The Addiction Economy

The system rewards companies that keep their users highly engaged with their app and unless we dramatically change incentive/regulatory structures, there really isn’t much society can do about it beyond individual restraint and choice.

When an axis of competition is in a moral and regulatory gray area, the free market will reward those who exploit it to their advantage. Most everyone can agree that they would prefer to not be addicted to their technology, but that isn’t what wins market share.

In 2010, Paul Graham published an essay entitled “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.” In it, he proposed that as technological progress continued its inexorable march forward, it would cause product improvements in every category. For the majority of products, that means they become more addictive. Graham argues, “The world is more addictive than i... See more

I’d summarize why this is all happening with two sentences—one academic version and one human-being version. Academic: System-level optimization will generally result in individual suffering. Human: Sometimes stuff that is good for a bunch of people will be bad for the one.

As the world shifts to more digital competition, one of the most powerful long-term advantages is addiction. For businesses, this means that services that can grab and hold consumers’ attention for longer will be rewarded. For consumers, it means that we will have to be ruthless in our relationship with technology. Business best practices are not e... See more

The action items to take from this essay would therefore be threefold:

1. Go outside and touch some grass . Continue to do so until the urge to open Twitter disappears.


2. Double and triple down on your individuality: Know yourself enough to know what is special. Improve that for years and years. Ignore everything else. Over time this will result in a ve

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