Technology is Heroin
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
I never thought when writing programs that I'd have to ask myself "Am I doing good or evil in the world here?" After all, it's just so many bytes, right?
But I'm not so sure about that anymore.
Opening paragraph: "At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people have the right to play video games - and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right - then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool."
Music: The one that gets noticed over the clutter wins.
Games: The one that's the best at giving us the illusion of social status and accomplishment wins.
None of these things are really competing against each other, because the hook for each is targeting a different need.
And I do think there is a way out. Change our environment so that our lives aren't so hollow and empty. The reason these addictions take hold is because, for example, people are accomplishing absolutely zero in their lives so they need the fake feeling of accomplishment and respect from hitting level 60 in WoW. If we re-engineer society so that people actually have an opportunity to make friends, do productive work, get exercise, etc. these things won't be nearly as dangerous as they are today.
Those are the lures that each niche uses, sure, but the result is that we lose time. The result is the problem, not the drug packaging or delivery mechanism.
If anything, that makes it more disturbing: whatever our psychological needs, there's electronic joy out there competing for them.
Not sure how it will play out. I'm an optimist, but after I wrote this it's kind of drug me down. I'm sure we'll muddle through somehow as a species. We always do.
The problem is that the counterculture rejects that stuff - partly because it's true that a lot of people who do all that are shallow and annoying. (The counterculture's just as bad, of course.) If you drop out and eat too much and don't make friends, you're bucking the trend, you're rebelling. That's how it is among a lot of younger kids, anyway: past a certain point obesity is just a matter of not caring enough to keep care of yourself.
Someone has taken your (and DanielBMarkhams) arguments to their logical consequences...
I did spot this little HN reference in there:
"Programmers are creating "no procrastinate" options for their web sites in order to help users not spend so much time there."
thanks for all that work!
I agree with your premise that technology is addictive, I think it somehow fits in with our fascination with tools in general. After all humans are 'toolmakers' par excellence, tools mean survival, food and progress, no wonder we should become addicted to them.
Your analog with heroin and the time required to figure out what was happening reminds me of the old story of the frog and the boiling pot: If you put a frog in a pot with hot water it will jump out immediately, but if you slowly raise the temperature the frog won't notice the problem until it is too late to jump out and it perishes.
Not sure if that's a true story but that's how I remember it.
I'm passing your article on to my 15 year old son to read.
I watched the movie Idiocracy with you and it hit me in the face as to one potential out come for the human race. But talking about the fact that we don't do physical chores that were done a hundred years ago, doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, things have changed. Those chores are no longer an issue.
I just saw Idiocracy yesterday (ironically, I decided it wasn't worth paying attention to so I played it on the top of the screen and coded on the bottom of the screen), and I think that assuming it's a plausible outcome is kind of silly. I doubt Mike Judge, the director, would disagree. Idiocracy is much more a critique of the present than it is of the future.
This was a terrific article, but there're a few fallacies in your argument. The one that most stands out to me is how you talk about music switching from being active to passive, and therefore taking less effort from the listener. You then bring up rock music as an instance of something that provides a big hit rather than focusing on intricacy.
The fallacy is that in the past, most people didn't listen to concerts. There is a long history of minstrel songs: music played in the street, catchy stuff for the public. The average person wouldn't listen to any concert in their lifetime. This is not a new thing. Furthermore, if you look at how many people travel to concert halls to listen to music, I would bet that more people proportionally listen to great pieces of work like Tchaikovsky or Mozart than ever have in the past. If anything, the trend is that once you have access to things easily, you are more willing to put effort into a viewing than you would be if you'd never been before. (I'm going to the Met to see a Tchaikovsky opera two weeks from now; I never would have wanted to if I hadn't torrented 2GB worth of his pieces earlier in the year.)
"Don't turn that dial!" has become cliche: whatever you do, keep your eyes peeled on this station.
That ignores the rise in TV that's actively challenging to watch. To bring up the two shows I always bring up, The Wire on HBO and BBC's The Office. Neither one is easy and clear-cut. They both attract watchers who are there to be challenged. I've watched the entire Office straight through three times in the way that I reread good books. It's not addictive per se, it's enriching.
Your argument about video games make me wonder how avid a gamer you are. I'm not a huge gamer, but the games that I do like are almost always pretty rich in environment. Portal's the cliche in gaming, and that's a game that's clever, well-written, and encourages lateral thinking. My 13-year-old brother, who dislikes most books and isn't a big math kid, got hooked in Portal's advanced challenges, which really are difficult pieces. Then there're RPGs, the best of which are superb storytellers, there are real-time strategy games, there are all sorts of games that encourage you to actively think. You can't play a game and shut off. You need to focus incredibly. My friends that play Counterstrike are the best proof of this: you need to be a special sort of brilliant to play that game well. It's addictive, but only in the way, again, that challenging books or pieces of music are. It's not a "pop" game.
Of course, I would also argue that VG composers are writing the most sophisticated orchestral music of the day. Listen to Roar of the Earth by Ko Otani if you can find sample pieces. It's rich and complex in the way good classical music is. Plus, it's attached to a video game that's pretty stimulating in and of itself - ever played Shadow of the Colossus? It's one of the few video games I will call an exceptional piece of art rather than merely a game.
(Sidebar: World of Warcraft is an exception in that yes, it's focused on addiction rather than active focus. But what a piece of art it is in and of itself! I've never played, I don't want to get hooked, but they made an entire world! This is like Tolkien realized. One of my future plans is to make an MMORPG in a much more literary sense, and to create an enormous world that really feels like fantasy - World of Warcraft opened that door for me. It's an incredible achievement in and of itself.)
The Internet is addictive, yes - but in what way is it addictive? My friend and I both competed to parody the 25 Things notes on Facebook yesterday - that requires some thinking and creative prowess. Meanwhile, while I spend hours a day in front of a computer, I'm constantly reading articles like this one, and writing answer pieces. I participate in debates. And I've found that as a result, in debate-focused classes I'm leagues ahead of classmates. It's entirely because the Internet gets my mind going. The Internet is not passive. It's not like rock music or TV shows or heroin. It's active. You consciously focus on what you're doing.
People are less fit because less tasks require physical labor than ever have before. That's why society is so focused on being thin. Now, staying fit requires conscious effort. It is no longer a passive task. It doesn't happen during the day unless you choose it to. So in a way, it's a reversal of the ideas that you're stating here. (I keep a 30-pound weight on my desk, and I exercise and have my computer read long posts out loud. It's such a wonderful system.)
Finally: things have always devoted people's lives like this. If I wasn't constantly on the Internet, I would be writing in a notebook, or practicing an instrument. That's not heroin, is it? That's an exercise in creativity. Think of it like that: anything worth doing is worth devoting time to. And most of society will always ignore those opportunities for wasted time. That's nothing new. It's a part of human nature.
I won't get into a long discussion -- HN seems to frown on these in-depth things. I'd like to point out that to a casual observer you sound like our Civil War vet talking about how much better his life is now that he's hooked on dope.
I did some investigations into MMORPGs a year or so ago. The average WoW player spends a little more than 35 hours per week online playing the game. That's about as much as a full-time job. The virtual goods industry alone -- that's goods that are purely digital -- is in the billions.
Perhaps there are these great mental exercises that make us all the equivalent of digital Mozarts or something. The external evidence is lacking -- there's not some huge increase in SAT scores or math prodigies among video game players. At the very least to an outside observer it seems that there is a huge amount of time and energy being spent in something with no physical results. Except, of course, the usual results of spending 40 hours a week sitting on a couch plugged into a LCD eating Fritos. At the very least, it's completely unprecendented that so many people would spend so much time in sedentary, er, contemplation.
Great comment.
Do you have a source for that? According to this article, Nielson has it at less than 15 hours per week. Still a huge amount of time, mind you.
Gartner expects 80% of internet users will be involved in an online world by 20011 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861&format=prin...
Chinese Gold Farmers, a significant population of WoW, play an average of 12-14 hours per day http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/20/virtual-goods-the-next-...
I might be able to find the original for the 35-hour quote. If it's bugging you, email me and I'll take some extra time to dig it up.
I would bet against Gartner aggressively. They don't understand the technologies they're talking about. Virtual worlds have less to offer than people think.
Ex-WoW player here (I quit it to take up running a business in my spare time -- pays better, a different flavor of fun, rather less dragons).
I probably spent 15-20 hours many weeks during those two years. It is a lot of time. What impresses me about it is that it seems to suddenly become far less time if I had confessed to watching TV instead.
I agree with Jonathan Blow, who said that it's awful that Blizzard doesn't take more responsibility with its games, that WoW's model of gameplay is awful. That said, I think the design of the game itself is of an incredible scope. I don't play WoW, so I'd agree with you that WoW is kind of icky.
Video games aren't big mental exercises. Then again, neither is reading a book in and of itself, or watching a movie, or talking to somebody. You get what you want to out of it.
Most of the things I get out of gaming involve lessons about game design itself. A few exceptions: the video game Passage - available for free online - changed how I looked at life (and also made me a bit weepy); Portal taught me of the incredible values of lateral thinking - that won't show up on test scores, because you can't test creativity, but Portal is the video gaming world's Gordion knot, and it showed me just how imperative it is that you create your own mindset when designing rather than mimicking somebody else's; Half Life 2 (also by Valve, who made Portal) taught me about the impact of small things. When you play a shooter game that starves you for bullets, every shot you fire counts, and you begin to form a bond with the few weapons you have, and you begin looking at the environment around you - the lesson there being to focus on the little details until every little thing is wonderful and worth caring about.
But that's antithetical to the discussion. Listening to Mozart doesn't make you smarter. In fact, Mozart wrote pop - he made easy, distinct, catchy themes. The only genius involved with Mozart is Mozart. There are similar geniuses now working in the world of video gaming, and online. It's not the masses, it's the individual that gains.
Agreed. Also, some books are stimulating, but some are really vapid. Generalizing about any medium as a whole is probably a bad idea, except in relation to the factors shaping it. For example, I think that media which makes money by holding your attention long enough to expose you to ads (some tv and blogs, most magazines) have a strong incentive to produce content that grabs your attention but isn't necessarily deep.
Plus you state in your article that people are getting less intelligent; what do you base that on? How do you explain the Flynn effect?
Also, at the end of the article, it states there are indications the IQ increase has stopped, and may be reversing, in the Western world.
They contend that the rise in IQ has been spurred on by a change in cognitive environment over the past century, and I think the existence of a shift in cognitive demands of a massive scale is something tough to deny.
Here's a paper where they discuss the theory, if you can't get the book. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/rev1082346.pdf
You say that as if it's a bad thing, it isn't. The greatest things we tend to seek aren't physical things, but mental states like love and happiness. It matter not whether the things that invoke those mental states come from the real world or the virtual.
whenever i played it the only thing i did was play against other players, because the combat was "strategic" and "street smart"ish for lack of a better term. but it's easy to miss that as a noob or just looking at the game from the outside
WoW doesn't require too much thinking, but thinking will make a huge difference. some parts of the game (player vs player arena for example) are practically chess matches, with the caveat that your moves can fail you (for various reasons) which means being on your toes is just as important as strategy and "street smarts"
Worse, the market for challenging videogames is diminishing rapidly, as well. Decent simulation or strategy games get hardly any press. My cofounder (incidentally, the creator of the Tonk Hawk Pro Skater franchise), describes it as due to a market reality. There are more people out there who want largely prepackaged entertainment. There are vastly more avid Guitar Hero players than guitarists, or skateboard game playing people than skateboarders. I think it's kind of sad. I just hope that not every domain of experience will become trivialized in simulation, in future.
I think it's not so much that the market for fiction is shrinking, I think it's that it's becoming more hit-driven. It used to be that reading was a solitary pursuit, and you checked a book out because it looked interesting on a library shelf (I still do this, but I'm one of the few folks I know of that do).
Now, most people read books because their friends do, and they want to read what their friends are reading. So popular books become more popular, while unpopular books get no sales or readership. This also increases the drive towards universally-applicable themes (a book that flies over the heads of 99% of the population isn't going to get word-of-mouth), which is why you see them as being less challenging.
Same goes for games. When I first started playing MM0RPGs in 1993, it was impossible to find an average person on the street that played them. Now, half my friends are addicted to WoW. Video games are a social enterprise, so they need to be a lowest-common-denominator. If you want text-only RPGs or Civilization 4, they're still out there. But if you want to play with your friends, you have to put up with your friends' varying skill levels.
More specifically, a children's book. Written engagingly, but with little by way of moral ambiguity or challenge to the reader. And yet this book became suddenly popular, and took over the adult charts as well. If there were ever a literary example of Guitar Hero over learning to play an instrument, this is it.
If you ask me, your example is evidence in favour of DaniFong's argument rather than against it.
Furthermore, it ended a lot of the publication limits on what constitutes kid's literature. Suddenly the stories don't have to all end happily ever after, lengthy series with big books are acceptable, and heavily political and religious themes are allowed. That's big: it let kid's lit writers have a lot more respect for their work.
I almost put this point into my original comment, because I anticipated this response:
Go back and read the first two books. They contain no hints of this sort of thing. It was only after the series became a runaway success that Rowling started to beef up the storyline with such "adult" topics. (And even these themes are fairly bolted-on to a world still fundamentally dominated by Absolute Good and Absolute Evil - or, at least, they started out that way).
My argument is that the introduction of these themes, and the retconning of a fairly simplistic world into something more ambiguous, resemble the rereleasing of the original books with "adult covers". They were an after-the-fact response to the way that a children's story became massively popular in the adult world.
(Which isn't to say that the books aren't engagingly written, or fun to read. And video games are fun to play - I'm with Randall Munroe on people who look down on those having fun just because they are insufficiently highbrow. But I simply disagree with your argument that the popularity of the original Harry Potter books represents the rise of challenging mental stimulation.)
Is this strategy blatantly commercial? Maybe. The first rule of being a professional writer (as opposed to a self-published wannabe whose Great Novel is found, posthumously, in a desk drawer) is to write stuff that people want to buy. If that's a sin, most pros would go to hell with happiness, as opposed to remaining stuck in their day jobs.
Commercial or not, Rowling's change of tone has a perfectly good literary rationale, because her main characters explicitly grow up as the books go on. The books are told from those characters' point of view. At the beginning, they're kids, and they see the world in a kidlike way. At the end, they're adults, and they see an adult world. The consistent yet evolving sophistication of the point of view is one of the things that makes the writing strong.
(For an awesome essay on POV, from a very successful commercial screenwriter: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html )
There're also little details in the prologue of book 1 that only make sense in book 5/6/7, so it's clear that she had the later books in mind when she wrote the first one.
I doubt this. The Sorrows of Young Werther is about unrequited love, after all. I think it is the emotional, moral, intellectual and psychological content of literature that challenges. Not the theme. Pride and prejudice is considered the epitome of the romance novel by many, after all. 55% of the novels in America are sold in the genre. And here's what the Romance Writers of America say about the genre:
"the main plot of a romance novel must revolve around the two people as they develop romantic love for each other and work to build a relationship together. Both the conflict and the climax of the novel should be directly related to that core theme of developing a romantic relationship, although the novel can also contain subplots that do not specifically relate to the main characters' romantic love. Furthermore, a romance novel must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Others, including Leslie Gelbman, a president of the Berkley Group, use a more shortened definition, that a romance must make the "romantic relationship between the hero and the heroine ... the core of the book." In general, romance novels reward characters who are good people and penalize those who are evil, and a couple who fights for and believes in their relationship will likely be rewarded with unconditional love." [1]
In this way, reality is sanitized for mass consumption.
I'd argue that now more people are in high culture than ever before because, for the first time in history, when I wanted to learn about old music I could research critics and torrent vast swathes of music and listen to three albums a day and develop a sort of standard for what I like. That was never possible before.
I think that, quite generally, there are periods in which the art, on it own merit, breaks through and speaks to a broader audience, and in those periods the best works are often the most popular. Afterward, they are aped by successive imitators, relying on formulas, or production value, rather than having something to say.
That said, I do think that the internet has strongly influenced and improved music as an art form. The indie revolution probably wouldn't have had nearly the effect without it. I think that works in film are advance too, though quite independently of the major Hollywood productions.
I'm really hoping we're approaching a moment where video games reach that peak. Hell, I'm hoping when it happens a decade from now I'm the one doing it. Things ebb and flow, and I think right now video games are too clumsy to be at that peak.
Films are at an "eh" moment right now. The next breakthrough will be something like the rock movement was in music: once tools are cheap enough that you can shoot something that looks good for almost no money, there'll be the rise of some explosive new talents we won't have anticipated.
The more a medium encourages deep, abstract, logical thought, such as some of the old school strategy games, the better. In this way, people start to grasp principles more than just specialized behaviors. But, the more people become only specialized, the less they can communicate effectively with people not in their specialty, and the more misunderstanding, wheel reinvention, tunnel vision, etc. results. We're seeing this in academia already.
It does, just slower.
(Great essay, Daniel. If you write code as well as you write prose, you are a hacker's hacker.)
Somebody posted it over on reddit and you should see some of the comments. Makes me sound like some guy living in a cave eating twigs and berries. I wonder how much of the response to an article comes from situational cues -- knowing the author, being part of a community and such -- and how much is actually predicated on how good the article is?
The guy who submitted in on reddit had a really low score. I'm assuming he's not one of the "in crowd" over there. It would be interesting to wait a month or two and then have a high-profile person over there submit the same article to see if the reaction would be different. I'm betting it would be.
Hey. Still working on my hacking skills. Been slinging code for 20 years and I don't think I'll ever reach uber-coder status like some of the other guys on here.
Not sure if I liked your essay so much because or who you are of if I agreed with it so much.
More likely, it stands on its own merit. You made an argument, used metaphor in a way that a fellow hacker could truly appreciate, and while you were at it, taught a little bit when we weren't looking. People like you, pg, Joel, etc. are using blog to breathe new life into an old artform, the essay. Keep up the great work!
This is a really remarkable level of historical inaccuracy. To quote from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=46725... :
There is general agreement that the Sumerians, who inhabited what is today Iraq, cultivated poppies and isolated opium from their seed capsules at the end of the third millenium [sic] B.C. They called opium “gil,” the word for joy, and the poppy “hul gil,” plant of joy. It appears that opium spread from Sumeria to the remainder of the old world.
At first opium may have been employed as a euphoriant in religious rituals, taken by mouth or inhaled from heated vessels (4). Knowledge of its use may initially have been confined to priests representing gods who sealed the sick and gods of death as well. It was given along with hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death, and it came to be used medicinally. The Ebers Papyrus (ca. 1500 B.C.), for example, includes the following description of a “remedy to prevent excessive crying of children" (see ref. 2, p. 35): "Špenn, the grains of the špenn (poppy)-plant, with excretions of flies found on the wall, strained to a pulp, passed through a sieve and administered on four successive days. The crying will stop at once." This remedy and others containing opium (such as spongia somnifera, sponges soaked in opium used to relieve pain during surgery) were dangerous because they varied in potency and rate of absorbance. Consequently, many physicians were wary of using them.
...
In 1806, Sertürner (8, 9) isolated the active ingredient in opium and named it morphine...
The same paragraph of the "Technology is Heroin" article also makes the error of calling cocaine an opiate.
Obviously opiates were around before then. Geesh. They were natural substances. The point of that section is about the social evolution of drugs.
And yes, Cocaine is not an opiate. It made a better example -- the available graphics were better -- so it was used. It was an editorial decision. It's an essay, not a science book.
The article is about the social parallels that led to drugs being severely restricted and how it compares/contrasts with modern entertainment technology taking more and more of our time and energy. Counter-arguments based against this thesis are welcome. (speaking as the author)
Your comment looks a bit like nit-picking, at least to me.
It seems that if you were interested in whether "addictive" "technology" would have a good or bad effect on people's lives, you could start by being more specific about the technology; there isn't much sensible that you can say about a category that encompasses the phonograph, Facebook, SMS, and a lot of etc. Then you could examine what effect it actually has on people's lives: does it make them more social or less social? Does it make them better informed or worse informed? Does it make them more or less likely to marry, or to stay married? Does it make them richer or poorer? Does it make their governments more or less accountable?
You wouldn't necessarily have to go out and interview people yourself. The Pew Internet and American Life project has already done quite a bit of quantitative research along these lines. danah boyd has done a lot of peer-reviewed qualitative research along these lines. I haven't read it all but the things I have read don't really seem to support your thesis, although it is hard to tell because it is so vague.
Nice stories and pictures, though, as long as nobody reads them and thinks they're true.
There's a premise, a thesis, and examples. You can take issue with any of these. For instance, you can claim the examples don't support the thesis. Or you can say the thesis doesn't follow from the premise. Or you can claim the premise is incorrect. etc
Instead you seem to make your comment personal "Nice stories and pictures, though, as long as nobody reads them and thinks they're true." You also assume the thesis "interested in whether addictive technology would have a good or bad effect" -- by definition addictive things have a deleterious effect. Then you run along the lines of the productive, good uses of technology, which was never in question and doesn't have an impact on the argument in question.
Just to be clear:
Premise: society has a difficult time dealing with technologies that have mixed effects and can lead to addictive behaviors. Especially when such conditions have not been seen before
Thesis: Modern technology is evolving to actively take more and more of our time and make us happy, which to some degree is the same thing that drugs do (except drugs are inert while technology is ever-evolving)
Examples: (of society having a hard time) drug prohibition in the late 19th century. (of technology actively competing for time) phonograph, television, video games, internet, MMORPGS
Thanks for the comment. I appreciate your reading the essay this time instead of just commenting without reading it. I think we're done here.
As far as I am aware measurable intelligence is increasing. I would also think that the internet has lead to a general increase in reading and intellectual thought.
When has it ever failed to do so? http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
people won't have to do any chores any more.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"So how do I earn the credits?" I asked.
"Earn?" Linda asked back.
"No no no..." said Cynthia.
"Do you give me a job? The reason I am here is because I have no job," I said.
"No. You see, it's all free. By being a shareholder, you already own your share of the resources. The robots make products from the free resources you and everyone else already owns. There is no forced labor like there is in America. You do what you want, and you get 1,000 credits per week. We are all on an endless vacation."
Some technology makes me more productive (refrigerators, text editors, bicycles, vaccines), and some makes me less (Flash games, irc, hacker news). Others have a mixed effect (cell phones, books). Technology takes many forms, and it's hard to generalize about them all in any sound way.
If one wants to start regulating parts of technology, they must ask the question of whether the expected gains from said regulation would outweigh the costs. With narcotics, its easy: addiction is very expensive, especially for the addicts and productive and non-productive uses are generally easy to tell apart (medical use of morphine v. junkies for example). OTOH, technology is difficult to separate and the side-effects from flash games, irc, et al. are not that significant.
My filter for what made me more or less productive (or an unclear mix) was whether it tended to distract me / take up my time. Spending time on irc when I meant to be working on my programming projects doesn't give me the shakes, but it's still burns up the finite amount of time I have.
Also, I was never suggesting regulation. I don't know where that came from...
* By which the author seems to mean computers and the Internet, specifically. Dyed fabric is a product of technology. So is bookbinding.
If you think of it, everything people do is quite remarkably purposeless.
Why does life exist?
Why do you exist???????