Chemical Addiction: Unsolved although Obvious
Addiction to painkillers has been killing a lot of people. For years. Just why it has been getting so much media attention recently may have to do with (1) criticality, analogous to the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, has been reached; (2) liberal alarm over the surge in “Trump voters,” many of whom, rural and white, are now suffering from addictions on a par with that of urban blacks whose votes have long been taken (and are still taken) for granted by Democrats. PBS recently ran a series on the subject. It appears that bright spotlights being trained on the opiate epidemic are giving rise to promising local and state programs to save addicts’ lives and then turn them around. The former is easier than the latter; instances abound of addicts having their lives saved one day only to overdose the next (and the next and the next), and the burden that puts on emergency services has led to a debate of whether there should be quotas, as in Three Strikes and You’re Out (for eternity).
Noises are being made at the national administrative and legislative levels to address the countrywide epidemic, but there’s little real movement, despite candidate Trump’s promise to do something. That was to be expected, since he was unclear from the start as to what, and seems to have forgotten his pledge while chaos erupts on every issue that he touches. In the legislature, there is much public hand-wringing but not much legislating. Even if laws are passed to mitigate the opioid epidemic, who in a government drifting toward self-destruction will carry them out?
The Other Addiction: Unexamined, Pervasive, and Maybe Insoluble – The Internet
As I so often do (link below), I refer you to a piece by Paul Lewis in The Guardian. Its subject is addiction to the internet, something which intuition suggests is more subtle than chemical addiction but just as real, far-ranging, and possibly more damaging in the long run. The Guardian piece pretty much confirms our intuition—moreover, the voices of most significant concern are not stuck-in-the-mud curmudgeons like myself, but former workers at Google and Facebook. Since one of them now training to be a neurosurgeon likens the effect that information technologies have on the nervous system, to the effect that drugs have, you can extrapolate that if social media are not exactly addictive, they are close enough to create dependencies . . . lifetime dependencies that warp judgment and the ability to sort truth from fiction..
For years, humanists, social scientists, and medical experts have been sounding the alarm on the addictive potential of the internet and social media. Now we are hearing directly from the horses’ mouths.
Writer Lewis interviews many sources, all current or past industry insiders (some of whom have made major contributions to Facebook and Google designs), and their views on the impacts of social media all sound the addiction theme. Some propose that these media are deeply changing not just what we think and believe, but how we think and believe. One ex-Google strategist James Williams (see the section on him a few paragraphs below the woman on the bicycle) speaks of “the attention economy” and how it “privileges our impulses over our intentions.” The dynamics of Facebook and Twitter have had a political effect, in making us less rational and more impulsive. Williams notes that both the political Left and Right are subject to “internet outrage over issues that ignite fury. . . . ”
See next link for a blog post that Williams wrote about the 2016 election:
The Bigger Picture: Democracy in Trouble?
Finally (in the Lewis article), James Williams adds, “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”
Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message seemed a bit cryptic decades ago, but it makes better, and more troubling, sense, when you look at the way digital media via cell phones are about as directly wired into our nervous systems as you can get without physical wires (“wireless” takes on a double meaning). Three of the five senses are involved: sight, hearing, and touch, and the feedback is instantaneous. McLuhan had a rather benign view of television as inviting humanity into a “global village.” Prescient as he was, I can’t imagine his view of digital media trends being all that benign were he alive today. If they are bringing us into a global village, it’s a village built on shifting sands.
There’s an exchange between journalist Lewis and deep thinker Williams at the end of The Guardian article (last two paragraphs) that may haunt you as thoroughly as it haunts me, but I wouldn’t skip down to it without reading the rest of the piece—it’s not just a sound bite.
What are the Options? Free Choice Ideology Undermines Free Choice
I’m not sure there are options to the decline in democracy if social media are not put on a leash—and who’s going to do that? One reason that chemical addictions have not received health care proportional to the epidemic, is the belief in free choice so deeply ingrained in the American psyche. The paradigm on drug addiction is slowly moving from the perception of addiction as a character problem toward the perception of addiction as a disease, BUT it is taking a very long time. Nevertheless, it’s happening because people can grasp how a chemical can rob a person of free choice—it’s as simple as, can you choose not to die once you’re poisoned?
A drug is a visible, tangible, material thing. There is no obvious parallel in the digital world: nothing so visible, tangible, and material. Common sense rebels against the idea that something so intangible as digital media rob us of free choice. So how long will it take to for us to first, acknowledge the digital media addiction as robbing us of free choice, and secondly, do anything about it?
One of Paul Lewis’s interviewees said, “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product. It’s capitalism.”
Well, there you are: capitalism—an economic model deeply entwined with the belief in free choice, and the “free market” is its mantra. (I speak of capitalism as a sweeping ideology and a matter of faith, not as a working system with its arguable pros and cons.) The sultans of social media portray their products as bringers of more choices, more connections, more opportunities, more freedom. To charge them with manipulating our addictive impulses runs contrary to the narrative that most consumers have bought into. In fact, many could not be said to have “bought into” anything—users under the age of twenty are immersed in the social media environment: it’s the collective mental sea in which their thoughts, often randomly, swim.
Paradoxically, it is the belief in free choice that constricts the opportunities we have to take the digital universe out of the control of its current masters and into our virtual “hands.” Think we can take the fight to them? Not with our virtual hands tied behind our virtual backs, which is what happens if we continue to believe in the illusion of free choice in a social-media-dominated marketplace.*
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* Note that I am not going to get into the deeper issue of free will. You may have free will (if it exists), but if you are offered minimal choices—say, if you are chained to a wall and given the choice of whether to be shot through the heart or decapitated—your freedom of choice is next to meaningless. Here I am speaking of free will as an inherent property, regardless of the external circumstances where free choice comes into play.