I wonder if the new drug of choice is actually technology. In some ways I think that the addiction to technology has some similar mellowing effects as drugs. Some research indicates that smartphone addiction is also related to low self-esteem and avoidant attachment [1] and that smartphones can become an object of attachment [2]. The replacement of drugs by technology is not surprising as it significantly strengthens technological development especially as it is already well past the point of diminishing returns for improving every day life.
I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life. My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period. In person stuff is mostly organized. That is helped by school policy that got rid of the idea of a neighborhood school.
Additionally, the social activities that coalesced around things like alcohol are out of reach of many teens. I live in a city that had a very active college bar scene. It’s dead and gone. Crackdowns on underage serving and cost drives it away. Happy hour special at a place that other day was $12 for 4 coors lights in a bucket. In 1998, I’d pay $15 for a dozen wings and all you can drink swill for 3 hours.
Back then, only "nerds" socialized online. Nowadays, everyone does it.
I'm of two minds about this.
On one hand, I'm really glad that kids aren't screwing up their formative years. Drug use during growing/development years can wreck someone's life.
The issue is that, if you are an addict (which is different from physical addiction. Many addicts never get physically addicted to anything), then you'll eventually have problems with drugs; even if they are "socially acceptable" ones, like pot or alcohol (pot being "socially acceptable" is kinda new, around here, but Things Have Changed).
It'll still destroy your life, but, at least, you'll hopefully have something like an education, and living skills, by then, which can help Recovery (and also hinder it).
My gut is that this will mostly break even at best.
Whatever "gains" you see in terms of less drug addiction, etc, you're going to see losses in terms of the negative effects of not being "in person."
I confess that it's probably to early to even strongly know what those negative effects are, but I don't think this picture is likely one of strong improvement.
> if you are an addict [...] then you'll eventually have problems with drugs
Do I understand you correctly that you're saying that people addicted to smartphones in their youth will (more likely) become drug addicts in adulthood?
What makes you think that people don't just continue being addicted to phones as adults (instead of doing drugs)?
Nah, but addiction to smartphones might be an indication of future issues with other stuff (not just drugs). Long story, not really the kind most folks around here are interested in hearing.
It was maybe only nerds in 1994, but by 1998 everyone at school was asking their parents for the internet so they could talk on ICQ—not just the nerds!
For sure, I remember that. I remember that even the most popular, non-techie kids got on ICQ, though it was probably more around 1999 by that point, but every kid that had a computer at home had an ICQ account (though how often they could actually go online and use it was another question, thanks to dialup lol)
Though, still, only the geeky kids like myself were spending numerous hours online and having a high % of socializing occuring online, even then. The non-computer-geek kids would come online for like, an hour or two. I had already been online for hours before them, and would still be for many hours afterward (it helped that we got ADSL in 1998, after so many years of 14.4/28.8 dialup)
ICQ was a way of texting friends so that you could go party. At least for me, and I'm a nerd. I remember even "normal" friends were using IRC as a way to hookup. Cell phones were not very common.
Looking at my non-nerd 17 year old, they meet maybe once a month, and it's to cook food together during the day. Nobody drinks. They just see it as a waste of money. Maybe not the most normal sample. They love biking and also go to circus school together (Montreal).
> Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.
(1) When I was growing up, nobody had any online presence. I remember life without the internet.
(2) The fact that it is not new does not mean it has not changed in magnitude and addictiveness.
(3) The fact that it is not new does not mean that it is not a problem. It is a growing problem. Especially because societies these days do nothing about their problems except through more technology at them, which rarely solves the underlying issue.
Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.
Maybe, though that would surprise me a bit. My first personal webpage was probably around 1996 or 1997--and I assume that was fairly early for that sort of thing. As I said, I had been using BBSs for a while and also accessed usenet and FTP sites somewhat later. (I would have only had access from work to the Internet for quite a while.)
For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.
AOL. In the late 90s, I was in the chat rooms, by the early 00s me and my friends would swap between AIM and text messaging depending when texts were free. Kids definitely had an online presence, but it wasn't like the mid-00s and after when social media rose up.
I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.
I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything
There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.
It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.
2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.
Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.
Maybe a couple years later. The iPhone came out in 2007 but it was probably around 2010 before it really exploded. I was doing email with an earlier smartphone before that but 2010 or so is when mobile web really exploded and everything associated with that.
And, yeah, the 90s weren't really a mobile era for most people overall. I got a laptop at work in the latter part of the decade because I sort of begged and pleaded but it was mostly unconnected. Even when I became an analyst in 1999, I had to buy my own laptop for travel as I was just given a PC. (And WiFi at conferences was still an adventure.)
> I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life.
One cannot separate the tool from the use. Of course, you are right, though. Technology has done two things: it has eradicated communities by making communities less economically valuable, and it provides a superficial alternative.
But the end result is that people become effectively hooked on using the device. The device is nothing without what is happening on it, but it cannot be deconstructed and separated either into a social component and the technology itself because it is more than the sum of its parts.
Makes complete sense to me. Drugs are an effective distraction because they're easy to use and often fast-acting. Outdoor/sport distractions require effort (driving, etc). Video games require much less effort. Add to that less-trivial things like investing and research, and you've got the perfect "addiction"
Suddenly I remember this movie from the 90s where people drugged themself with some kind of minidisc. “Strange Days”, maybe? Anyhow, I always found the plot weird, but maybe they actually were onto something…
The discs had -in the movie- the memories of another person, and you would experience that memory and sensations as if you were living it. So, e.g. someone would record themselves doing something risky and you would get the adrenaline rush from watching it.
So... Maybe in some way one could argue that social media gives some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap, but in a conceptual way... it's still a bit of a leap but maybe not that big.
>> some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap, but in a conceptual way... it's still a bit of a leap but maybe not that big.
Play that VR game set within in the shark cage. The adrenaline rush is definitely not much of a leap from the real thing.
Yes, which originally came from Cyberpunk, the first sourcebook for which was released in 1988, with Cyberpunk 2020 releasing in 1990 complete with the idea for pre-recorded replayable memories/full sensory experience, ie:Braindance.
Strange Days was released in 1995.
Maximum Mike was, and is, a prophet right alongside Gibson.
edit: Although almost certainly this wasn't the first place people imagined being able to record and playback memories.
Brainstorm (1983) did it before Neuromancer. The movie is about a device that records and replays sensory and emotional experiences, and a central plot point is that it records the dying moments of a character.
I thought the central point was the porn played on a loop. Maybe I was distracted and missed the real plot. Also maybe mixed up by the fact that one of the principle actors died in real life while the movie was being made.
The porn thing showed that the device could be harmful to the viewer. This adds another dimension of risk to the later scenes where the Walker character is experiencing the death tape.
The actor was Natalie Wood, and the event is shrouded in mystery about how she died. However, the character who dies in the movie is played by Louise Fletcher.
The military stuff is a McGuffin-type subplot. The real plot is the main character's obsession with seeing Lillian's vision of the afterlife.
The author of the screenplay, Bruce Joel Rubin, is a self-described spiritual teacher, and "transitional journeys" is kind of his thing. His three most well-known films (Brainstorm, Ghost, and Jacob's Ladder) are all about characters experiencing the afterlife in some way.
This is exactly the parasocial way my girlfriend's niece and friends experience life. No relationships of their own, it is all celebrities and their lives, ingested on their phones. I don't have the heart to tell them that 95% of it is stuff created by PR firms.
playing devils advocate for a minute... isnt that similar to what our parents said in the 80's/90's about our generation? all that "tv and phone" brain rot
1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.
2. People did say that about TV and TV maybe had the potential to be like this. However, TV failed in many ways to be a hyper addictive device. Some of the many reasons:
i. Just less content. There wasn’t that much TV content at all. YT probably adds more content in an hour than all the TV content ever created.
ii. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to watch beyond a few dozen channels at best. So you always had opportunities where you were forced to do something different at many times.
iii. The TV wasn’t available to you at all times. You had to go to the den to watch it and you couldn’t take it to school with you.
iv. TV couldn’t specifically target you individually with content to keep you watching. The most amount of targeting TV could do was at maybe a county level.
v. You couldn’t be part of the TV. Social media and phones today make you an integral part of the “show” where a kid can end up having a video of them popping their pants on a playground shown to millions of people. Even in a more ordinary sense, a kid commenting on a video or sending a message to a friend makes them part of the device in a way TV never could outside of extraordinary situations.
> 1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.
Or they weren't and addiction wasn't the crux of their position; and I say that as someone who loves a lot of rock derivatives.
The influence pop icons with broken lives had on teen generations was horribly deleterious (and I'm not even talking about hippies), mainly because malleable and unproperly taught minds rarely see that an artist's respectability is completely separate from his output.
The ancients had the concept of muses for a reason.
TV certainly could target their audiences. Television shows would share their viewer demographics with advertisers: age groups, income levels, race and other social indicators, related interests.
The shows had target markets often driven by the need to reach certain demographics, though actual viewer demographics sometimes were surprisingly way off the mark.
They could not do this at the individual level, nor did they have ways of reaching people to persuade them to watch (notifications from mobile apps, emails about posts).
The key is limits. In the past, even if celebrites were idolized, we had a limited amont of information compared to now. The fluid variable is the increase in information, which makes the situation different.
You might need to recall just how crazy it was e.g. literal shrines to boy bands were just normal. To cover every inch of your bedroom walls and ceiling with photos of a celebrity crush was not unheard of. At school, every conversation could be about these obsessions. Folders/files would be covered with pledges of devotion.
No comment on how it is today, but looking back it was terrifyingly nuts - full on religious fervour to the point of mental disorder. When bands broke or people married/died, there would be full on breakdowns and sympathy suicides.
The lack of information might have helped exacerbate the religious mystery and make more space for imagination, fantasy and faith.
Effectively unlimited content is huge, though. IMHO that pretty much overshadows everything. There were only so much records, magazines and other content you could consume before the internet.
And they were right. But we would watch TV usually together and only for around 4-5 hours a day. Do you know how much screen time are people having ? 8 to 10 hours are not uncommon. And alone.
And our kids will warn their kids about how the ‘direct to brain’ type interface they will use is rotting their brains. Each generation will have been a little correct along the way; the harm at each step was just always gentle enough to not scold the frogs too quickly.
> Maybe in some way one could argue that social media gives some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap
That technology exists; it's called empathy, and the extremely powerful form of it innate to humans is arguably our singularly defining characteristic. It's our tech moat, so to speak.
Or the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Game [0]. Every time I watch that I get this eerie sensation that we're essentially giving our free will up to the masters of the games and social platforms we're addicted to.
"If you just let the game happen, it almost plays itself." The quote from the episode certainly makes me think about the "idle games" genre that has emerged in that last several years.
Offhand the only drug-like thing I remember from that series is the nutrition bars that had 0 calories that most of the school got addicted to. Or maybe the cheerleader that got bee pheromones and started controlling the rest of the students.
Aside - I just learned a month ago that there's an official followup miniseries that brought back several of the original actors, titled "Echoes", with hopefully more coming since it's called Season 1. Came out over 2022-2023: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHGrvCp5nsDJ1qSoKZEmm... (the trailers are at the bottom of the playlist)
Dangit tried to delete this when I realized this is completely unrelated, just a similar name, and was seconds late. Got the delete link then it denied me.
I’ve said this story before but I quit Facebook about 10 years ago, at a time when it was essentially the only social media game in town, so I was essentially quitting social media, and the quitting process felt exactly like when I had quit smoking the year before that.
Indeed. And I do feel that we need a sort of new terminology for technological "attachment/addiction" or whatever it is. Because people continue to nitpick on whether it is physiologically the same as physical dependence and that completely misses the point.
I really found it interesting that in the engineered society of Brave New World, everyone got a drug. I guess my personally opinion is that I disagree with you, that in a world where you know about drugs, drugs are a sort of need.
More seriously, I think there's ample historical evidence that drugs (with a liberal definition, beer, etc) are very popular across various times and places.
That very wikipedia article you links makes it clear it's not intended to mean religion is a "Drug" in the sense of being addictive, but rather a sociological pain killer. A tonic that limits how much people react to their own suffering.
Absolutely. And smart phones are also not literally a drug. Drugs, video games, alcohol, and religion, are all used as a part of coping mechanisms for many, however.
> a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence
(Merriam-Webster, "addiction")
It might be stretching it somewhat, but I think video games, social media, and religion can manifest a habitual need to indulge, negative effects from doing so, and negative effects from not doing so. Perhaps not in most people.
Coping mechanisms/painkillers can naturally cause some people to be "in too deep" because they keep using it and become dependent.
If you want to get technical, doesn’t it? When some particular variety of thing is popular across all human cultures, doesn’t this point to it addressing some deep desire we might put on mazlow’s? What distinguishes a deep, innate human desire from a need?
One way to distinguish them is the retrospective analysis of the outcome. What happens when someone obtains or goes without each category?
To go deeper, I think one needs to more fully defined "need”. Need for what? Are we talking about needs.. to sustain biological life? Are we talking about needs... To sustain happy and productive lives?
If we take the second definition, there is a pretty clear difference between a desire and a need. Satisfaction of a desire does not necessarily advance that goal, and can very well be counter to it.
I would just argue that “happy and productive“ is vastly too reductive. This seems like a very difficult definition to nail down, but those needs which are not required for survival would probably be defined as something like “those things which increase the flourishing of, maximize the potential of, and/or contribute to a valid and lasting feeling of deep satisfaction in the individual.”
From this definition, it seems like some drugs and some uses of drugs are most certainly not necessary while others seem to be contributing to a real psychological need. Some drugs can give people insight into the nature of their own mind or of their experience, or reshape their worldview for the better. They can allow us to experiment with our own consciousness, which seems to be something that we derive a lot of satisfaction and even utility from. In these cases, drugs may be fulfilling a need. Simultaneously we can recognize that drug use intended more just to anesthetize or produce blind pleasure is most likely not contributing to a need, as it was defined above.
Indoctrination into a dependency mindset fits the "buy a solution" model that our societies run on. We are already primed for this indoctrination from the moment mother puts a pacifier in our mouths. Then constantly looking up at her approval, that constitutes the beginning of our need of approval from the women in our lives. We are programmed and primed from day 0.
> According to Freud, dreaming about trains often symbolizes the journey of life, with the train representing the progression of time and the destination representing death, and the act of riding a train can be linked to unconscious sexual desires due to the sensation of movement and confinement, particularly when experiencing anxiety about missing a train or being trapped on one.
Yes, Freud was who I was referencing; the references to the mother, pacifier, and constantly looking for approval from women made me think of Freud's fringe theories about the Oedipus complex. He was also big into the symbolism of dreams, and thought that one explanation for trains in your dreams were the phallic representations of your repressed sexual desires.
A human baby is helpless and "primed" for dependency on others - there is simply no other way they could be (without a drastically different evolutionary path). This whole thread is about the modern difficulties of teaching children to become independent in spite of that beginning and the corporate machine that wishes to keep us there ("commoditize your complements"). So uh, welcome to the conversation and try not to be so fatalistic.
That kind of misogyny sounds like some deeply rooted trauma you have there, buddy.
Have you ever considered that humans are simply social creatures, that the only thing really separating us from other animals is our ability to socialize and organise in groups?
So if babies are ignored and raised in isolation they still grow up with normal social skills? I think it’s fairly clear that socialization is learned (a term which I think is equivalent to programmed in this context) and not something as innate (or “in our nature”) as breathing.
That’s a fallacy. Human babies don’t grow up in isolation; if they do, it’s in contrived experiments, and drawing conclusions from that is about as helpful as watching birds in a cage.
Humans in their natural environment will interact with other humans socially, mirror their display of emotion, and have a desire for affection.
Of course they will. But that’s is programming. Nurturing, socializing, teaching… all of it is programming. I’m not placing any negative connotations on the word. I’m not sure why you don’t view those things as programming?
Does compulsive technology use trigger the same neural pathways as addictive substances?
Because "addiction" is a very loaded term (with a specific clinical definition when it's not being used colloquially), and the sources you cited used "attachment" instead.
I think the answer here is a bit subtle and hard to explain, because it contradicts a lot of common assumptions about addiction and drugs.
In short, many addictive substances create a chemical dependence that often has awful, even potentially fatal chemical withdrawal symptoms. Behavioral addictions don't cause this, which makes people assume they are entirely something different, and categorically less serious and damaging.
This is wrong- because those withdrawal symptoms, while they do make it harder to quit by making going cold turkey difficult and sometimes impossible, they are not the underlying reason why these drugs are being abused in the first place, nor the reason they destroy peoples lives. The reason is that they stimulate the reward system and/or allow one to escape negative emotions and trauma. Behavioral addictions also do that, and can just as easily ruin ones life, by completely overcoming someones mind and will, such that they no longer are able to live their life, and are unable to escape or quit with willpower, just as much so as with drugs that cause withdrawal. They can still completely ruin your life and drive you to suicide, etc.
Moreover, people also often emphasize that many addictive substances can directly cause serious health problems, or even death. This is also not central to their harmfulness, nor always the case. In fact, for a drug to have substantial abuse potential it must be relatively free from serious adverse health effects, at least in the short term, or else it would become impossible to abuse- the most damaging substances are the ones where people can take higher doses for longer with less adverse effects, because this more strongly emphasizes its ability to be used to strongly stimulate the reward system and escape negative emotions and trauma for longer periods of time - cementing the addiction-, without causing a new negative experience on its own. Methamphetamine for example is unique among stimulants in how benign it is- allowing people to take massive doses over really long periods of time, and not face immediate health issues. Counter-intuitively, this is actually what makes it have so much abuse potential and cause so much harm, compared to other stimulants which quickly make you sick or feel awful at high doses. From this perspective, you can see that the fact that behavioral addictions are also able to be repeated in "large doses" for long periods of time without immediate short term health consequences can make them have a high potential for harm in the long term.
Some corollaries, that might not be obvious for those not deeply familiar with drug policy:
1. Statements like "we can't legalize a drug until we have proven that it's not harmful" are nonsensical given that it's easier to become habituated to drugs that are less harmful. The standard should be, "when measured holistically, does legalization and regulation increase or decrease harm relative to banning and criminalization?"
2. Lumping habitual use and sporadic use together as "abuse" is counter-productive.
3. A humane and just drug policy would focus on removing the causes of people wanting to escape negative emotions rather than on removing the tools they use to escape those emotions.
MDMA has little addiction potential- for one it isn’t really just an unhealthy escape from negative feelings, but helps people process traumatic experiences and negative emotions by temporarily lowering anxiety and fear, and may be close to being FDA approved for that therapeutic purpose.
I have only tried it once, and it permanently eliminated my crippling social anxiety, by temporarily eliminating it, and allowing me to experience and remember what that was like. I felt no desire to use it again, because the (life changing positive) effect was permanent.
Second, it seems to have rapidly diminishing effects that make it self limiting- if sometime takes MDMA too much or too frequently, it stops having the desired effect.
MDMA can be addictive, though usually on people who are dealing various issues that, like alcohol, can mask or suppress "bad" feelings. It pumps up the serotonin levels and people can definitely get addicted to that (the same way shopaholics are addicted to the temporary dopamine hits they get when they buy something new).
MDMA (and other drugs that fall under the psychedelic umbrella like magic mushrooms or LSD) has has shown some clinical success in dealing with trauma and other mental health issues, but only supervised and combined with professional help. Most people I know that have used MDMA/Ecstasy usually only stopped because the crash sucks as they didn't want to deal with it after. That's the main reason it was used for social gatherings like raves; it really helps eliminate social anxiety.
Every time there's talk of drugs people will just shuffle and repackage some random facts they know about whatever drug in question and preach it like it's something they just discovered.
I'm not really sure how the behavioural addiction here is harming the person. You're talking about an external harm with the behavioural addiction being symptom treatment due to feeling trapped.
It ends up consuming all of a persons time and energy, and they stop doing everything else that is important or essential- maintaining their own career, friendships, family obligations, and health. They lose the ability to feel joy or engage positively in anything but the addiction. This causes a downward spiral of physical and mental health, that destroys quality of like and can in some cases be ultimately fatal.
Triggering the same neural pathways is also a flawed way to look at things. Dopamine exists without the presence of drugs despite the dysfunctional state of discourse demonizing literally anything which releases dopamine. A true dopamine detox would in fact be very bad for your health, physical and mental. The point being, drugs exploit existing pathways and biochemical interactions, they don't create them de novo. The set isn't just "compulsive technology | drugs" it is "compulsive technology | drugs | eating | running | mental stimulation | sexual activity | etc."
Fair point. Some other studies use addiction too, though, and there is a distinction between both addiction and attachment and the links between them is a bit nebulous. You can check out the results on Google Scholar if interested.
I couldn't agree more. Using the term addiction in contexts where it is not medically valid is very dangerous (like yelling "fire" in a theater) and leads to the use of violent force against those one falsely claims are "addicted".
Audio-visual stimuli from screens and speakers has never been shown to be able to have the same effects as a dopaminergic drug which is to say, completely turning up incentive salience regardless of reward or lack of it. That is why drugs are dangerous.
Technology can only be habit forming (in some contexts, maybe) if it continues to be rewarding in some way. Psychological dependence, maybe, but never addiction, and not even physiological dependence. Addictive drugs do not have to be rewarding or pleasurable. They just hijack wanting.
They are not the same and definitely should not be legislated the same. Enjoying something that is actually fun is not the same as wanting something because it chemically turned on wanting.
There is no reason to assume that a behavior that activates the reward system is categorically less harmful than a molecule that activates it directly. In both cases it can completely overcome someones will such that it destroys their life and they can’t escape it. Both are addiction. You’re making a distinction without a difference- a fire only needs to be hot enough to kill, it does not become “invalid” just because you can think of other types of fire, or hotter fires.
You are using the word “medical” to emphasize your point incorrectly- behavioral addictions are included in the modern medical concept of addiction, and the idea that they should be considered categorically separate from substances is an outdated concept. The DSM-5 for example has a diagnostic criteria for gambling addiction.
>no reason to assume that a behavior that activates the reward system is categorically less harmful than a molecule that activates it directly.
There are mountains of papers, books and all sorts of evidence that drugs that directly act as agonists for populations of dopaminergic neurons the VTA that mediate incentive salience (methamphetamine, cocaine, etc) are incredibly addictive (wanting, not liking, not reward. reward prediction). This is very different than an experience that is naturally rewarding like sex (liking, and maybe wanting later remembering the liking). Anticipation of sex may activate VTA dopaminergic populations but the reward of sexual activity itself does not. And certainly not things like viewing audio-visual media on screens.
I use medical to emphasize that when you try to reason about these things without fine grained understanding you come to false general conclusions.
I do agree that with drugs that just activate reward directly (like opioids with glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) can rapidly become addictive. But these too are different than expriences that happen to activate reward through sensation. For example, sexual activity is a behavior that activates reward yet very few people become addicted to it.
The next generation weren't interested in facebook, because "that's what moms use" and figured out something different.
As to drugs, now many are legal, so parents can now partake in what used to be illegal for them. Or for harder drugs, "Uncle Bob does drugs, and he's always in trouble".
So one generation of parents acts as a negative example for the next generation to reject.
I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs.
I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.
Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to be indicators for a future failed adulthood.
I remember traditional drugs only becoming present around 14-16 years old. Alcohol was probably the most prevalent, and probably the most dangerous. Followed by Cannabis, tobacco and some recreational drugs like MDMA.
Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Obviously tobacco with terrible potential future health effects, but beyond that, everyone I know turned up pretty healthy. Not only that, I remember some time later that the most experimental group (mdma, LSD, mushrooms) of drug users being full of people with Master Degrees and PhDs.
The new technological drugs scare me way more than the old traditional ones. Obviously it is a normal response of the known va unknown. Time will tell.
I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.”
I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.
This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.
And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)
The primary reason to legalize isn’t to make it easier to do drugs, it’s to not use the justice and court system for dealing with addiction problems.
Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.
When this happens the reason 90% of the time is usually not because the program wasn’t working but the opposition to the program has made sure to either gut the funding or put in measures that makes those programs not work (only hiring 2 people to handle all the work or excessive operating requirements.
Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.
Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.
In Portland, decriminalization was poorly planned, new treatment options were implemented badly, and the alternative penalties for possession were not meaningfully enforced. It was a failure of execution.
I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.
Absolutely, Americans love saying “we’ll just send the cops after them.” Because then they don’t have to do any of the hard work of understanding or funding the programs. Americans are lazy when it comes to solving actual hard problems.
In numerous places those efforts have been purposefully sabotaged by police who aren't happy about the loss of court revenues and the eventual cutbacks on police funding for drug prohibition. With them literally refusing to enforce some laws like public intoxication or shooting up heroin in the middle of the street because their more profitable and super easy to get arrests for drug possession laws no longer existed.
Not my area of expertise per se, but the counterargument that I've seen is that the states (e.g. Oregon) that tried it never got the backstops in place to help soften and support the transition (i.e. rehab centers, support programs, social programs). Instead, it was just a hard switch that went expectedly bad.
There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.
We really don’t know that, they had terrible data reporting on drug use before the policy was implemented so we can’t even make a before/after comparison. We also can’t parse out the extent to which changes in drug use stats reflect changes in autopsies or in cultural attitudes and candor about drug use affecting self reports.
I think poor people in the US are against legalization mostly due to the decades of “war on drugs” propaganda or other forms of conservatism (eg religion), not because they’ve seen people close to them being destroyed by drug use
These same sources also mistake causality, as many folks with mental health issues self medicate, rather than having drugs be the absolute source for mental health issues. Example: Cleon Skousen.
Spot on- so many social problems get attributed to everything but the economy and inequality. If we could make our system more equitable, then we would not have such desperation.
The combination, which is the point of the comment above. Legalization may be fine in places where people have other support factors that make them less likely to destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, but in areas without those protective forces, it's good that there are some controls (or at least many of the people who live there think so).
At that point it becomes important to ask (1) how much damage does the illegalization itself do; (2) how much harm does the limited access actually prevent; and (3) how much damage alcohol does, and what the tradeoff is.
If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.
Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.
Okay, but the person wasn't asking this of the family of a dying loved one, they were asking it in this space where ideas are discussed and examined. Yes, it would be disturbingly unempathetic to ask that question in such a circumstance, but asking it in this circumstance is neither cold, inappropriate, or a demonstration that the asker lacks empathy.
I disagree entirely, and I have personally witnessed people lose themselves to drug use.
Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.
Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.
The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.
I disagree with your characterization of my comment and I think you greatly missed the point I was making. The OP presented a false dichotomy as if these things aren't woven in with each other in a large feedback loop.
You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.
You've had multiple people "misunderstand" your comment. I suggest reconsidering how you express whatever it is you are trying to say, as I and the others are responding to what you managed to actually communicate, whether that message was your intended one or no.
It has been put into consideration. But now that we've made it clear that there have been ~ misunderstandings ~, can you try to see where I'm coming from now? :)
That you used a forced analogy (even if experiential) and ethos in a policy discussion? Sure, I can see that. I can even see blaming drugs for mental health issues and addiction despite the causality really being screwy if you try to force it that way.
It's okay to be wrong, even when emotional, so long as we learn from it.
My point was to suggest to OP that their dichotomous reductionism goes way, way overboard to the point of unproductive callousness. People with addictions aren't just data points. Saying this as a data journalist who focuses on policing and jails.
> "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.
That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.
Citation needed on claims of poor people opposing drug legalization. I can show you stats from Oregon showing that poor people overwhelmingly support, and still support, the bulk of our legalization efforts (I.e legal shrooms and legal weed)
> Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life.
Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch.
Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.
I don't think that's true any more, at least not in the UK. Not drinking alcohol is becoming normalised to a large extent - most restaurants and bars I go to now have non-alcoholic options, some of which are really delicious. I had a non-alcoholic "dry martini" in a bar the other day which had a really nice bite to it. I used to feel a bit cheated with non-alcoholic options because they were mostly like overly sweet cocktails or nasty-tasting beers, but the choices are really opening out now.
A substance is a means to an end. What you described is just one of the many.
And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible.
I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life.
That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.
Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute.
1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being.
2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago.
3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting.
Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.
because children are undergoing a critical phase in their development that has no analogy for older populations? I'm not saying isolation among the elderly is not concerning, nor widespread phone/tech addiction among adults. But I think there’s ample reason to have particular concern for the effects on children.
>Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute.
This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass.
Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.
> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.
Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students.
I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.
First off, kids that young learn best in context and with tactile feedback. Until AI have bodies, they will not fill that niche.
Secondly, there is a while cottage industry of young kid's videos to just show kid's the world and engage via a screen with it and explain it. A 3 and 4 year old knows so little, they don't want even know what questions to ask because they know nothing. The value of slop like Blippie or even Ryan's World is alerting kids to the fact that things exist in a digestible way. And they need to loop it. They need to be exposed to the information many, many times to truly get it. Early education is in no way shape or form a good candidate for AI. I'd argue that the repetitive videos we have now are about as ideal as we can get once we filter out the surreal nonsensical videos targeted at kids.
The problem is I thought kids would have been doing this 15 years ago already by using the internet to learn more and more.
This is not our culture. We don't have a culture that is really able to take advantage of the internet for this. Our culture plus the internet actually creates a type of learning disability for a huge % of the population.
A small % of people will use AI to be smarter than they would have otherwise. A much larger % of people will use AI to learn less than what they would have.
I assume you don’t have kids because as the parent of a toddler this is a terrible idea. The last thing a toddler needs is AI hallucinations “teaching” them
While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.
Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children.
EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.
> there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.
The issue was that he has seen these kids being entertained by smartphones. This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans, unless the parents wanted to interact with them, which they obviously didn't (or couldn't, for whichever reason). That was the context.
The parent post is throwing AI at the problem. The solution isn't to improve technology to make it better at parenting/babysitting our children.
The solution is to replace technology with humans.
> This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans
I'm not sure where it is ok for children, particularly early developing children, to not be around other humans, or humans that can't or don't want to interact with the children. If that's the case, that's another problem altogether.
If people are having children just to have them raised by technology/AI, I hope they realize that before having children and reconsider.
We could already have extremely high quality children's educational content via videos. But instead the ecosystem is dominated by garbage that can draw engagement rather than enrich.
Why would AI be any different? I'd expect AI content for babies to be garbage because the incentive structure is exactly the same as it is for noninteractive videos.
Thanks. I started with Snow Crash and disliked the style and parts of the content so much that I ditched it and never bothered to read any other book from him. Maybe I should try that one then.
Playing Devil’s advocate… Socialisation is what’s driving technology use. It’s just happening on the phones, not irl. Just like with alcohol, anyone not participating will be left out. If everyone’s on their phones all the time, IRL socialisation won’t matter compared to socialisation via phones.
I think this was true a decade ago, where people used social media to talk to each other and actively kept chats with friends, etc.
What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic
Disagree. Nothing can replace face to face socialization. We're not even close. Our minds are just adapting, but to a new local maximum that is far away from the global maximum of ideal.
Socialization online exists, but I'm not sure that it's the main activity on phones.
When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising.
Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.
Rather: avoidance of socialization is what's driving it. It's the easy way out of meeting people while still getting compliments and such and pretending "everything is fine". In that sense, it indeed has a lot in common with alcohol.
Old drugs are also at least sometimes social. Even heroin gives rise to cliques of users. It’s deeply unhealthy and self destructive but at least there is connection. Sometimes you get art out of it too. A whole era of great music has many bittersweet odes to smack.
I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless.
Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds.
I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction.
As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good.
In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge.
I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks.
Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI.
Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.
If you read William Dalrymple’s book about the early Christian church in the Middle East, that is exactly what happened in terms of gurus for hordes of fanatic monks.
I’m sure that’s just one of endless historical examples.
Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal.
I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects.
We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.
> I wonder if the new drug of choice is actually technology
Technology certainly is the economic sector that we privilege against all criticism of the harm it does to young people, to voting adults, to information quality, to public discourse, and to democracy itself.
Well, we have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology, so regardless of its negative effects or its diminishing returns, we develop it. It's a strong piece of circumstantial evidence for technological determinism, not to mention many advancements are clear-cut cases of the prisoner's dilemma (arms race), such as computer security vs. hackers.
I’ve been looking at it more from an ecological angle.
“We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders who embrace technology the most aggressively simply get rewarded in money and power, and they go on to promote accelerationist views with that power.
With the logical conclusion that people are increasingly treated as resources to be harvested by technology.
I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.
> “We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders [...]
No, it doesn't imply a deliberate decision. I've never said it was deliberate. It's more of an emergent phenomenon.
> I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.
True, but determinism shouldn't be thought of as inevitable. And that's not the case in the philosophical literature either. Technological determinism is more of a force like gravity that can be overcome, and can be measured (theoretically, some have tried) numerically. The large the force, the harder it is to overcome, but overcoming it is not impossible obviously. Feel free to email to discuss further.
I think it is more the accessibility increase from it being allowed along with unfettered advertising ensuring that the targeted ad demographic is "literally anybody who watches sports and more".
I wonder if we're entering an era of social stagnation, caused by screens. Before screen-based entertainment was so ubiquitous, young people (teens and young adults) experienced a lot of boredom, which pushed them to do new things. Many of those things were stupid and bad (drugs etc.), but some of those kids decided they were ambitious and wanted their life to be above ordinary in terms of achievement and impact on the world. Today, there's less room for such thoughts to even emerge - and if they do, they have to compete for mindshare with addictive entertainment on a daily basis.
It was not until I recently set up Screen Time in macOS that I realized how much I was being distracted from applying myself to the specific creative endeavor that I have set for myself. It works per-application and across devices, and it is a real benefit compared to the iptables rules I had set up before. I have web, news and other things on Downtime from midnight to noon daily, and throughout the Sabbath. It brings clarity to do the most important things first in the day.
No, it's not, but there's a spectrum of drug experiences. Scrolling social media is more like sitting in a shitty motel by yourself on a meth binge, or being on the nod.
Even if technological "addiction" is not like real drug addiction, it is something strange. People constantly checking, scrolling without any real purpose. There's some sort of conditioned behaviour in it that has some facets of addiction.
You should read some absurdist literature, people doing things without any real purpose is very common.
Nobody cared about drug addiction until it was politicized. US politicians have a long history of using drug users as scapegoats to win elections to disastrous results. Prohibition, drug war, next are social media bans. The insanity will never end.
A lot of people have the same feeling about technology. I personally regulate my technological use fairly stringently. I almost never carry a smartphone with me for instance. It's got nothing to do with personal insecurities. I'm just interested in contributing to a more critical discussion on technology.
If everyone is switching from drugs to social media, then that's progress. Twitter and Facebook won't harm your body. They're also free, so your habit will never make you poor and desperate. This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry. The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology. We can improve the human condition, but we can't change human nature.
I strongly disagree with this. Social media companies are incredibly valuable specifically because they are effective at getting people to spend their money on things they otherwise wouldn't have.
Depression, suicide, and other serious mental health disorders are strongly linked with social media use. Is that better than more kids drinking and smoking pot? I don't know, it's complicated. It's certainly not clearly better and might be significantly worse.
Hand waving away these costs is putting on some seriously rose colored glasses.
>Number of alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides: 51,191
Alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides per 100,000 population: 15.4
>All suicides
Number of deaths: 49,476
Deaths per 100,000 population: 14.8
Apparently, not all suicides are caused by social media, and accidents may be more important here. I just want to offer some data that can be easily fetched.
They are also really valuable at building/generating personality models of large swaths of the population, the data can be said knows us better than we know ourselves. Since the memory of our patterns can be mined for discovery or narrative creation. That's why they really exist. Just follow the money.
> Twitter and Facebook won't harm your body. They're also free
Only if you value your time at exactly zero.
> The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology.
By that logic it’s also your body’s fault to react poorly to drugs, not the drugs’.
Thinking of it in terms of “fault” is also not very productive. I’d say it’s definitely a (possible) negative consequence of social media usage that might otherwise not have happened, and as such worth studying.
I’d argue that targeted advertising and unprecedentedly-centralized corporate control of what text, images, and video we see online is just as potentially harmful as (recreational) drug use, if not worse. And online-shopping/adventure-travel/other addictions facilitated by targeted ads and targeted content algorithms can definitely leave people unable to achieve goals in life.
Creating a new addiction to replace the last generation’s isn’t really something to be proud of. As developers, we should be aiming to create ways to communicate that aren’t addictive and facilitate genuine connection with others that includes their highs, the lows, and financial/socioeconomic transparency.
> This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry.
I can say with some amount of confidence that the number of people wasting their talent and life in making up bullshit engagement algorithms, who thought about it as a way of getting people away from drugs, has been exactly zero. So, it is definitely not something to be proud of, but maybe something to think of as a funny coincidence, provided that the premise actually holds.
> The worst that can happen is ...
That you'll remain or become an idiot, or suffer physically and mentally as a result of being inactive while consuming the garbage your proud tech workers shove down your head.
Perhaps? But a confounder is the strengthening or weakening of social ties. It's not clear that what seems to increasing loneliness is doing well by this next generation.
Mental health is health, and poor mental health can result in death... death rates that we have seen climb precipitously among children. Trading heroin deaths for suicides isn't an improvement, even if the dealers feel they aren't directly responsible.
As someone who grew up in the 90’s and partied the way they did in the 90’s If there is a switch from drugs to social media I find that incredibly dystopian.
Plenty of bad side effects: Harming your brains development, ability to concentrate, harm the ability to find joy in non-screen activities, mental health and so on.
I like this idea, but we are nowhere near a point of diminishing returns. We are about to experience the wholesale obsolescence of the economic value of human labour, which means in practical terms, no stupid jobs just to have a place to live, intelligent robots cleaning your house etc
If anything, buckle up. Going surfing every day or crotchet may become a perfectly legitimate life aspiration.
> just to have a place to live, intelligent robots cleaning your house etc
Animals could say precisely the same thing about living in a zoo!
(1) Who determines the allocation of resources in your utopia? How do you handle an ever increasing population that depends on the biosphere which itself is the only source of raw materials and energy for the incredible amount of energy required for it?
(2) People need a purpose. Most people will find a life of really doing nothing quite boring. Like it or not, people want some control over their destiny, and not to be animals in a cage.
(3) If people really don't need each other, what will happen to the social fabric? If AI can really do everything for us, then what is to stop some people from killing all the rest and taking everything for themselves? We have only relative morals that function when they are necessary, and some people not even that.
Well, I think there is also an emergent theme in the research that there also needs to be two distinct concepts: addiction, and attachment. See [1].
[1] Hertlein, Katherine M., and Markie LC Twist. "Attachment to technology: The missing link." Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy 17.1 (2018): 2-6.
Luigi and Uncle Ted both thought technology was evil, and preached about it to anyone who would hear but they were both censored and ignored, forcing them to violence to reclaim there tongues. They both knew that, as Euripides said many years before: 'This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.'
Watch people on their phones just endlessly watching, scrolling, clicking… little actually being done. It’s mostly a series of tiny high’s the apps, esp games and social media, are designed to generate. People also experience withdrawal-like symptoms when they go cold turkey on it.
Technological media is definitely like a drug in many cases. Not all or for all people but often. It also lets others influence your mind for selfish reasons. Between the two, it’s a good idea to both be selective and limit it.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...