Limbic Capitalism Has Been Driving Addiction for Hundreds of Years
A chapter from historian David Courtwright’s magnificent book, The Age of Addiction, helps us understand how we got here and what’s likely to come.
Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:
In The Anxious Generation, we told the story of the “great rewiring of childhood” and situated it in the historical context of the last 50 years. But just as we were turning in the manuscript, in late 2023, I (Jon) read an extraordinary book that traced the story back much farther — another 10,000 years.
The book was The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by historian David Courtwright, at the University of North Florida. Courtwright begins with humanity’s eternal quest for pleasure from the plants and animals found in nature. It used to take a lot of work and bee stings to obtain a few servings of honey. But the agricultural revolution, and later the invention of money, and later the industrial revolution, brought Western civilization to the point where vast quantities of quick-dopamine products (candy, cigarettes, crack cocaine) could be obtained easily and cheaply, even by the poor, who were often the main targets of these industries.
Courtwright tells the story of “limbic capitalism,” a term he coined to describe an economic system where industries take advantage of the brain’s limbic system — which regulates emotions, motivations, and memory — to drive overconsumption of brain-rewarding products. It is a quintessentially modern enterprise, one that takes something humans have always done — seeking out new pleasures — and supercharges it in the name of profit. It also makes the brain-rewarding substance cheaper and more potent over time, so that vast quantities can be consumed. He shows how, for example, the trans-Atlantic trade in sugar, liquor, and tobacco created vast fortunes from the labor of enslaved people, while spreading mass addiction around the world.
Most of Courtwright’s story is about addictions to substances, from junk food to hard drugs. But in Chapter 7, reprinted below, Courtwright gives us a gripping account of how tech companies followed the same logic to fill our lives with “digital addictions,” starting with computerized slot machines and then on to internet addictions and the smartphone as a variable-ratio reward center.
We think that Courtwright’s long historical perspective is essential for understanding how digital addictions rose so quickly and caused such widespread damage in such a short time. He helps us look ahead too: we know for certain that limbic capitalism will be supercharged by AI and the competition among companies to recoup the mind-boggling amounts of money that they must generate to repay their investors.
We recently had a wonderful discussion with Courtwright himself, and we asked him for permission to reprint Chapter 7 of his book here on After Babel. We thank him and Harvard University Press for allowing us to share it with you. We hope you’ll enjoy the chapter, and consider buying the book.
– Jon & Zach
Digital Addictions
Chapter Seven of The Age of Addiction by David Courtwright
Though critics disputed Volkow’s claim that food addiction is a brain disease, all but doctrinaire libertarians agreed with her on one point: Overeating has an element of conscious commercial design. Volkow’s worries about hyperstimulating environments were widely shared, and not just by those concerned with compulsive overeating. Students of the casino industry, including the journalist Marc Cooper and the cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, found an uncanny resemblance between engineered gambling and engineered food. The similarities were most obvious in Las Vegas, a place where, as Cooper put it, the market ethic had been laid completely bare. So had the impulse to fine-tune and then standardize the exploitation of consumer weaknesses, a trend critics called “McGambling.”
Machine Gambling
For all the diversification into glitzy entertainment, casino operators never gave up on gambling. But they preferred the automated variety, installing as many slot and video poker machines as they could cram onto their casino floors. The machines took no coffee breaks, demanded no maternity leaves, required no skill to play, and ensnared customers with maximum efficiency. “There’s no decision—it’s all done for you,” explained one slots manager. “You just stand there and get excited.” Or very excited. “For some people, something like the Fourth of July is going off in their brains as they gamble,” the sociologist Bo Bernhard told Cooper. “It’s trendy to say gambling is sweeping America. But mostly it’s machine gambling that’s sweeping America. And these machines are a convergence of so many factors: the logic of capitalism, technology, and increasing comfort with machines.”¹
Compulsive gamblers are mostly escape gamblers, as distinguished from action gamblers who favor the craps and blackjack tables. James Bond did not play slots. But women do, and not all are retirees in tennis shoes. “Today the problem gambler is likely to be a thirty-four-year-old woman with two kids and two years of college,” said Robert Hunter, a Las Vegas addiction therapist. “And a video game addiction. We’re not seeing many of the dinosaur action gamblers who play to feel a rush. We’re seeing people who say they want to feel numb, want to blank out, want to lose track.” The point was to disappear, said one of his patients, a woman in her late thirties who moved to Las Vegas after she married. The disappearing act cost her $200,000 over three years.²
If her losses were unusual, her status as a Las Vegas resident was not. Between 1960 and 2015 the resident population of Clark County, home to Las Vegas, grew by two million. The gambling industry cashed in. By 1991 gambling ranked as the locals’ fourth most popular commercial recreation, trailing only eating out, movies, and shopping. By 1999 some 6 percent of the county’s residents were compulsive gamblers, a rate over four times the national average. Exposure mattered, as did novelty and social class. Most prone to frequent gambling were recent arrivals and those with a poor education, many of whom toiled in the resorts. When they went off duty they patronized neighborhood casinos or McGambled at one of the ubiquitous machines in restaurants, bars, and grocery stores. Some “locals’ casinos” sweetened the pot, awarding frequent play with credits that could be swapped for cigarettes and liquor.³
Schüll wanted to know why machine gambling was so addictive and why so many addicts were women. The answer was an updated digital version of the hunter–prey story of commercial vice. Using Las Vegas as their proving ground, the hunters perfected computerized gambling machines that doubled as marketing and tracking devices. The machines’ television themes and resemblance to consumer gadgets gave them an aura of entertainment innocence and attracted a new generation of prey. Many of the younger players were anxious, depressed women seeking respite from burdensome lives in a high-pressure society whose expectations they could not meet. They played less for a big win that would let them escape than to escape, period. The goal, said one, was “to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”⁴
Casino architects obligingly created machine-lined labyrinths in which gamblers lost themselves, satisfying their desire to escape until their stamina or money ran out. Solitary, continuous, and rapid wagering created a trancelike state that rendered players oblivious to anxiety, depression, and boredom. Digitized machine gambling was as reliable as Valium and faster acting. Regular players of video gambling devices became addicted three to four times more quickly than those who gambled in other ways. They also played more rapidly, whipping through a new video poker hand every three to four seconds. Their fingers flew over the controls. The most compulsive players became transfixed, unable to leave their machines despite growling stomachs and bursting bladders. One retired firefighter, who played fourteen hours at a stretch, said the place could burn down and he would stay put as long as he had gambling credits. “Forget it—I’m not leaving unless I can take the machine with me, I’ll die of smoke inhalation first.”⁵
Digitized machine gambling was as reliable as Valium and faster acting. Regular players of video gambling devices became addicted three to four times more quickly than those who gambled in other ways.
Game designers, who knew the risks of addiction and the odds against winning, avoided playing. Asked if he indulged, an artist at Reno’s International Game Technology replied, incredulously, “Slots are for losers.” The director of a department called Responsible Gambling at the company said that her designers did not think about addiction. They thought about beating the competition. “They’re creative folks who want machines to create the most revenue.” Others were more candid about the price of victory. “I don’t feel great preying on psychological weaknesses of little old ladies,” a game developer told Schüll. “I can’t sit here and say, I only put the screws in the bomb, I only assemble the warhead, because I’m sure that products I’ve made have destroyed people’s lives somewhere.”⁶
The slot machine had indeed been weaponized. The weapon’s power first became apparent in 1984, when Las Vegas’s Four Queens Casino installed “virtual reel” slots armed with microprocessors. Each machine could produce ten times more reel stops than standard electromechanical models, hence larger potential jackpots. When casino staff compared the performance of the old and new devices, they found that digitized slots doubled revenues. Trade magazines spread the good news.⁷
Over the next two decades digitized gambling swept the casino industry. With 10 percent of the gamblers providing 80 to 90 percent of the take, anything that speeded up and extended play among regulars was bound to grow revenues. Labor costs shrank, too. Player identification cards and barcoded cash tickets replaced antediluvian change attendants pushing coin carts and tellers selling rolls of quarters from cages. Even cocktail waitresses’ jobs were not wholly safe. By 2008 Harrah’s Entertainment was experimenting with automated bars in casino lounges. Patrons could play touch-screen games, watch YouTube, and design and order their own customized drinks with a click.⁸
As with resort architecture, what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. Digitized machine gambling expanded rapidly in revenue-hungry nations from Scandinavia to South Africa. Designers adapted to local conditions and traditions. Pachinko parlors, Japan’s de facto casinos, got a digital makeover. But everywhere the strategy was the same—to establish and reinforce player habits. The result has been a familiar spectrum of heightened risk tailing off into compulsion and ruin. By 2012, Hungary, a nation of ten million that allowed digitized gambling in pubs and bars as well as casinos, was home to an estimated one hundred thousand gambling addicts and another half million regulars in danger of losing control over their play. In Britain, betting shops proliferated along the main streets. The big draw was FOBTs, fixed-odds betting terminals that offered virtual games from roulette to slots. Punters could burn through £500 in a minute. Counting only those sessions in which gamblers lost £1,000 or more, FOBTs brought in £2.3 billion per year. May as well put heroin on a cheese trolley, a professional poker player wrote disapprovingly, and leave it twixt the chemist and the bus stop.⁹
It was in Australia, however, that digital gambling became a national obsession. By the late 1990s the country had one “pokie” for every eighty adults. Local clubs and pubs installed the machines, as well as hotels and casinos. Eight in ten Australians gambled, four in ten regularly. Casinos encouraged them with loyalty cards offering bonuses and discounts and easy-to-use debit cards that silently tracked their habits and acquired marketing leads about the addicted minority who provided most of the revenue. In one Australian casino, just 2.3 percent of the loyalty card holders accounted for 76 percent of the slot take. The gambling lobby protected and widened the take. In 2015 the government of New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, raised the maximum amount that casino gamblers could store on their smartcards from $1,000 AUD to $5,000 AUD. The move, which stunned hardened industry observers, was clearly designed to keep problem gamblers glued to their custom-designed seats.¹⁰
For confirmed machine-gambling addicts, there was no leaving the perch anyway, regardless of the credit line. It had become part of their mental furniture, their blues ejection seat. “It starts while I’m on my way to the casino,” an addicted gambler told Schüll:
“I’m in the car driving, but in my mind I’m already inside, walking around to find my machine. In the parking lot, the feeling gets even stronger.
By the time I get inside, I’m halfway into that zone. It has everything to do with the sounds, the lights, the atmosphere, walking through the aisles. Then when I’m finally sitting in front of the machine playing, it’s like I’m not even really there anymore—everything fades away.¹¹
Caught in the Web
The machine-gambling language of preoccupation, anticipation, cue- arousal, and oblivion- seeking is strikingly similar to that of drug and food addicts. The principal difference is that food addicts have to eat. Drug and gambling addicts at least have a shot at a clean break. But their digital cousins, internet addicts, are more like food addicts. Online temptation is well nigh inescapable, internet access having become an assumed feature of life in developed societies. Addiction therapists know the score. They aim for “abstinence from problematic applications and a controlled and balanced internet usage,” just as food addiction recovery groups promote measured and balanced eating.¹²
The similarities do not end there. Both food and internet addicts become obsessed, lose control, display tolerance (bigger gulps, more time online), manifest associated disorders like anxiety and impulsivity, and experience depression during withdrawal. They often relapse and persist despite family badgering and social opprobrium. And their numbers have been growing. Surveys undertaken in the United States and Europe between 2000 and 2009 (before widespread smartphone use aggravated the situation) reported internet addiction prevalence rates between 1.5 and 8.2 percent. Chinese studies found values ranging from 2.4 to 6.4 percent, though some subgroups, such as Taiwanese university freshmen, approached an 18 percent addiction rate. In developed nations, internet addiction has become at least as common as food addiction. Among adolescents it is much more so.¹³
Both food and internet addicts become obsessed, lose control, display tolerance, manifest associated disorders like anxiety and impulsivity, and experience depression during withdrawal.
Addiction to the internet and other electronic pastimes reveals itself most clearly in the harsh light of abstinence. In 2010 an international team of researchers asked one thousand college students from ten countries to go without electronic media for twenty-four hours and to record how they felt. The typical response involved a combination of surprise, restlessness, boredom, isolation, anxiety, and depression, often prefaced with a frank admission of excessive use and addiction that cut across cultures:
CHINA: “As matter of fact, I’m quite addicted to the computer and the Internet. In the wake of this experiment, I realized that media is spread like a web that binds me.”
UGANDA: “t will not do any good if I do not begin on the note of acknowledging that I am actually very tied to the media.”
ARGENTINA: “I realized that, out of every 24 hours, I’m connected to a machine 15 hours a day.”
MEXICO: “It was quite late and the only thing going through my mind was (voice of a psychopath): ‘I want Facebook.’ ‘I want Twitter.’ ‘I want YouTube.’ ‘I want TV.’”
UNITED KINGDOM: “As soon as my 24 hours were up, I grabbed my beloved Blackberry and turned on my laptop. I felt almost like a drug addict getting a fix after a long stint of going cold turkey.”¹⁴
As with alcohol, drugs, processed food, and gambling, electronic media consumption is subject to the principle of hormesis. Consumption runs along a spectrum from occasional, beneficial use to relieve boredom and boost morale—the digital equivalent of a coffee break—to heavy, escapist use that harms self and others. Clinicians differ over whether to call the latter condition internet addiction, internet addiction disorder, internet use disorder, pathological internet use disorder, or something else entirely. They do, however, discern a common denominator. The heaviest users are those who have come to strongly prefer recreational life online as a way of tuning out IRL (in real life) hassles. They behave much like machine gamblers slipping into the zone, save that most of their activities, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), have a social aspect that reinforces the virtual seduction. No self-respecting World of Warcraft DPS (a character who inflicts a large amount of damage per second) would want to miss their guild’s next big raid. IRL types take a dim view of such pursuits. Teachers issue failing grades, parents threats, employers pink slips, spouses papers for divorce, and judges treatment orders for internet boot camps.¹⁵
Libertarians and medicalization skeptics think forced treatment is absurd. The arguments over food addiction—Is it really an addiction like drugs? Is it an acquired brain disease to which some individuals are more susceptible than others?—have cropped up again over internet addiction. Only this time the debate has been messier, because internet addiction includes a much wider range of activities than compulsive eating. Among them are addiction to digital pornography, online gambling, video and role-playing games, adult-fantasy chatrooms, shopping on sites like eBay, social media platforms, and websurfing. Different groups of people display different types of addiction. Boys and men are more inclined to online video games and pornography, girls and women to visually oriented social media and compulsive buying. Some psychiatrists class the latter as an addiction, others as a type of obsessive compulsive disorder. If comparing food and drug addiction is like comparing apples and oranges, comparing food, drug, and internet addiction is like comparing apples, oranges, and several varieties of grapes.¹⁶
The Worse Angels of Our Nature
Another thing that makes internet addiction difficult to assess is its relative novelty, especially habitual social media use via camera-equipped, internet-accessible mobile devices. History wants perspective. Little is available here. In countries like India, cheap voice-activated devices with intuitive video-oriented apps have only just begun to bring the social media revolution to poorer and less literate consumers. Yet some account is necessary, as there is no denying digital technology’s accelerating role in the history of pleasure, vice, and addiction. Briefly, three developments stand out.¹⁷
First, digital connectivity and mobility have spawned genuinely new patterns of addictive behavior. Putting aside academic disputes over categories and causes, the behaviors themselves have become social facts. When I told people that I was writing an updated history of addiction, the near-universal response was that I should include kids glued to their smartphones. What had once been a peripheral nuisance has become a real worry, given the rising toll of accidents caused by distracted drivers, not to say reports of increased bullying, anxiety, and academic failure. Compulsively studying social media posts leaves less time for studying everything else.
Second, the development of the internet created new, global opportunities for the dissemination of old vices and addictions, including gambling, psychoactive drugs, prostitution, and pornography. Indeed, porn has accounted for a significant portion of internet traffic from the time of its commercial inception. Swearing, the last of the bad habits that John Burnham profiled in his book, also gained a new outlet. Swearing never had much of a commercial aspect, which is why I have said little of it. Yet traditional vice it is. An emotionally charged form of speech processed through the limbic system, rather than the cortical language regions, swearing is a taboo, aggressive act of a cue-triggered nature. Like the other masculine and lower- class vices with which it is associated, swearing offends and demeans others. It flourished among soldiers during the world wars and then became increasingly common public behavior. From the vantage of 1993, when Bad Habits was published, normalized swearing struck Burnham as another defeat for American opponents of vice. In the ensuing quarter century that defeat has turned into a global rout. Online libertinism and anonymity encourage profanity, flaming, and other forms of verbal aggression such as trolling, succinctly defined in the online Urban Dictionary as “being a prick on the internet because you can.”¹⁸
Third, both developments, new bad habits and new outlets for old ones, have been engineered to maximize revenue, data on consumers, and time spent on the device or app. No less than for gambling machines, attention is the key corporate asset and behavioral science the means to claim it. For every individual attempting to exercise self-control over computer use, pointed out the ethicist Tristan Harris, there are a thousand experts on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break it down. Game makers study young players and analyze their mouse clicks to devise reinforcement schedules that prolong play and stimulate purchase of products tied to the game. Some are limited-time offers: You had better keep playing or you will miss out. Others are virtual gold pieces “farmed” by Chinese proles playing MMORPGs in twelve-hour factory shifts to supply impatient gamers in South Korea and other affluent countries with the virtual assets necessary to advance quickly in rank. One Fuzhou gold farmer earned $250 a month—good pay, he said, in comparison to other jobs. Most of his wages, and the middlemen’s profits, came from free-spending “whales” whom the computer-game industry had cultivated and caught.¹⁹
Both developments, new bad habits and new outlets for old ones, have been engineered to maximize revenue, data on consumers, and time spent on the device or app.
All three aspects of digital vice and addiction—new, old, designed—figured in journalist Nancy Jo Sales’s American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (2016). Sales interviewed more than two hundred smartphone–equipped girls aged thirteen to nineteen, asking how social media had affected their lives. The gist was that they had displaced reality into a digital realm of celebrity idolatry, genital exhibitionism, drunken hookups, pornographic sex, constant distraction, collective insomnia, malicious gossip, cyberbullying, desensitization, and anxiety about appearance and popularity. The chief beneficiaries were makeup manufacturers and Silicon Valley honchos who equated teen time with advertising revenue. They were, Sales wrote, as prone to objectify women as the schoolboys who sexted female classmates and expected nude photographs in return.
Sales’s subjects volunteered that they were addicted to or obsessed with their phones, internet videos, and social media, to which the heaviest users devoted from nine to eleven hours a day. As with other addictions, reinforcement had a positive and negative dimension. Every like on a post or photo, every retweeted message, was a small psychic jackpot that could arrive at any moment. The continual flow of information, especially information about where one stood in the hotness pecking order, was a potent form of reward. Not having access to that information was a source of gnawing anxiety. Like much else online, it acquired its own name, FOMO. Fear of Missing Out.
Missing the big weekend party was fear one for the older, sexually active girls. “People get drunk, hook up,” explained Madison, a Boca Raton high school student whom Sales interviewed together with three of her friends, Billie, Sally, and Michelle. “Seniors are like, Let’s live it up. We’re all going off to different colleges, I’m never going to see you again, so let’s just, you know, do it.” Sales asked if porn had anything to do with the sexual carousel:
They all said, “Yes.”
“Boys look at porn all day,” said Billie. “They watch it during class,” said Madison. “Whenever you text a guy and ask, What are you doing?, they say they’re watching porn,” said Sally. “Some guys in my class were actually watching it while someone was doing a presentation. This girl Jennifer was giving a presentation and these guys put their phones like that”—she held her phone up to show the screen. “They were like, Oh, Jennifer, I have a question, and they raised their phones and it was a porn video. She couldn’t even concentrate. It was so sad. I felt so bad for her.”
Their teacher, sitting in the back of the classroom, saw nothing. Why didn’t they tell her? Sales asked. The girls looked around at one another. “If you tell on them, they’ll never let you forget it.” When Sales asked another group of girls, in Los Angeles, why they didn’t just walk away from social media if it was making their lives miserable, the answer was “because then we would have no life.” It is the classic addict answer, with a twist. Anxiety and dysphoria have acquired a new partner in the list of withdrawal symptoms—fear of social death.²⁰
Wired kids in other cultures have found themselves similarly entangled with smartphones, the stickiest of the world’s sticky things. They say they cannot imagine life without them. Phones are their lives. They would freak out if they lost them. They need apps for confidence. They long for perfect selfies. Everything revolves around social media. They cannot abandon online friends and late-night chat sessions for fear of ostracism. No less than their American peers, they have fallen into the ultimate luxury trap.²¹
The trap became more insidious after 2007, when smartphones and tablets conquered the consumer electronics market and social media went mobile. By 2015, 92 percent of American teenage girls were online daily, 24 percent “almost constantly.” It is easy to see why. A smartphone in a personalized case seems like the ultimate in teenage liberation, a portable vending machine full of mood-brightening apps. But in this instance, as in so many others, the sheepskin of consumer autonomy conceals the wolf of emotional manipulation from a distance.²²
The most obnoxious manipulators are boys who badger girls for nude photos and hookups and who harass and slander them should they fail to deliver. Yet boys too pay a price for easy, uncensored internet access. They become ensnared in a loutish bro culture and a world of pornographic fantasy that can result in sexual dysfunction. The reason college men are having trouble getting erections, a male Ivy League student told Sales, is excessive porn use. Masturbating to online pornography is like drinking ten cups of coffee a day. The prospect of “random non-intimate sex” with a real person rather than a porn star sculpted to trigger arousal cues is like drinking just two cups of coffee, “not that stimulating in comparison.” Biological Calvinism applies to online pornography as well as to alcohol and drugs. A reckoning there has been, manifest in hookups turned into letdowns or outright failures to launch.²³
It is as if, in the span of a century, there have been three revolutions of technology and sex. The first, artificial contraception, separated sex from procreation. The second, digital pornography, separated sex from physical contact between persons. And the third, online remoteness and impersonality, separated sex from courtship and its customary object, marriage. When sex is cheap, quick, and always available, why bother with corsages, dinner dates, and engagement rings?
More than tradition is at stake. Since the pioneering work of Norbert Elias, historians and social scientists have come to appreciate that acquiring and displaying good manners has greatly strengthened the faculty of impulse control on which social order depends. Sales’s informants did not need a dead German sociologist to know that something had gone wrong. If these guys said to our faces what they say to us online, one of them told her, we would probably kick them in the balls.²⁴
Critics accused Sales of pushing a feminist agenda and ignoring the other uses of social media, such as sharing family news or networking with activists. No smartphones, no Arab Spring. No social media, no Black Lives Matter. New consumer technologies have their liberating side. In his magnum opus on the historical decline of violence and intolerance, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), the psychologist Steven Pinker proposed that the acceleration of human and animal rights revolutions since the 1960s was a byproduct of the consumer electronics revolutions. The annual doubling of transistors on integrated circuits put the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters on steroids. It connected a literate mass audience and broadcast the methods and ideals of the scientific and humanitarian revolutions. Against Wikipedia, pernicious beliefs stand less chance of survival. Prejudices about the innate criminality of certain races, or women’s enjoyment of rape, or the necessity of beating children, or the moral irrelevance of animal suffering stand a mouse click from debunking. The internet is bad news for those who, paraphrasing Voltaire, would have us commit atrocities because they can make us believe absurdities.²⁵
This is a plausible theory, though not a watertight one. The Republic of Flamers and its legions of bots have proven equally adept at filling cyberspace with absurdities and invective, as comment chains and Twitter feeds attest. Nor has the Republic of Tempters been idle. In the mid-1990s the internet Jekyll, which began life as an academic email and file-sharing network, assumed a second, Hyde-like character as a global libertarian commons of untaxed commerce, seductive pastimes, and vice. As late as the 1960s, observed the psychologist Adam Alter, people swam in waters in which there were relatively few addictive hooks. Chief among them were cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. The last were expensive, risky, and often hard to obtain. But by the 2010s consumer waters had become filled with hooks. They had names like Facebook, Instagram, porn, email, and online shopping. Fishing had become phishing.²⁶
Alter neglected to mention food addiction, a real-life phenomenon with online triggers like mukbang and fast-food-delivery apps. But adding compulsive overeating and its digital prompts only strengthens the point. In the early twenty-first century—the same period that Pinker identified as a golden age of statistically declining physical violence and expanding rights—people face more, and more cunningly fashioned, inducements to harmful habits than at any point in history.
Though the harms vary from country to country, the global pattern is clear. The average adult living in the world of 2014 was thirty times less likely to die from war or homicide than from a condition linked to bad health habits. These include familiar killers like smoking, drinking, drug use, and unprotected extramarital sex as well as relative newcomers like overeating, salt- and sugar-rich diets, techno-sloth, and distracted driving. It is as if the worst angels of our nature emerged at the same moment as our best. Even if Pinker is right about the pacifying and humanitarian implications of electronic communication, the same underlying technological revolution has brought grave risk as well as great opportunity in its wake.²⁷
As they multiplied, the digital hooks became sharper. In September 2006 Facebook was just another “fun” site, a novelty open to anyone who was thirteen years old and in possession of a valid email address. Ten years later it was an obsession, with more than a billion daily active users, a claim on the attention of nearly 40 percent of the global online population, and the foundation of the world’s fifth most valuable corporation. None of this was accidental. Like food engineers, designers of social media platforms and video games rely on pleasure’s traditional art of combination. The difference is that, instead of sugar, salt, and fat, they select from a menu of psychological ingredients. The big six are compelling goals just beyond the user’s immediate reach; unpredictable but stimulating feedback; a sense of incremental progress and hard-won mastery; tasks or levels that gradually become more challenging; tensions that demand resolution; and social connections to like-minded users. Insiders call the social aspect the “rewards of the tribe.” Tribes punish, too. “You’ve got to keep up with the virtual Joneses,” explained Ryan Van Cleave, an English professor who lost his job at Clemson because he was playing World of Warcraft sixty hours a week. When he finally quit, to avoid losing his family, he suffered drenching sweats, nausea, and headaches.²⁸
In the early twenty-first century, people face more, and more cunningly fashioned, inducements to harmful habits than at any point in history.
A product does not have to be a game to have game-like effects. Instagram, a photo-sharing app that ballooned from 1 million users in 2010 to 700 million in 2017, offers a textbook example of variable reinforcement. Some posts bomb. Others get lots of likes. Users chase likes by continuously posting photos and constantly returning to the site to support their friends. Instagram is simple, quick, and universal, being visual, linked to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and requiring no language fluency. And it is, like, addictive. “I wake up in the morning and my heart is racing out of my chest,” said one user. “How many new followers did I get? How many people did I lose? What am I going to post today?”²⁹
Nir Eyal, an applied psychologist and former video game designer, has called Instagram a meticulously designed, habituating product unleashed—his word—on consumers who make it part of their daily routine. They do so because Instagram and similar apps exploit small stressors like boredom, frustration, or FOMO by turning them into internal triggers, prompting “an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.” Successful product designers know how to combine psychology and technology to scratch these itches, forming bonds of positive association and strong habits good for their bottom line.³⁰
Just how good became apparent in 2012, when Facebook paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram, yet to reach its second birthday. The investment proved a bargain. Most of Facebook’s activity involves looking at other people’s photos, and Instagram is ideally suited for targeting ads. Foodies snapped three-star meals, quilters quilting bees, skiers their favorite resorts. “This data is WORTH S***LOADS!” tech enthusiast Robert Scoble told Forbes, referring to information about user preferences. It became worth even more when Instagram added video capacity in 2013. Facebook had a window into its shutterbugs’ souls—and into their vices, when they broke the rules by sharing illicit drug ads and pornographic video clips using hardto-detect Arabic hashtags.³¹
Whether it was forbidden content that drew users to the internet and social media platforms, or mini-hits of stress-relieving information, or both, critics began to detect ill effects of heavy use. With the exception of trauma caused by distracted driving and walking, few of these effects are acute and none toxic in the manner of alcohol or drugs. Internet addicts are not overdose candidates. Their heavy use is instead a slow poison, one whose cumulative toll is cognitive and moral.
The primary danger, particularly with smartphones, is constant distraction from personal conversation, sleep, driving, study, reflection, practice, and work, which translates into difficulty achieving or maintaining intimacy, health, safety, knowledge, creativity, expertise, and socially constructive flow states. Like gambling machines, social media and other digital diversions offer alternative flow states through virtual shortcuts that exact their price in money, time, and diminished real-life accomplishments, satisfactions, and tolerance for electronically unvarnished life itself. “It was an unpleasant surprise,” wrote a Mexican student who participated in the abstinence experiment, “to realize that I am in a state of constant distraction, as if my real life and my virtual life were coexisting in different planes, but in equal time.”³²
Or unequal time, given that there are only so many hours in a day. “Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I’ve ever had,” the writer Zadie Smith confessed, “and I loved it for that.” With a literary career at stake, she broke off the affair after two months. She was wise to do so. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, who wrote portions of The Corrections wearing a blindfold and earplugs, doubted whether anyone working with an internet connection was capable of writing good fiction. Professors doubted whether students so equipped could sustain original arguments, fears borne out by research showing social media use inversely correlated with grades. Psychologists showed that mere proximity to a silenced smartphone diminishes cognitive ability, particularly in habitual users. Lit up or vibrating, the devices are guaranteed to divert attention, as is any form of regular online access.³³
Internet addicts are not overdose candidates. Their heavy use is instead a slow poison, one whose cumulative toll is cognitive and moral.
The condition acquired a name, “time suck,” defined in the Urban Dictionary as something “engrossing and addictive, but that keeps you from doing things that are actually important, like earning a living, or eating meals, or caring for your children.” Like other forms of addictive behavior, time suck is self-perpetuating. If dereliction from real-life duties creates stress, or immersion in the virtual world creates loneliness, anxiety, and depression, then escapism is just the thing. A remark George Koob made about the spiraling distress of alcoholism— “People often drink because they don’t feel good, but drinking makes them feel worse, so they drink more”— applies equally to digital addictions.³⁴
To the extent that they undermine self-control, the internet and linked mobile devices have become part of what Pinker, in another context, called the decivilizing process. It is a label that can be applied to all forms of limbic capitalism, though not to capitalism per se. The production and exchange of unexceptionable goods and services has generally acted as a progressive force. Market competition benefited ordinary people, few of whom cared to live in a town with one store run by a state mono poly. Mercantile and future orientation, industrial capitalism fostered traits of self-discipline, future orientation, and efficient time management. And capitalism produced the wealth that funded institutions of public health, safety, and education that let people lead more salubrious, secure, and rational lives. These conditions Pinker associated with the long-term decline in violence and brutality. And yet these same characteristics and circumstances would also seem to be antithetical to vice and addiction.³⁵
So we have a mystery. Why did violence and cruelty decline while commercial vices and novel addictions proliferated? One answer is that technologies of violence— weapons—and technologies of addiction— weaponized pleasures—are psychologically distinctive. The pulses of missile-launch officers going on watch remain steady as they seat themselves at their computer consoles. The pulses of video poker addicts race as they seat themselves at their beeping machines. “Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven,” Pinker wrote, “and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another dead.” Actually, behavior is both goal-directed and stimulus-driven. Yet his point stands. Technology made weapons much more lethal, but the lethality failed to translate into higher sustained rates of violent deaths because other historical developments made people less inclined to kill one another. Those developments amount to a checklist of modernity, starting with personal security under the rule of law and the expansion of mutually beneficial trade. Pinker called trade “gentle commerce”; his ally Robert Wright, a non-zero-sum game. “If you ask me why I am not in favor of bombing Japan,” Wright observed, “I’m only half- joking when I say that they built my car. . . . To the extent that you think someone’s welfare is positively correlated with yours, you’re more likely to cut them a break.”³⁶
But what if, instead of cars, the trading partner made junk food or addictive drugs and apps? Limbic capitalism is capitalism’s evil twin. It is stimulus-based, ungentle, and zero sum. It produces large and sustained profits (and with them the means of stymying opposition) through commerce in exceptionable products like pornography and cigarettes or, in the case of food and phones, quotidian products made exceptionable by addictive engineering. The good twin and the evil twin are joined, not at the hip, but at the historically contingent point where science and technology made it possible to turn a commodity into a vice. Sometimes the process was inadvertent. Hypodermic medication was a medical breakthrough that carried, unexpectedly, a greater risk of addiction to narcotic drugs. But from the late nineteenth century on, vice-product invention, refinement, and marketing became deliberate processes. These processes undercut the Enlightenment hope that gentle commerce would lift all boats. What actually happened was that conjoined-twin capitalism raised some boats and sank others. That is why mainstream anti-vice activists and their public health descendants preferred regulation and selective prohibitions to outright socialism. Reform was about killing the evil twin.
Doublespeak
The moral justification for elimination of vice is straightforward: Destroy predacious products before they destroy us and our communities. To which the predators reply, it is not about the products. It is about individuals. No matter how tempting our lures, people can still resist them. They have made some variant of this argument for every addictive product and pastime, digital or other wise. All that is necessary is facility in doublespeak. Nir Eyal gave a textbook demonstration in two lectures before the Habit Summit behavioral design conference, the annual gathering (for up to $1,700 a seat) of limbic capitalism’s digital clan.
Limbic capitalism is capitalism’s evil twin. It is stimulus-based, ungentle, and zero sum.
Eyal devoted his first talk, in 2014, to the four cardinal virtues of habituating product designs. They increase “customer lifetime value,” the total sum of money that can be extracted from a user. They allow greater leeway to increase prices, because of less flexible demand. They supercharge growth with “short viral-cycle time,” meaning that engaged users will quickly recruit others. Finally, they increase consumer “defensibility” against rivals. Up went a slide of a bomber bristling with machine guns. The message was unmistakable. We have you, and we will keep running you through our wringer.³⁷
Three years later, in 2017, Eyal again addressed the Habit Summit. He began with a walk-back of the head-fake variety. Yes, there had been abuses. Distraction was a problem. But it could be dealt with by gentle social pressure. Try saying “Is everything OK?” to the smartphone boors at your restaurant table. Encourage the consumer to download attention-retention apps that block online triggers and limit time spent on the device. Why, he used the apps himself. The social-media-as-drug crowd had it wrong. “We’re not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here,” Eyal said. “We can’t believe we’re powerless. We’re only powerless if we think we are.” All but thumbing his nose at Volkow, he put up a slide of bakery shelves groaning with carbs. “Just as we wouldn’t blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them,” he said. “Of course that’s what tech companies will do. And, frankly, do we want it any other way?”³⁸
The managers of Shenzhen-based Tencent, a leading Chinese internet services provider, shared the sentiment. In 2016, a year in which the company reported a 38 percent increase in operating profit, the annual report identified online gaming as an important growth engine. The gains had come through data mining, used to tweak the performance of existing games and gain “deeper insights” into players’ behavior, meaning what kept them online and spending to improve their characters. The big winner was Honor of Kings, a fantasy role-playing game that (this detail omitted from the report) the state- run People’s Daily denounced as a “poison” and a “drug.” Rather than dispute the analogy, Tencent’s managers spun it, telling investors that their strategy for promoting smartphone games was to “engage a large pool of casual gamers and gradually advance them to mid-core and hard-core categories.” Already hard-core players of games like League of Legends could be placated with “attractive new content” prepared with the help of “insights gained from data mining.”³⁹
Some insiders lost their stomach for euphemism and equivocation. In 2017 Loren Brichter, who created the pull-to-refresh mechanism by which users of Twitter and other apps could update their feeds by swiping down on the touchscreen, said he regretted his invention. He called it addictive, a lever on a slot machine. Justin Rosenstein, who coded the like-button prototype, wished he had not bestowed “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” on a distracted world. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, hated that “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse. No cooperation. Misinformation. Mistruth.” It was not, he emphasized, an American problem. It was a global problem, and stubborn in the bargain. Capturing and monetizing eyeballs had become an irresistible game.⁴⁰
Repentant or not, Silicon Valley elites watched out for the eyeballs of their own families. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Apple’s Steve Jobs told an incredulous reporter, who had imagined his dining table tiled with iPads. “Not even close,” Jobs said. He wanted his children to discuss books and history at family meals. The five children of Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, complained of their parents’ tech-denying rules. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” Anderson told the same reporter. “I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” Palihapitiya was more explicit. He didn’t use “this shit” and wouldn’t let his kids, either. Other tech executives and engineers dealt with the problem by imposing time limits, refusing phones to their children before their mid-teens, and never, ever allowing screens in their bedrooms. Extending the low- tech writ beyond their homes, they enrolled their children in prep schools where iPhones, iPads, and even standard laptops were forbidden.⁴¹
No one doubts that, functionally and aesthetically, iPhones and iPads are remarkable technological achievements. But so were the clipper ships that carried opium to China. Creativity and parasitism, splendor and hypocrisy run through the history of limbic capitalism like bright, intertwined threads. Those who count the money understand this reality. They deal with the unseemly conflict as most of us do, by compartmentalization.
No one doubts that, functionally and aesthetically, iPhones and iPads are remarkable technological achievements. But so were the clipper ships that carried opium to China.
The champion in this regard was Martin Stern, the architect who conceived the high-rise casino megaresort. One day in 1969 Stern was driving toward the International Hotel, his Las Vegas prototype. Approaching an intersection, he gazed up at his creation, oblivious to the red light he was about to run. He was transfixed. “This is a goddamned good-looking building,” he told his startled teenage son. “This is a really goddamned beautiful building.” It was, too, and it would be copied all over the world. But what Stern did not admire was his building’s principal attraction, gambling. He thought the table games and slot machines he had cunningly laid out were “stupid” pastimes for tourists and losers. He was neither.⁴²
The Post-Spatial Underworld
Though Stern’s glittering mousetrap had three physical dimensions, it also operated in the fourth dimension of time—more precisely, in the nighttime. Historians and sociologists think of the nighttime as a temporal frontier whose colonization was made possible by artificial lighting, electrification, and motor vehicles. Victorian pub crawlers and prostitutes were early nighttime pioneers, in that they used gas and electric lights to expand their scope of operations. In postwar Japan gamblers and bar and cabaret workers extended the night with the help of amphetamine “awakening drugs.” Stern took the next logical step, creating a self-contained, air-conditioned, parking-equipped, nonstop pleasure palace. Inside it day and night were as irrelevant as wall clocks, omitted to keep gamblers lost in play.⁴³
The mice still had to reach Stern’s cheese. That is why transportation speed and price mattered so much to Las Vegas and other pleasure meccas. In the 1950s Chicago to Las Vegas by car was two days, six meals, and a motel bill. A $75 tourist ticket on a TWA Constellation reduced the trip to five hours, with plenty of time left for an evening of play. Over the next three decades large, fuel-efficient jets and deregulated fares dramatically increased tourist volume. In 1958 about 60 commercial flights landed daily at Las Vegas. By 1988 well over 500 did so.⁴⁴
It follows that, before the internet, the history of pleasure, vice, and addiction was largely a history of spatial and temporal expansion. There were places, at first isolated places, where people discovered, cultivated, processed, blended, and traded food-drugs, until eventually psychoactive commodity chains spanned the world. There were urban districts, like Harbin’s Garden of Grand Vision, where people sought or tolerated commercial vices and where addiction-centered subcultures took root. And there were late-night hours, after the streetlights flickered on, when rouged streetwalkers emerged from the shadows to troll for customers.
Anti-vice activists made it their mission to shrink these domains to a minimum. They won some victories. Yet, despite their sustained campaign against illicit drug use and cigarettes, they lost the larger war to contain and marginalize commercial vice. By the 1990s, one had only to switch on cable television, stroll the aisles of the local video store, or glance at the magazine rack to understand that, in the Protestant nations that had been its cradle, anti-vice activism was on the ropes.⁴⁵
The internet delivered the knockout blow, launching anti-vice activism out of the ring and landing it somewhere in the third row of seats. A restrictive strategy predicated on physical supply chokepoints (open your trunk), human checkpoints (show me your ID), and regulation of space and time (no ads near schools, no selling after hours) had scant chance against a technology operating in the virtual fifth dimension of a globally connected, post-spatial environment. Anti- vice activism did not compute. Digital commerce did, and in ways that transformed the availability, affordability, anonymity, and advertising of vice.
The obvious example is sex. Before the internet children received informal instruction on sex from peers and media, formal instruction from teachers and parents. After the internet children had only to enter a string in a search engine. An analysis of the top thousand “how to” searches in the United States in late 2007 revealed that 17.3 percent involved sex, including four of the top ten. The wording of these four—how to have sex, how to kiss, how to get pregnant, how to make out—suggested that young fingers were doing the typing. Porn videos offered advanced erotic instruction, or what passed for it in the objectifying world of internet sex. Those seeking guidance for illegal activities accounted for another 9.5 percent of the top how-to searches. Growing marijuana led the pack. Though readily accessible, do-it-yourself vice was not entirely anonymous or free. Tracking cookies, viruses, and malware exacted their toll, and pornographic websites often charged for regular access. But it was easier than dealing with strangers in dicey neighborhoods, or running the risk of being seen there. Silicon Valley executives knew what they were doing when they forbade computer screens in their children’s bedrooms.⁴⁶
Constructive knowledge is also on offer. How to write a résumé came in at number five in the 2007 study, how to write a book at sixty-two. A few keystrokes allow internet users to immerse themselves in the works of Caravaggio or Callas. The question, though, is relative traffic In 2018, a search for “how to grow marijuana” yielded fifteen times as many hits as “Callas arias.” The headline lesson of the content surveys is that the internet provides a mostly frictionless entry into what used to be called “the life.” The life was the underworld, an exciting but precarious place where outlaw players hustled, pimped, gambled, got high, and did anything to scrounge a buck. The life was a term of class, subculture, and place, more often heard in poor neighborhoods than in rich ones. But with the advent of the internet and social media, every one was virtually in the life, no matter where they lived.⁴⁷
Alcohol marketers, who knew that up to 20 percent of sales went to underage users, quickly spotted the internet’s potential. By 1995 liquor companies had begun sponsoring sites offering giveaways, promotions, and information about how to play drinking games. When social media arrived, alcohol multinationals tied their brands to pop-culture “influencers.” Most of the ads are accessible to underage viewers, who upload their favorites to YouTube. Tweeters sing alcohol’s praises. Facebook and Myspace users post photos and videos of themselves and other kids getting drunk or high. Just as American Indians had learned to drink from the worst possible tutors, fur trappers and backwoods traders prone to riotous binges, wired teenagers learn to drink from peers who swill booze, hug toilets, and pass out on the floor. Pathological learning is social as well as chemical and commercial.⁴⁸
The cybervice portal operates in closed societies as well as in open ones. As early as 1995, Chinese communist officials denounced the threat of “pornographic and reactionary” internet material. Over the next two decades, China’s business deeds often spoke louder than its official words. Chinese manufacturers supplied most of the sex toys sold (and demonstrated) on the internet. Chinese software companies like Tencent prospered by designing addictive online games. And Chinese firms supplied precursor chemicals, advertised on the internet and exported in bulk, used to make deadly synthetic drugs. Money had no ideological color.⁴⁹
The Chinese were consistent in one regard. Their main worry was young people, a concern echoed in every national survey of internet vice exposure. Studies of pornography consistently find that neophytes enter the digital underworld at an early age. In 2003 Australian researchers learned that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls aged sixteen and seventeen had accidentally or deliberately viewed internet pornography, including “images of virtually any sexual practice imaginable.” These figures, likely underestimates, were compiled at a time when only one Australian home in three was connected to the internet. Kids found a way. In Iceland they tapped in with game consoles. In Kenya students used internet cafes and university dorm rooms, where they downloaded pornography and staged blue- movie nights. One undergraduate was turned on by a friend who sent him a porn link. “Since then I have craved for more sites like that,” he said. “It is very addictive.”⁵⁰
The internet provides a means of accessing commercial sex, as well as experiencing it virtually. By the late 1990s New York City prostitutes were advertising escort services online. Booking dates by computer was easier and safer than dodging police and street predators. Classified advertising websites like Craigslist and Backpage (which was shut down in 2018) ran ads for prostitutes and pimps, including those who trafficked in minors. Backpage, a Minnesota prosecutor charged in 2016, was “the platform by which children are bought and sold.” Another prosecutor called it a “dystopian hell.” But hell has its defenders, including internet trade associations and tech companies that resist crackdowns and censorship for fear of adverse precedents. Vice wants to be, if not free, at least readily available.⁵¹
Vice also wants to be mobile. “I can say to my phone, ‘Siri, where are the hookers?’ ” observed Robert Weiss, a therapist who specializes in sex addictions. “And it will geo-locate escort services within a half-mile, a mile, two miles, three miles, with phone numbers and maps and reviews of the different prostitutes.” In India, where prostitution was traditionally confined to red- light districts, prostitutes abandoned brothels, bought cheap mobile phones, took an assumed name, and visited clients who called or texted. Hello, I’m Neelan, and my terms are cash before disrobing. The business being flexible and anonymous, part-timers ventured into the market. Men liked the convenience of mobile sex. AIDS workers took a dimmer view. Safe-sex counseling worked better when prostitution was physically concentrated than when it was digitally dispersed.⁵²
But hell has its defenders, including internet trade associations and tech companies that resist crackdowns and censorship for fear of adverse precedents. Vice wants to be, if not free, at least readily available.
Websites, dark or otherwise, began to traffic in drugs and drug paraphernalia. Online shoppers bought everything from powdered caffeine, more dangerous than it sounded, to fentanyl, every bit as lethal as its reputation. By 2014 an estimated forty to sixty thousand websites offered drugs without a prescription. Those with names like buyoxycontinonline.com left no doubt as to their intention. Other sites provided information on how to con doctors for narcotics. Faking fibromyalgia was a good bet. Just be sure to pick a doctor on the wrong side of the tracks and pay cash for your appointment.⁵³
Rights to choice drug URLs command top dollar. In 2011 pot entrepreneur Justin Hartfield paid $4.2 million for marijuana.com. When governments dispensed with the pretense of prescription cannabis, he reasoned, he could cut out the local pot shop and sell directly. Marijuana.com would be the new wine.com. Meanwhile help was at hand for male customers worried about drug screening tests. They could order a Screeny Weeny, a fake penis connected to a bag of synthetic urine that could be strapped on and squeezed to emit a stream of clean urine. The manufacturer offered circumcised and uncircumcised versions in a variety of skin tones. Headshops provided refills. They took orders online.⁵⁴
Just as important is information about drugs: what dose to take, how to inject, how to produce your own. Digital know-how helped transform European and North American cannabis markets. With the help of information, seeds, and specialized equipment acquired through the internet, domestic cultivators began growing potent strains of marijuana such as sinsemilla and nederwiet. High-THC domestic pot competed well with, and often replaced, traditional smokes like Moroccan hashish or commercial-grade Mexican marijuana. Legitimate nurseries and hardware stores got in on the action, selling growing media, cloning trays, high-intensity lighting, generators, fans, and dehumidifiers for indoor cultivation. The largest and most sophisticated operations added computers and other automated equipment that relieved growers of monitoring chores and cut labor costs. Growing pot became as rationalized, and as digitized, as anything else.⁵⁵
Automated pot farming can also be read as a dystopian augury. Futurologists (and one historian- turned- futurologist, Yuval Noah Harari) have argued that the big story of the recent past is the uncoupling of consciousness from intelligence. Kludgy human brains have failed to keep up with digital algorithms. The gap keeps widening as information-processing power keeps doubling. Homo sapiens is bound for the evolutionary scrap heap. People will be replaced by smart machines that—or who—dispense with most or all of their economically useless forerunners. We face extinction by design.⁵⁶
That prospect should prompt skepticism. Library shelves and video bins are littered with dystopias that failed to materialize. Yet the brief history of digital addictions suggests that there are other ways that digital devices can parasitize their creators. They not only excel at data processing, they excel at recognizing, predicting, and manipulating human feelings. “Hey, Siri, where are the hookers?” teaches the iPhone something, not just the iPhone’s owner. If information and the ability to process it are what really count, who is the owner and who the owned in such circumstances? With machine intelligence divorced from conscience as well as consciousness, and with algorithms deployed in the service of habituation as well as profit, who is to say that the singularity will not be an addictive one, with a fading species’ penultimate act seeking succor in digital opiates? Of course, the skepticism rule applies to this scenario, too. With one footnote.
Some of us are already there.
David Courtwright
David Courtwright earned a doctorate in history from Rice University and took up the study of addictive behaviors (Dark Paradise, Addicts Who Survived, Forces of Habit, and The Age of Addiction); the social worlds of frontier environments (Violent Land and Sky as Frontier); and the late-twentieth-century culture war (No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America). He pursued these interests with the support of the American Historical Association, NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Richmond, and the University of North Florida, where he is presidential professor emeritus. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and is writing a history of the U.S. opioid crisis — this time on his own nickel.
You can find this post’s footnotes here.
David Courtwright's concept of limbic capitalism explains how uncertainty became profitable. What interests me is why some people appear more vulnerable to these digital closures than others. Perhaps the deeper question is developmental. A child's relationship with uncertainty is not purely cognitive; it is physiological. Children raised in environments that support reflection, recovery, and emotional regulation may develop a greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking relief through digital stimulation. If so, the challenge is not only reducing exposure to addictive technologies but also cultivating the conditions that make premature closure less necessary.
I liked it, but I got tired of the caricature of libertarians the author trots out every four paragraphs. He really needs to put down his phone and meet a real libertarian.