Addiction is not new, it has been with us since we learned about fermentation. Of course, along with the great advances of medicine we have learned to create chemicals with much more addictive potential than alcohol. Advertisers taking advantage of that potential and selling these addictive products as widely as possible is also not new, running from Greek festival depictions of Bacchus thru modern OxyContin multilevel marketing schemes..
What is new is the concerted efforts of trillion dollar corporations to create addiction to the media itself.
As damaging as physical addiction is to addicts and those around them, the behavioral research that goes into the surveillance capitalism efforts to create addiction to outrage in their pursuit of profit from our attention is subverting the communication fabric of society itself.. There is no coincidence in the rise of the addiction to social media and the rise of the various flavors of populist authoritarian regimes and coup attempts in the world..
This kind of addiction, together with a truly unprecedented rise in the power of of artificial intelligence, with technology like chatGPT, will likely make all the physical addictions pale in comparison – sooner rather than later.
Addiction is not new, it has been with us since we learned about fermentation. Of course, along with the great advances of medicine we have learned to create chemicals with much more addictive potential than alcohol. Advertisers taking advantage of that potential and selling these addictive products as widely as possible is also not new, running from Greek festival depictions of Bacchus thru modern OxyContin multilevel marketing schemes..
What is new is the concerted efforts of trillion dollar corporations to create addiction to the media itself.
As damaging as physical addiction is to addicts and those around them, the behavioral research that goes into the surveillance capitalism efforts to create addiction to outrage in their pursuit of profit from our attention is subverting the communication fabric of society itself.. There is no coincidence in the rise of the addiction to social media and the rise of the various flavors of populist authoritarian regimes and coup attempts in the world..
This kind of addiction, together with a truly unprecedented rise in the power of of artificial intelligence, with technology like chatGPT, will likely make all the physical addictions pale in comparison – sooner rather than later.