programming languages are tools to Get Stuff Done. Stuff in the Real World, like providing food, shelter, clothing, and leisure time to the masses through good wages, which come from the production of high-quality, low-cost products. I fear, rather, that the Internet and related technologies are a way to suck away the cognitive surplus Clay Shirky talks about. People are bored, so they go all clicky-clicky on Zingaville.

    They should get out more and make friends.

    Can you tell I was reading Henry Ford’s Today and Tomorrow? — Highly recommended.

    Reply
  7. Chris Bridgen

    I enjoyed this interesting piece.
    The technological crack power of, say, the iPhone, constantly surprises me. Like junkies in search of their next hit, the Apple fanboys are addicts. And the wait between hits gets shorter and shorter.
    There is no humanly possible way for users to have fully used and mastered all of the software features before the newest version is available, which immediately obsoletes the former experience of the device, which was apparently Nirvana to begin with.
    Why? because the new drug is more addictive than the old drug.

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  8. Ann Hudspeth

    Good point about personal responsibility and addiction. The cycle of addiction doesn’t allow enough pause for people to realize they control what they consume and it might make them happier to change. How can parents teach children to eat responsibly when they are caught up in their own addictions? I am so infuriated and sad when I see an obese child and her invariably obese parents. Technically, the child is innocent and (barring an unlikely health issue) her parents are at fault for her obesity, yet the nature of addiction plays a heavy role. It’s tough to hit bottom when the generally accepted bottom keeps moving down.

    I wish Michelle Obama’s healthy food initiative would directly address addiction. You can put a potato in the corner market, but everyone will still choose french fries.

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