July 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common isthat they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And thescary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that curesdiseases: technological progress. Technological progress meansmaking things do more of what we want. When the thing we want issomething we want to want, we consider technological progress good.If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, thatseems strictly better. When progress concentrates something wedon't want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seemsbad. But it's the same process at work.[1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasingnumbers of things we like will be transformed into things we liketoo much.[2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage hasbecome increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why:there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At theextreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has beentransformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations infood processing into something with way more immediate bang for thebuck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkersand solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille.TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unlessthe forms of technological progress that produced these things aresubject to different laws than technological progress in general,the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it didin the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don'tmean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerousdrug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful.More things we like will mean more things we have to be carefulabout.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the worldbecomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live anormal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal"is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is thesense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of apiece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someonetrying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most ofthe US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced.You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that ifpeople don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things.I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes firstappeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads througha previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a(statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. Wehad ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither ofmy parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed.In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from somethingthat seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from somethingmovie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles ofaddicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of thechange was due to legislation, of course, but the legislationcouldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless therate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match theaccelerating rate at which technological progress throws off newaddictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs toprotect us.[3]Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mineof each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes alesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselveswhat to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not justabout new things, but also about existing things becoming moreaddictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, butthe Internet got me because it became addictive while I was usingit.[4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We'reall trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing Iwant is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.[5]My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was abetter form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Nowthe slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer Ispend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you'retrying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guideyou. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric.But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then thiskind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fateof anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly bedefined by what we say no to.Notes[1]Could you restrict technological progress to areas where youwanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state.And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects."Good" and "bad" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated,so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing theformer. And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs"show, bans often do more harm than good.[2]Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithicstandards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithicperiod.[3]Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recentresurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reactionto drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; iftheir kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. Butthat solution has broader consequences than just getting kids tosay no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well.I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few peopleplot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else booksa package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by thegovernment.[4]People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describewhat they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describewhat's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call itprocrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.[5]Several people have told me they like the iPad because itlets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop wouldbe too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This istrue of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't asobvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those.)Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, andRobert Morris for reading drafts of this.
