When you think of addiction, you probably think of substances first – cigarettes, alcohol, drug addiction, caffeine – but you might also think of ‘new’ addictions – work, social media, phone screens, gaming, Youtube, even performance addictions – these are so-called ‘behavioural addictions’ – and it leads to a broad question: is the face of addiction changing?

In fact, so many of our addictions seem to be becoming online ones. As our psychologies fuse into the hyperreal postmodern screen-attached cyber-psychologies, symbiotic with tech, dependent on it, what happens to those compulsions we feel – that pull towards clickbait, towards likes, towards doomscrolling – what’s it doing to us?

I have addictions – too many – they’re not too bad these days – but I smoke a bit, drink a bit, eat too much chocolate, am drawn to Twitter and convince myself that Youtube videos are research because of this job. Even my reading, work habits, and exercise verge on feeling like addictive compulsions.

The modern world – the one that arose out of developments in science, factories, industry, the Enlightenment – was an attempt, in many ways, to fix a premodern problem: scarcity.

What happens when, for some of us, the problem scarcity is overcome? The modern problem of overcoming scarcity turns on its head and becomes a postmodern problem: that of abundance and excess. From too little to too much.

Our wiring has evolved over the course of millennia as a response to the scarce landscape of the savanna. Postmodern life is a constant fight against the ghosts of that wiring.

And is the new face of addiction becoming an epidemic?

Drug overdoses in the US have tripled since 1990. Opioid use has risen by 300%. 300 million of us have a alcohol disorder. In the 20thcentury, 100 million died early from smoking. Many psychologists estimate that 1 in 10 Americans qualify for social media addiction. One study estimates 7% of gamers are problem gamers and 1.4% are addicted.[1]Facebook itself found that Instagram was harmful to teenage girls. 30% could be classified as addicted to our phones. 7% to gambling and 7% to shopping.[2]

So is I true to say we live in an age of addiction? Philosopher Kent Donnington has written: “Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.”

So what’s going on here? If this broad pursuit of pleasure ranges from tobacco to Tetris, sex to social media, booze to buying, gaming to gambling, how do we think about addiction at all? It seems so broad, so vague?

The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction like this:

‘Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.’

Of course, addiction is complex, personal, subjective, but I think two parts of that definition are important: compulsion – the pull of addiction, the diminishing of a free will to resist – and the harmful consequences.

We live in a constantly shifting context of addictive hooks – environments designed to draw us in, to pull our behaviour, to advertise pleasures, to flash signs and slogans and headlines and photos, to notify us of trivial but tempting updates – we live in an attention society that seeks to take possession of our minds, over and over, from all directions.

In fact, studies have shown that substance addictions – to nicotine say – and behavioural addictions to phones say – are indistinguishable in brain scans.

Cocaine addiction and gambling addictions, for example, show similar patterns in cues, cravings, dopamine release, withdrawal symptoms, and so on.

Professor of Marketing, Adam Alter, in his book Irresistible, says that there’s ‘a pattern that describes the brain of a drug addict as he injects heroin, and a second that describes the brain of a gaming addict as he fires up a new World of Warcraft quest. They turn out to be almost identical.’

So if all addictions are based on that compulsion combined with harmful consequences, how can we think about the historic change towards these new postmodern addictions?

In a 1993 Wired article on this new thing called the internet, Mitchell Kapor predicted that:

‘We could wind up with networks that have the principal effect of fostering addiction to a new generation of electronic narcotics (glitzy, interactive multimedia successors to Nintendo and MTV); their principal themes revolving around instant gratification through sex, violence, or sexual violence; their uses and content determined by mega-corporations pushing mindless consumption of things we don’t need and aren’t good for us.’

He then asks what could prevent such a fate?

Is the internet just the logical destination of our history of attempting to make pleasures ever present? We’ve built civilizations and progress on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

As psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes ‘As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance.’

We’ve evolved for scarcity and live (in much of the world) with abundance.

The industrial, modern, capitalist pursuit of pleasures-on-demand is what historian David Courtright has called Limbic Capitalism.

He says Limbic Capitalism is a technological advanced way of doing business that encourages ‘excessive compulsion and addiction’ – targeting the limbic system – our quick emotional reactions, feelings, our deepest evolutionary desires, our base impulses – sugar, money, celebrity, sex, gambling, luxury.

Throughout history, we’ve sought to institutionalise and secure these pleasures. Food, drink, shelter are the most obvious. But we’ve also sought to maximise the potency and availability of things by distilling sprits, building casinos, producing cartons of cigarettes, brothels, creating slave trades for sugar, global fast food supply chains, designing persuasive social media systems, Hollywood.

Limbic capitalists seek to supply pleasure and reap predictable profits.

In 1663, the mathematician Girolamo Cardano carefully studied many gambling games and created lists of probabilities of outcomes, wins and losses. Mathematicians made it possible for casions and lotteries to professionalise gambling and make the extraction of profits from gamblers scientific. Add booze, women, food, cigarettes etc and you have a winning hand.

Today, Big Tech giants work on the probabilities of you opening an app at a certain time of day, the best way to predict what you’ll click like on or share, sales in your inbox work on the chances of you responding to a specific percentage off.

Dopamine

It could be said that we’ve built civilizations on the pursuit of dopamine – the most important neurotransmitter in our brain – the feel good chemical, the reward molecule. Whats interesting about dopamine that it might be more important for expectation of reward than the reward itself.

Dopamine is central to addiction. The more dopamine released the more addictive the drug.

When we engage in addictive behaviours we get a burst of a dopamine, then our homeostasis system – the system that balances and regulates our body – tips the other way producing withdrawal symptoms.

The dopamine released is a reward for behaviour that we assume is good, fun, exciting, social, and so on – but usually, evolutionarily speaking, it was also rare – a treat – sugars and fats being the prime examples. (sugar in the wild)

When we have too much of these things our dopamine baseline drops to balance out. We down regulate. We get that big reward – that big hit – then our system has to recover. We experience withdrawal, dullness, boredom, temptation, and so on. We also build up a tolerance. We require more and more of the thing to get the same result. The same fix. And we spend more of our time pursuing it, resulting, in many cases, in an unbalanced life.

Now, we instinctively know this with booze, caffeine and other substances – we get hangovers and crashes. But remember, the brain scans of the heroin addict and the World of Warcraft addict look the same. Dopamine spikes, withdrawal symptoms, tolerance apply to social media as much as cigarettes, as much to sugar as phones.

Before we get back to Limbic Capitalism, one of the most fascinating findings in studies of dopamine is that its not just released as a reward, but also – and maybe even more importantly – in the expectation of a reward.

Memory is central to the release of dopamine. We remember a certain cue, a certain pattern, predict or remember a certain outcome, and get excited. We see a fast-food restaurant or a pub. I have a beer and think cigarette. Our mouth salivates at cooking food. Gamblers are as excited as the slot machine spins than from the win itself.

What we have in all of these things are cues. We get a little cue when our phones buzz – dopamine is released in expectation of what it is, more than the ‘what it is’ itself.

Cues – the expectation of reward – hooks, are central to postmodern addictions.

Under Limbic Capitalism we’re surrounded by hooks. Encountering them fires dopamine which acts as a magnet, drawing us in, down that dopaminergic tract, in the expectation of a quick reward.

Of course, all of this can function normally. Cues and rewards, when working correctly, motivate us, draw us in.

I can feel a slow stream of dopamine release when I’m out exploring – the experience of novelty, anticipation, thinking through new things in real time – all reward with dopamine release. But too much of any good thing becomes a problem when it tips us off balance – too much work, too much sugar, too much gambling, too much social media.

And under Limbic Capitalism those hooks – corporate signs, logos, headlines, notifications, games – that promise a big hit of dopamine and so draw us in like a Siren’s song are everywhere.

Here’s the biggest problem with limbic capitalism – 80% of alcohol sales go to 20% of heaviest users. The gambling industry makes 80% of profits from 20% of users. In social media use, the top 1% of users create the majority of content.

Limbic hooks appeal to the most vulnerable among us – those with psychological needs, those in poverty, kids, those with a genetic predisposition towards addiction. But they appeal to the most vulnerable among us, and the most vulnerable parts of us.

Alter says that ‘a staggering 41 percent of the population has suffered from at least one behavioral addiction over the past twelve months.’

When we’re surrounded by dopamine on tap – when we live in that age of abundance – an opoid epidemic, fried food everywhere, booze everywhere, online gambling 24/7, social connection 24/7, the promise of novelty 24/7, any film or video at any time – when we have a lack in our lives – a psychological need -it becomes easy to replace it with a crutch.

And social isolation, a lack of social support, trauma, poverty, genetics combined with ease of access and potency – engineered weed, strong alcohol, hyper-tuned online gambling, etc – are all predictors for addiction.

What we see under limbic capitalism is the design and production of sophisticated techniques to appeal to the release of dopamine.

The mathematisation of gambling, the use of new printing techniques and bold colours to grab our attention, the proliferation of signs and sounds to draw us in to apps or adverts, autoplay, algorithms to predict what you like, when you’ll like it, headlines that will fire your fight and flight, and the most powerful of all – the simple screen – in short, cues and hooks are ubiquitous. Everywhere tempting, the promise of quick rewards.

And so the key to the attention economy – a subpart of limbic capitalism – is to dangle digital drugs that are likable, clickable, repeatable, that entice, persuade, and cajole us. Just think how different your everyday landscape is to how we’ve evolved.

You probably know the story – Odysseus on his way home – gets his crew to tie him to the mast to hear the Siren song – the sweet melodious sound that draws seafarers towards the rocks – while his shipmates put wax in their ears as they navigate past. Homer’s Odyssey is a foundational story of the foundations of civilization – is it any wonder that this temptation towards sweetness and doom is such a well known part of that story.

There’s something primordial about the warning of that pull down the dopaminergic tract – original sin, maybe.

How many times do you check your email on autopilot? How many times have you seen this (2) notification and been compelled to click to see what’s new? Notifications in red to get your attention. Game designers use compelling feedback rewards – sounds, flashes, animations – that reinforce the reward of that little dopamine hit. Virtual reality will make this feedback multisensory.

In his history of attention, Tim Wu writes that the inventor of email Stephen ‘Lukasik was arguably the first to develop that little habit that consumes the attention of so many of us—the “check-in”—the impulse triggered by the intrusive thought that whatever else one is doing: “I need to check my email.”

70% of office emails read within 6 second. Accounts are checked 36 times every hour. 45% of people described this compulsive checking as a ‘loss of control.’ We’ve become addicted to ‘inbox-zero’ to running streaks on our sports watches, to Duolingo streaks, to posting once a day, to beating a high score, to catching up on that last Neflix cliff-hanger.

Once one company starts vying for our attention it sets in motion a chain of competition in which you either present your ‘hook’ or get ‘out-hooked.’

Wu writes that ‘under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent’.

The Siren tempts us away from the physical world to our phone screens.

In 1958, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World wrote that ‘the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant . . . failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Even our goals become a hook that turns into addiction. Must beat the last video views, must run a faster pace than last week, must beat that high score, must get more followers. Goals are everywhere.

Alter writes that ‘The Internet has exposed people to goals they barely knew existed, and wearable tech devices have made goal tracking effortless and automatic. Where once you had to seek out new goals, today they land, often uninvited, in your inbox and on your screen.’

Metrics, analytics, the comparing of yourself to everyone on the planet, closes the gap between performance and possibility.

Why do we become addicted to social media? There are many factors but a few universal factors stand out as interesting. First, novelty. As hunter-gatherers we’re wired to seek the new. Exploring – whether in the wild or in the digital wilderness – is addictive.

Another is that Big Tech have learned a lot from the gambling industry. Studies have shown that the maybe factor – the idea of maybe getting a win – the maybe of having a new email, a new friend request – the thrill of the chase – releases more dopamine than a win itself.

In studies, pigeons peck a button to release food more furiously when the food is released randomly instead of consistently.

The like button changed the psychology of sharing – we now gamble with the maybe factor each time we share something – a photo, an update, a video.

Social media uses what psychologists call “variable reinforcement” – rewards vary. Studies have found that variable reinforcement is the best way to train animals into obedient habits.

Casinos use so-called ‘luck ambassadors.’ When you’re near your point of giving up and leaving, when you’ve lost repeatedly, someone is dispatched to give you a free drink or a voucher. In the same way, when you haven’t logged into an app or a game for a while you’ll get a little update, a notification – a gift.

Philosopher James Williams proposes a thought experiment. How would you design a society as weak-willed as possible? It would, he says, deliver an ‘endless supply of informational rewards on demand’ – whether that’s outrage headlines or cute cat photos – and whats worrying is that those informational rewards become more and more personalised to suit your particular weaknesses.

Professor of Psychiatry David Greenfield who founded the center for internet and technology addiction says that the internet ‘amplifies the intoxicating impact of stimulating content via the efficient delivery mechanism into our nervous system.’

He describes the internet, with its variable rewards, beeps, buzzes, colours, flashes, animations and notifications as the ‘world’s largest slot machine.’

AS the slot machine gets even more sophisticated its only going to get harder to resist.

An early pioneer of the idea of behavioural addictions, the psychologist Stanton Peele said that an addiction is “an extreme, dysfunctional attachment to an experience that is acutely harmful to a person, but that is an essential part of the person’s ecology and that the person cannot relinquish.”’

The word ecology stands out to me there. Ecology, landscape, the world we find ourselves in. The internet is, of course, the new digital landscape – and the hooks and cues a new indispensable part of our lives. But does that mean we should wander through the digital landscape and give in to it?

The idea of ecology in addiction is so essential that during the Vietnam heroin epidemic, many were fearful of what would happen when veterans came home. Politicians feared a widespread heroin epidemic on domestic soil. But it didn’t happen. Many who were addicted in Vietnam didn’t bring that particular problem home with them.

The ecology – the landscape – was completely different. The same cues and hooks weren’t there anymore.

Williams has described computers as ‘wonderous machines’ that also appeal to the lowest parts of us. Like all technology, the value is neutral – its what we do with them that matters.

To combat postmodern addictions, there are two paths. We need to both better arm ourselves – educate ourselves and foster a culture of awareness – and design and create responsible landscapes that protect vulnerable people – kids, addicts, and the vulnerable parts of all of us.

Arming yourself is difficult. Many psychologists argue that abstinence alone is rarely enough. Instead we need to focus on the psychological needs that the addictions are a cover for – something that’s not fulfilled in the moment.

Psychiatrist Anne Lembke writes that ‘Many of us use high-dopamine substances and behaviors to distract ourselves from our own thoughts.’

The trick to beating an addiction is to replace it with something else, something more meaningful. To allow yourself to think about what the need is in the moment – ask honestly why the compulsion is there – escape, fun, boredom, fear, a reward. Then try to replace the addictive behaviour with a new habit that does the same job. Twitter doomscrolling is the result of needing a break and seeking novelty, go for a walk or flick through a paper instead.

AA teaches addicts to avoid the hooks cues – people, places, and things – that trigger compulsive behaviour. Remember, the expectation of reward is difficult to resist once the hook has lodged itself under your skin. If Twitter is open in a tab it’s much more difficult to resist clicking to see what the notification is than if you’re logged out. Notifications can be turned off on your phone.

But the idea that we should all just work to resist the limbic temptations that surround us is a naïve neoliberal dream. WE need to focus on that landscape of hooks and cues too – the designers of the system and our laws and regulations are all responsible for the structure of our experience.

The problem with relying on the individual to resist limbic temptations Is that, as design ethicist Tristan Harris says, will power is not enough when “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”’

And Devangi Vivrekar writes that:

‘Portraying the problem as one in which we just need to be more mindful of our interaction with apps can be likened to saying we need to be more mindful of our behavior while interacting with the artificial intelligence algorithms that beat us at chess; equally sophisticated algorithms beat us at the attention game all the time’

Billions of dollars and millions of engineers, programmers, designers, even psychologists and focus groups all spend their time working out how to attract attention, so in response, we must focus our attention on demanding effective digital landscapes that align with our goals and needs rather than appeal to the weakest parts of ourselves, pray on those with addictive tendencies, and are a danger to kids.

In one survey, half of kids said they felt addicted to their phone and three quarters felt compelled to respond to texts, posts, and notifications immediately. Self-harm posts and self-harm itself seems to be on the rise. Excessive gaming is correlated with negative mental health. Excessive social media use correlated with anxiety and depression.

Early adulthood is the highest risk age for developing addictions – if you don’t develop an addiction earlier in life you’re less likely to develop one later on.

One big reason for this is that, as Alter says ‘young adults are bombarded by a galaxy of responsibilities that they’re not equipped to handle. They learn to medicate by taking up substances or behaviors that dull the insistent sting of those persistent hardships’.

Combine this with having devices on tap that provide consistent drips of dopamine on demand and we could be on course for a generational disaster.

Ask most parents and they’ll tell you its impossible to resist the pressure for kids to have phones and social media accounts when all of their friends do. It becomes unfair on them if they’re the only ones without, and its just as harmful for kids to be ostracised. And so the duty of care must fall on schools, government, regulation, and the social media giants themselves.

There’s a quote I find interesting from the American philosopher Matthew Crawford. He says:

“The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.”

I think what we means is that, historically, we had authoritative guides about how we should act – they came from the Church, from ideas of masculinity, what acceptable decorum might be, what should or shouldn’t be allowed on television, and so on.

But those cultural, political, and social guides have largely disappeared and been replaced with the market. At their worst, those cultural jigs, as he calls them, restricted us, but at their best, they provided a landscape – an ecology – that guided us.

In replacing them with the market, we leave ourselves open to whoever can attract our attention as the highest bidder with the sweetest most addictive hook. That’s dangerous.

When it comes to traditional addictive substances – tobacco, alcohol, drugs – we intervene in their use in several ways. By limiting access, by age limit, say, or by, regulating their ingredients to make sure their safe. We do the same for casinos and gambling and for advertising for all types of addictive substances. We also have cultural and social expectations and media pressure to make sure substances are made and sold responsibly.

IN liberal societies, both are meant to be a light touch. Adults should be left to make their own decisions. But I think there is legitimate reason to regulate when addictive technologies are affecting the most vulnerable. Regulation and our expectations of platforms like social media should be designed to protect categories like children and addicts.

I think these labels, for example, are a good example of light touch regulation – although im unsure of their efficacy. Should the same sort of warnings be on social media? Should social media age limit be at least 16? Not 13? Should we expect push notifications be turned off when we install new apps by default? Autoplay turned off? There are plenty of ‘light touch’ solutions that stop short at blunt instruments like simply banning websites or getting involved in what can and cant be posted. We often think of regulation as too black and white.

In Algorithms of Fear, Wael Ghonim writes that ‘We’re not driving people to content that could help us, as a society … You can build algorithms and experiences that are designed to get the best out of people, and you can build algorithms and experiences that drive out the worst. It’s our job as civic technologists to build experiences that drive the best. We can do that. We must do that now.’

This is one of the biggest problems with giving into the race to the bottom, limbic capitalism, dangle digital sugar in front of everyone’s eyes, of neoliberalism – the cyberecology becomes full of addictive hooks that we protection against.

Recently, I keep coming back to this quote from Zygmunt Bauman: ‘”The deep contradiction of our age is the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion and the capacity to control the social settings which render such self-assertion feasible. It is from that abysmal gap that the most poisonous effluvia contaminating the lives of contemporary individuals emanate.”

To fight that poisionous effluvia we must take back control.