Thank you for sharing your experience with addiction, Tony, and I’m most gratified that you found some value in my essay on addiction.
My definition of addiction as “…a largely self-correcting and perfectly normal lifestyle coping mechanism that sometimes goes awry” came after many years of personal experience with different narcotics and narcotic behaviors, not least among them, cigarettes, marijuana, sex and media. The same experience over several decades (supplemented by discussions with hundreds of addicts) led me to reject the shamefully self-serving addiction-as-disease model and conclude that addiction travels laterally in our lives as an essential component of who and what we are. Of my past addictions, only my addiction to all things media and all things digital persists and still requires vigilance and deliberate mitigation — so far.
Per my essay, our brains are chemically compelled to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, so we are essentially wired to become addicts. Early social engineers realized this many thousands of years ago. In response, they fashioned systems — religions not least among them — designed to both mitigate and exploit the behavioral aspects of addiction that might harm us as individuals and societies at large, and/or enrich us as kings, queens and high priests.
Hence, the central tenets of most religions tell us what not to do in order to live in harmony with our gods and each other. The Ten Commandments don’t tell us how to behave as much as they tell us how not to behave, just as the Bill of Rights doesn’t tell the government what it can do to citizens as much as it tells government what it can’t do. Indeed, civility and civil liberties are essential and well-codified exercises in both individual and social restraint.
Over the millennia, religions and societies have imposed rituals designed to restrain our worst and most excessive tendencies. Worship, the family dinner table, the sabbath day of rest, afternoon naps, the town hall debates and other meaningful rituals instituted and adopted over the years were all designed to impose restraint and thus promote social balance, maintain harmony and yes, protect the interests of the status quo.
We are now witness to what happens to civility, civil discourse, civil liberties and the general quality of life when addiction emerges as the default social condition, the rule rather than the exception.
Like every other addiction to every other narcotic, our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital obliterates the meaningful rituals in our lives, and replaces them with the rituals of our addiction(s). In essence, it removes the very things that separate us from our own chemical destiny. En route it castrates restraint and labels it oppression — like petulant teenagers whose parents confiscate their smartphones. And like every other addiction to every other narcotic, it steals our time and money and freedom.
We need to be exceedingly careful what we wish for…
Thank you, Tony. Much indebted…

Jeffrey, I really liked the essay on your blog, about addiction, for example when I was young, I used to be extremely addicted to racing extremely powerful motorcycles, but when I was 25, I looked myself in the mirror, and said to myself, if you don’t stop doing this, you ain’t going to make 30. So I gradually gave it up over a year, but I still drove my bike all over most of England, to go to Gliding Clubs – Learning To Fly (to go solo) (real gliders – not these dangerous kites that got in the way. I wanted to pull even more g – and did)
I gave that up as well. My girlfriend was even more addictive. I even gave her up too when I met my wife. She is incredibly addictive and I’m still with her.
How about you?
http://digitalapostate.com/truth-about-addiction
“Turns out that nothing we’ve been taught about addiction is true.”
Tony

Thanks again, George. Mechanically, addiction breaks down the meaningful rituals in our lives (those that help us defer gratification among them) and replaces them with the rituals of the addiction.
The fact that addiction became a design component deliberately deployed by the young wizards of the Silicon Valley with no hint of consideration for the lives of those who purchased and/or used their products is — of course — shameful, a shame compounded by their recent claims that the magnitude of the deleterious social consequences that ensued were somehow unintended — when nothing could be further than the truth.
We don’t call it cradle-to-grave marketing for nothing…

Thanks for your response. I didn’t feel my comment had a direct bearing on the discussion but I wanted to make it anyway. I did imply that the disappearance of childhood meant in fact the collapse of the distinction between children and adults.
Tonyopmoc: I wasn’t talking about the matter of feeling like a child – which is frankly what we all want to feel i.e. that sense of wonder and enthusiasm for life. (Ironically – I feel I may never have had it. I was always introspective.) I was talking about the matter of knowledge and coping with responsibilty. The bit about deferring gratification is important – but it is precisely consumer capitalism that works unceasingly to destroy every last shred of restraint in its incessant drive to increase sales and maximise profits.

Thank you for reading my essay, George. Yes, I’ve read Postman’s “Disappearance of Childhood”, and I sympathize with many of the fears he expresses. To me, however, the bigger problem is no longer the end of childhood. To me, the bigger problem is the opposite: the end of adulthood. The Brave New Digital World has largely eliminated the primary behavioral distinction between kids and adults: the desire and ability to defer gratification. Hence, kids grow up not to become adults, but to become older kids.
While it’s understandable that we turn our attention to the welfare of our children, our meta-addiction to all things media and all things is digital is a top-down phenomenon. The problem didn’t start with our kids. Neither should the solution.
Thanks again, George.

George, Maybe its because of the job I did, which involved keeping abreast of very rapid changes in technology, requiring constant relearning to maintain employment, or maybe the girl I met and married, which resulted in almost continuous exposure to young children for most of my life, including now, but I don’t think I have reached “the age of transition” yet. My wife is very much a child too. We are both over 60, not quite yet become adults, even if we are grandparents.
I found the author’s essay very interesting, including his blog. I thought bevin’s comments were even better.
Tony

Thanks so much for your well-considered response, Big B. Yes, seems you can’t throw a brick these days and not hit another confession or mea culpa from yet another Silicon Valley billionaire anxious to unload a guilty conscience and/or get out ahead of the inevitable class-action lawyers now waiting in the weeds.
Re George Soros and the other oligarchs at Davos: the shared future they envision belongs exclusively to them. The fractured world part belongs to the rest of us.
Despite my digital pedigree, I never drank my own Kool-Aid. Consequently, I invest little faith in digitally driven mirages like the Arab Spring or the Global Village. Both are byproducts of arrogance, modern Babels conceived and built by sheer hubris. For me, yesterday’s utopian plan always emerges as today’s dystopia.
I’d rather invest my faith locally than globally any day on an actionable scale that’s more accountable to me and mine. I prefer the purely local and far more actionable news of the dinner table to the ersatz digital news and endless diversions designed to render me inert.
Accordingly, I prefer the young boy and the ox. My guess is that the power of the Other will not overwhelm us in a digital flash. It will unfold over decades and centuries as it always has, and it will always be there for those who choose it. Meanwhile, resistance movements will come and go like the tyrants themselves. But they will always emerge first as some variation of the boy and the ox at our own dinner tables and in our own backyards.
Back in the 1960s, Timothy Leary counseled us to turn on, tune in and drop out. We might be better counseled in the Brave New Digital World to turn off, tune out and drop in.
Thanks again for your good time and energy, Big B.