Futurismic

Finally, the spurious demon of  internet addiction gets its own Betty Ford clinic – complete with a scarily large price-tag. Ars Technica reports on the reSTART program that has just been launched by the Heavensfield Retreat Center in Washington State; enrolment for qualifying internet addicts has just begun, so block-book your 45-day break immediately! I guess you’ll not want to mark it in Google Calendar, though… [image by James Cridland]

Heavensfield certainly makes it sound like a professional and fully featured program, though:

reSTART offers counseling with professionally-trained staff, group therapy, vocational coaching, 12-step meetings, recreational activities, “high adventure” outings, health and fitness programs, and volunteer service. This is in addition to psychiatric assessments, medical treatment, scholastic tutoring, and career guidance. As pointed out by Mashable, you must qualify for reSTART by displaying symptoms of IAD, which include a strong impulse to use the Internet, withdrawal symptoms without it, a reduction in other interests or social activities as a result of the Internet, and an impairment of everyday life.

Hmm; that all sounds rather like someone I know… but then doesn’t pretty much anyone who isn’t a teetotaller come out looking like an alcoholic on the Alcoholics Anonymous tests?

That said, much as I’m skeptical about a high-dollar treatment program designed to cure it, I’m pretty sure there is an addictive component to the internet – my recent weeks without it were pure hell, though that was as much to do with being unable to work for my clients (and hence pay my rent) as anything else. Whether the addiction is a basic physiological response or a reflection of how swiftly and completely our social culture has migrated onto the intertubes remains a topic for debate, I think.

Here’s an optimistic vision of the future, from the last page of The End of Overeating by former US Food & Drug Administration commissioner David A. Kessler, MD (available here and elsewhere; reviewed here; author interview by Stephen Colbert here.)

A change in perspective cannot be imposed with mandates, but must evolve as a social consensus. The goal is not to vilify all food and those who serve it, but to change our thinking about big food, those huge portions of layered and loaded food with little nutritional value. We need to look differently at the people and the places that serve it. When their power to manipulate our behavior becomes fully transparent, cues will lose their capacity to entice. Instead of expecting food to be served at every social and business occasion, we’ll realize that many offers of food outside mealtimes do not serve anyone’s interest.

In the future, new social norms and values will emerge, and food choices, offered in smaller portion sizes, will seem ‘right’ to us. That will be what we come to expect, and that will be what we want.

So, yes, as research for my optimstic sf story, I broke down, bought, and read this book, which is short, readable, and provocative.

Kessler’s thesis is that since the 80s, millions of Americans have been on a binge of conditioned hypereating, brought about by a food industry that knows how to get people to keep chowing down even when they’ve eaten more than enough. They do it with marketing, focus grouping, advertising, and even such childishly simple methods as making food easier to chew and swallow.

Kessler cites enough neuroscience data from human and animal experiments to put together a working hypothesis of marketing-driven food addiction. Among other things, the industry excels at creating tastes, textures, situations, and associations that rewire the brain to want more and more of certain kinds of foods. For example,

…[A]n animal that eats a combination of sucrose, chocolate, and alcohol releases the greatest levels of dopamine [a brain chemical associated with "attentional bias."].

Not surprisingly, these foods have layers of sugar, salt, and fats — often in repeating geological layers. It’s akin to the tobacco industry’s striving to make cigarettes even more addictive. The food merchants seem to accomplish their goals more by trial and error than through pure research, but the result is plain for all to see: A serious obesity problem with, at the very least, a larger health care bill attached.

People need to take responsibility, and Kessler lays out some steps that will probably spawn a lot of self-help books (some of us can use the help). He simply asks that people watch how they feel when exposed to food or come-ons to the same, and alter their behavior accordingly. And maybe do what the French, he says, do, or at least used to do: Take your time at the table, and don’t eat between meals. Old-fashioned, and easier said than done.

He has policy suggestions, too. Some of them ought to be adopted for the sheer entertainment value of the outrage and resistance they’re likely to provoke.

• Restaurants should list calorie counts, “by mandate, if they’re not willing to do so voluntarily.
• Food package labels should contain percentages of added sugars, refined carbs, and fats.
• Public education should focus a jaundiced eye on “big food.”
• And my personal favorite: Marketing should be monitored and exposed.

Our greatest gift to future generations … would be to find a way to prevent the cue-urge-reward-habit cycle from ever taking hold.

There’s optimism for you. And there’s got to be some way to turn this into a story.

[I Can Haz Cheezburger?, due to sheer lack of willpower]

Imagine, if you will, what it might be like to have a kind of switch wired into yourself that triggered tiny electrical shocks in your orbitofrontal cortex, giving you what would effectively be an “orgasm button”. Well, this isn’t science fiction any more. [image by bbaunach]

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky takes a look at the history of pleasure-centre brain-tweaking, and considers the implications of the technology becoming affordable and readily available:

So, should these devices be banned?

Yes and no.

Like the current prohibition on both soft and hard drugs, there’s a certain efficacy to a patriarchal imperative that works to protect citizens from themselves. Sex chip junkies wouldn’t be unlike other kinds of junkies. Highly addicted and dysfunctional persons would find themselves outside the social contract and completely dependent on the state.

But what about the pursuit of happiness and other freedoms? And our cognitive liberties? A strong case can be made that we all have a vested interest in the quality of our own minds and the nature of our subjective experiences. Ensuring access to these sorts of technologies may prove to be a very important part of struggle for psychological autonomy.

Is the best society the one that protects its citizens from all potential pitfalls, or the one that educates them as best it can and lets them take care of themselves?

The headline says it all, though the recanting of video game addiction specialist Keith Bakker comes with qualifiers:

“…the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.”
…
“This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”

It’s easy (and very tempting) to fall back on sarcasm here, but let’s just be thankful he’s learned something and will now stop putting loner kids through some sort of twelve-step program.

Incidentally, Bakker’s findings concur with those of the National Institute of Media and the Family, which for the first year ever has used its annual MEDIAwise ‘video games score-card’ to praise the gaming industry rather than excoriate it. Times are a-changin’. [image by William Hook]