Where are the products?
Mid-addiction, Midjourney
In 2010, Paul Graham wrote an essay about the internet called The Acceleration of Addictiveness. These 14 years later, it holds up. (In 2010, I was still taking SuperPump, a "pre-workout" supplement containing 250 mg of caffeine and a potpourri of other stimulants, at 5pm and wondering why I couldn't sleep.)
Graham's thesis is that the acceleration of technological progress has effected an increase in the levels of addictiveness in the world. More things that we like will become things we like too much. In the temporary(?) absence of societal antidotes, Graham opines that individuals should develop personal strategies to reduce exposure to the addictive elements of modern society.
In short, in his words:
"You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
In short, in my words, only the eccentric survive.
In medium, the majority of society is f*cked. Their fate is an addiction to cheap mental baubles that will prevent them from feeling, thinking, and producing to their potential. Those of us who read Hacker News (also a Paul Graham creation), maybe we have a shot at escaping the numb psychosis that is (in 2024) the norm, but only if we cultivate a personal vigilance against the technological development of ever more pleasurable, addicting, socially-acceptable drugs. There will be winners, but as a portion of society, they will be few (and they will not let their children use the technologies they have wrought).
Coming as it does from one of the leading framers of the modern pseudo-intellectual discourse about technology, society, and the internet, I find this unsatisfactory.
For the conclusion to be that the educated among us should just work on getting weirder, and for Graham to concede that most won't be able to do it — it's too narrow a perspective, too white a flag, and too Disney a prescription: the strength was inside of you the whole time.
To be candid, I'd like to believe that I have the strength. It mostly fits with my American worldview that I can shape my own life and my own mind to my own design. But as I have yet to arrest or even slow my gradual internet stupefaction, I’m not so sure.
Even Disney heroines needed a little help, right?
I am one person with one brain. It's not a bad one, as brains go, but it is one, and in the struggle against "normal" addiction, it (my brain) is lonely.
Every day, I pit it against the brains of thousands of our best and brightest, experts in human psychology and behavior, professional minimizers of friction and maximizers of delight. Every day, I lose.
Of course I do. The only way to win is to refuse to play (by biking to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and casting my iPhone over the side down hundreds of feet onto the deck of a Pacific-bound container ship passing below, thereby returning the phone to whence it came). I haven't seen my way clear to full opt-out, because it would also entail opting out of a lot of modern life. Also I wouldn't be able to get home, because I need Google Maps to get anywhere outside a 5 minute walking radius of my home.
I've tried, you guys. I've read the books (about the nature of attention, about behavioral economics, about friction, about the business models), I've built a meditation habit, I've banned phones from the bedroom, my screen is in black and white, no more podcasts in the shower, no phone first thing in the morning…
For all that effort, and for all the ways in which I am a little eccentric (and a little exasperating), my relationship to the internet is quite ordinary: just garden-variety addicted.
My disgust at my stalled progress to un-addict myself is aimed most at... myself. Because I am the captain. The fault is in my stars. Personal responsibility, internal locus of control, the power of the individual over circumstance — my instincts are not unlike PG's: the fight is mine to win.
This perspective is very American.
If there is a Mecca for adherents of the Church of Personal Responsibility, it is America. (Paul Graham is actually not American, but he spent much of his early professional life in the United States, and converts are often the most zealous.)
The primacy and power of the individual is everywhere in marketing material for the land of the free. In America, you don't owe anyone anything. If you want something, you either make it or you take it. If you haven't succeeded, if you haven't awakened to the American Dream, you've no one to blame but yourself, per the marketing material.
But insisting on the individual as the unit of analysis to the exclusion of all others is willfully obtuse. It zooms in too far. It says: in the case of your economic betterment or lack thereof, or in the case of your mental betterment or lack thereof, just work harder or be more grateful or become more eccentric. Can it be that simple? It cannot.
If you ever take an improv class, which you might do if you want to cringe harder than you've ever cringed but learn that sometimes the understanding you seek is on the other side of a hilariously awkward misunderstanding, one of the principles you'll learn in the first week is "Yes, and." It means 1) accept what your improv partners have given you ("yes") 2) develop it ("and").
It is necessary for the individual to be willing. It is also insufficient.
So, yes to the American ethos of personal responsibility.
And, "Where are the products to help us?"
There are so many products. It’s a marvel, some would say a miracle, how many products we can choose from. A search for “back scratcher” on internet retailer Amazon.com yields thousands of results. Thousands! Including this one where this guy is just staring deep into my soul from behind a wooden back scratcher:
I mean… Damn.
But I digress.
When you’re thinking about starting a company, the general guidance is to find a problem, ideally a problem that people would pay to be rid of, ideally a big one, and solve it with the product you create.
In 2010 (at the latest), Paul Graham and other smart technologists recognized a big problem: that most people were becoming addicted to the internet. Not like, “Haha I’m addicted to green M&Ms,” but like, really addicted as in reducing critical capacity in the addict and presenting itself as relief from the problems it causes. (1)
If we’ve known about this problem for awhile, if we live in a system that enthusiastically produces products to solve our every problem, where are they?
Where are the products to help us claw back even some of our agency and attention, or Paul Graham terms, become more eccentric?
Well, what does it take for a product to come into existence? Here are the three conditions (that I just came up with off the top of my head, but that I will nonetheless stand behind forever):
Identification of an unmet need / a problem to be solved
A market of people who will pay for said problem to be solved
Technical feasibility
I hope I’ve established that Condition #1 is satisfied. Writing in 2010, Paul Graham had identified the problem of accelerating internet addiction and believed the solution would be personal discipline, and not, by implication, technology to help modulate and mediate. Writing in 2024, and acknowledging that critiquing a 14-year-old essay about technology is a bit unfair, I disagree.
Condition #2 seems self-evident. Think about how many people, across generations, bemoan the state of their attention spans. Think about the popularity of focus and productivity gurus like Cal Newport or Ali Abdaal or the recently-outed-as-a-player Andrew Huberman. Think about all the business-type people who wish they could be sharper and more creative. Think about how many of those business-type people wish their employees were more focused. I think there’s a market.
Condition #3 is met. YouTube knows me better than I know myself. Apple knows when I go to sleep, who I’m sleeping with, when I wake up, my exact content preferences, roughly how much money I have. You think they couldn’t help me marshal my attention more effectively? I promise they could, if they wanted. You’ll notice they haven’t. That’s because they do not want to.
The companies best positioned to build an “attention management” product won’t do it, because it would cannibalize their core businesses. That is, the companies with the data and capabilities to build a product that would allow more of us to have a healthier relationship with the internet won’t do it, because they enjoy huge profits thanks to our dysfunctional relationship with the internet. And though proactively positioning your company as the company that cares about your customer’s brains would probably be a good long-term play, public companies aren’t well incentivized to practice long-term thinking, especially when that long-term thinking will come at the cost of shorter term performance.
Even Apple, the greatest product company of our age, of Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone fame, even Apple is an advertising company now. The other day, I bought a literal apple, from the grocery store, and there was a sticker on the apple advertising a Disney movie. This business model, pioneered by London penny newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 1855 when it started taking a loss on each paper sold and thereby massively expanded its readership, thereby increasing its ad revenue by much more than the foregone per-paper revenue — this is a fantastic business model on and off the internet: if you amass a large enough audience, selling Apples or selling apples, you should sell their attention. It’s super high margin, and in the case of both Apple and apples, it can exist alongside your core business of selling actual products.
So, Apple, the company best positioned to create the FitBit for our minds to nudge us toward better attentional and mental health, won’t do it, because reducing screen time is bad for business. And non-frazzled people of sound mind make fewer impulse purchases, furthering shrinking the advertising pie. Bad for business all around.
A boring dystopia, indeed.
In our system, every proposed change eventually has to be justified by, “You can actually make more money doing it this way!” For example, the refrain by proponents of diversity in workplaces is, “Studies show that diverse teams perform better and companies with diverse teams make more money.” It’s a foregone conclusion that doing something because it’s good for society is not a good enough reason to do it. But turning down more money? Well, that’s downright un-American.
I’ll take that tact here in the conclusion. We can make some money with attention management. Here’s the plan:
Obviously if we can’t join the navy, we’ll have to be pirates. We’ll start with the actual best business model ever, B2B SaaS. We’ll tell companies how their workers are going to be more fulfilled and productive and grateful. For our earliest users, we’ll have them upload their data exported from the big platforms, and then learn their individual patterns using AI. The product will be like Apple Health, if Apple actually cared about your health — gamified attention tracking, positive reinforcement of good attentional practices, gentle nudges back on track when users wobble — mostly, users will feel like they’re making progress. We’ll launch a PR campaign to put pressure on Apple to improve and open up their Screentime API framework to developers so that users can benefit from the huge amount of data Apple collects. You’ll make me a “Founding Advisor” for LinkedIn clout, give me 5% of the company, and I’ll write one spicy blog post a month for the cause.
Paul Graham closed The Acceleration of Addictiveness thusly:
…if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.
I need help saying no, and I think others do too. Many of my friends and colleagues, even some of my enemies, would say that I'm eccentric. As any measure of my attention span would attest, it's not enough. Not nearly.
You might say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.
And I can’t help but feel that there’s gold in them there hills.
Notes
(1) Inspired by the definition of malignant addiction in David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which I read in his essay collection called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. I’d recommend.