Technology is Heroin (2009)

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php

by ISL • 13 years ago

107 25 13 years ago

The author goes into delightful depth about the history of addiction, but then implies at the end ("things that take mor brain time win") that after all that we haven't evolved any defenses against it.

But there are checks and balances against addiction in our culture. Your friends start to get concerned. You lose your job and can't pay your WoW bill anymore.

And these events afford us a time for reflection. I specifically don't do World of Warcraft (or amphetamines) because I know they're good at capturing my "brain time". My fear is bad for WoW's growth.

I do agree Internet addiction is a public health crisis. But I don't think we're as powerless to take it on, both individually an collectively, as the author implies.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

The point is we really haven't evolved defenses against it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

Yes you are right, people can choose to avoid getting addicted in the first place. But countless people try drugs and video games anyways. They are very tempting. And there is strong market pressure to make them even more tempting, and even more addicting.

crassus• 13 years ago

What happens when we have universal basic income guarantees + WoW? That's going to be the most depressing world of all time.

frozenport3• 13 years ago

The moment you can't pay your WoW bill its too late, imagine how fucked up you must be not to be able to pay $15 a month? Hell, Comcast is more expensive.

cdwhite• 13 years ago

Perhaps "you lose your job and decide that your WoW bill is a non-essential expense, and make the one-time, non-trivial-to-reverse decision to cut it, which is much easier than every fifteen minutes crushing the urge to start playing."

matthewcford• 13 years ago

Some good points, but Technology is a stimulant not a depressant (unless you spend all your time on facebook looking at your friends' pictures), so it's more like Cocaine.

Malician• 13 years ago

Learning how to deal with the effects of technology, the instant gratification and the multi-sensory stimulation it provides is, indeed, one of the great challenges of the modern age.

The writer's specific examples grate on me. I do not think that most of them are supportable - they seem to originate from a mono-cultural understanding of the world which muddles influences from non-Western cultures with the effects of technology. His description of life in rural America is important, not because of the similarities to life in other historical cultures, but because of the differences.

Take the music. There are more cultures in human history than merely rural America. Many of them have historically relied on drum-heavy music.

Not just African music, either. Rhythm based music (often with spoken words) has been important to many cultures and is not some sort of new demon fostered by technology. I would "blame" multi-culturalism on its popularity, not iTunes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxk7c38Q-lQ

I do not believe in the slightest that intelligence is going down - not unless you compare the elite of the past to the failing students of the present. After all, the vast majority of people either didn't have access to much reading material or have the time to peruse it.

We now have access to an always-on research library through the Internet. Does everyone use it to its full potential? No, but there are a surprisingly high number of people who go out and read research studies and long-form articles of their own volition. I do not think books are innately superior.

Does his suggestion that Indians and Chinese are writing the software, which Westerners merely consume, really jive with your experiences?

The drug war saved our country?

I do not want to fall prey to middlebrow dismissal, but these arguments unnerve me and I think the point could have been made in a better way.

p1esk3• 13 years ago

TV, video games, internet - information technology is evolving towards Matrix-like virtual environment. It's not going to be forced on us by aliens, or intelligent machines. We are going to build it, and we are going to like it.

Cochlear implants and artificial retinas can already inject information directly into our brains, bypassing our senses. Artificial skin is being developed to provide a sense of touch to prosthetic limbs. Direct brain to brain communication was demonstrated, where one person was able to move another person's finger as if it was his own finger.

A virtual reality technology has been pretty lame so far. However, if traditional input/output devices are bypassed, people can experience it in a natural way. A brain does not care where the data came from - a computer, or your eyes - it's all just electrical signals. As long as that data is realistic enough, your brain will believe it. Every sensory experience from a real world can be recorded, analyzed, modified, and recreated in a virtual world. Sound, touch, smell, taste - they are just patterns of electrical activity to our brains.

After the technology is available, people are going to gradually migrate to this new social environment. Your physical body remains in the real world, where it can be connected to a sophisticated life-support machine, but most of the time you spent in the "Matrix". Virtual reality will be interfaced with a real world. There's no reason why it should be a closed, isolated environment. Anyone will be able to perform their jobs in the real world from the virtual one. A doctor can monitor your health as you lie down strapped to your life support machine. Even a surgery can be done remotely. If people don't want to leave the virtual world to do something in the real one, the technology will appear to make it possible.

Now, back to the entertainment - can you imagine being a god? Anything you can imagine will be possible. More than that - anything that anyone can imagine will be shared and experienced. Just like in the real world, people will create, buy, and sell good designs. A design can be anything - from a new pair of shoes, to an entire planet, to a weird feeling, to an experience of being a spider.

Your brain will believe it's real. Any you're going to like it.

aridiculous• 13 years ago

Maybe.

There's still the thorny problems of politics and economics in the real world. Who's going to control the machine farms? Who's going to guard them?

Also I don't think scarcity is the only source of conflict among humans. We'll probably find a way to prevent cyber-utopias where everyone is a god.

a3voices2• 13 years ago

Would most people want to be gods? Video games are more fun without using cheat codes.

p1esk3• 13 years ago

I don't see your point. If you don't want to do something, then don't do it.

My point was you'd be free to create your own reality, limited only by your imagination.

hoprocker• 13 years ago

Although I strongly agree with the basic premise -- namely, that many of us could benefit from some reflection on our screen-gazing habits -- after the Brief History of Drugs portion of this piece, it drifts off into speculation that could be attributed to a William Gibson story. The comparison here might be valid, but this piece could use some more info on how technology measurably affects quality of life, quality of social health, and other factors.

frozenport3• 13 years ago

Heroin brought euphoria reading Wikipedia has made me knowledgeable on many diverse subjects and those video games might have increased my focus and problem solving skills. Video games and to a lesser extent television are stimulating, while most drugs are not.

coldtea• 13 years ago

Heroin brought euphoria reading Wikipedia has made me knowledgeable on many diverse subjects

Or rather gave a lot of people a shallow understanding of some topic and a false sense of entitlement to be equal to an expert that actually studied the field in question.

and those video games might have increased my focus and problem solving skills.

Judging by teaching young people very adept at video games, no it really hasn't. If anything it has destroyed their focus for anything that's not a constant blaze of motion and sound. As for problem solving skills, the only ones that wee boosted was those most alike solving video game problems.

contingencies• 13 years ago

Video games and to a lesser extent television are stimulating, while most drugs are not.

What about 'stimulants' then, mmm? Oh wait, you were only talking about mental stimulation? Many actually do sharpen the mind. Nootropics? What about psychadelics or lesser psychoactives then? Oh wait, you don't consider those experiences 'stimulating'?

You put television above drugs? Psychoactives and similar experiences (eg. sensory deprivation) really are critical to the history of human cultures... in particular the emergence and development of visual art[1] and other forms of communication (glyphs, writing, dance...). Television and radio, for all their wonders, historically speaking do represent a johnny-come-lately, distributed programming channel for an (a)pathetic population of pliant, endebted, time-poor, couch-dwelling wageslaves subsisting on artifice and an everpresent supply of tangential mental wankery.

I agree fully with 'all things in moderation, including moderation' as suggested by your first sentence, but I disagree strongly with your conclusion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtymYxADpnE

normloman• 13 years ago

This guy doesn't know shit about music. - A music teacher.

0xcolton• 13 years ago

Seriously? What arbitrary metric of cultural value is this guy using other than nostalgia? He makes a truly fascinating comparison, but like many of you have said, his statistics are dubious. Technology's influence on evolution / selection in modern society pushes us towards efficiency, connectivity, knowledge, and truth. Its influence on art/music is profound, too, but we can't qualify art anyway

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

Technology's influence on evolution / selection in modern society pushes us towards efficiency, connectivity, knowledge, and truth.

it is really fascinating statement. Is gen X more efficient than boomers? and Millenials more efficient than gen X? I'd agree with more connected. The next 2 are also doubtful - more knowledgeable (vs. baseline of available knowledge) and more truthful.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

If you like this kind of Science Fiction check out Neuromancer by William Gibson

But seriously saying Technology is Heroin is like saying Obama is Hitler.

Heroin is a serious fucking drug that will destroy your life. If your a heroin addict you can't just stop doing heroin and go back packing in the forest for a week.

Yet people take breaks from technology and the internet all the time and are perfectly fine. Theres plenty of technology to be afraid of; dying in a car accident, sitting in a chair too much, but Instagraming every meal you eat is not one of them, thats just a little weird.

Sagat2• 13 years ago

That's because we still are at the beginning of the process. Once technology is directly melded into the brain we'll start to see people become dysfunctional when they can't get their fix.

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

correct title should have been "Technology is Dopamine". It is really surprising to not see a mentioning of dopamine in an article on addiction of technology.

Btw, dopamine is also key player in heroin addiction.

Yet people take breaks from technology and the internet all the time and are perfectly fine.

people take breaks from smoking, for example, all the time (i'm saying this as a 10 years long smoker - i was taking breaks from smoking and i was perfectly fine, just wanted to smoke the way i want to check email periodically. Quit smoking 10+ years ago, still check email/stocks/news looking for the "rush" though :)

Sagat2• 13 years ago

I think the problem is that there is too much content available, and it paradoxically reduces interest.

Technology is Heroin (2009)

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