Tech Addiction

One insight I gained after my arrest, after my collapse in pretrial detention, when lucidity started overtaking insanity was how I had gotten sucked into the internet in a way approaching addiction. I would persist in Yahoo Chat even though I resented the time there and felt mire and more disgusted by what I both found and did there. That was the worst place I got attached to but I was even more attached to Wikipedia and Google. Those last two I missed keenly all through ny stay in prison.

I would think we would know better by now. Nope.

Reading The Addiction Economy:

In 2010, Paul Graham published an essay entitled “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.” In it, he proposed that as technological progress continued its inexorable march forward, it would cause product improvements in every category. For the majority of products, that means they become more addictive. Graham argues,

“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 would propose that this process of optimization has accelerated over the last 10 years. We are at a level of ultra-optimized consumer addiction of which TikTok is the exemplar. However, this addiction isn’t merely relegated to the realm of social media—it has penetrated nearly every category of product that consumers interact with.

But there is a bigger problem the essay tries to address:

....For businesses, this means that services that can grab and hold consumers’ attention for longer will be rewarded. For consumers, it means that we will have to be ruthless in our relationship with technology. Business best practices are not equivalent to consumer best interests. Whether professionally or personally, all of us will need to understand and reconcile ourselves to this phenomenon. In the years to come, whoever responds best will be rewarded.

And I am wondering if capitalism has solved Jarl Marx's problems with overproduction. Excuse me while I go smoke a cigarette.

sch 5/27/22