Goodbye Philip, Hello Aldous…
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley
Now in the wake of the still-receding media storm generated by the recent loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman to heroin addiction, I offer the following top-line statistics to help steer the inevitable media feeding frenzy over the next celebrity OD in a more meaningful direction…
The DEA attributes 3,038 Americans deaths in 2010 to heroin overdose, just under one half of one percent of the estimated 700,000 heroin addicts nationwide, and about 8% of the nation’s annual death toll by drug overdose (excluding alcohol).
A Google search for “Philip Seymour Hoffman + heroin” generates 67,700,000 result links.
On average, there are about 2.75 people per American household.
On average, there are about 2.93 TVs per American household.
On average, there are about 5.7 Internet-connected devices per American household.
More smartphones are sold and activated each day than there are babies born worldwide (about 300,000).
By 2015 the average American will consume 15.5 aggregate hours of electronic media consumption per day, the equivalent of 9 out of every 10 waking minutes.
That last statistic comes from a recent study by the USC Marshall School of Business, and the conclusion it leaves us with is undeniable: our addiction to all things media and all things digital dwarfs all other addictions to all other narcotics combined in all meaningful ways. If you own a smartphone in 21st-century America, the odds are overwhelming that you also own a bona fide dependency problem. Functionally, our addiction to all things media and all things digital invokes the exact same dopamine release-and-response mechanism in our brains as any other addiction to any other narcotic or addictive behavior. Functionally, our addiction to all things media and all things digital rewires our brains over time in the exact same fashion as all other addictions to all other narcotics and addictive behaviors. And like all other addictions to other narcotics, our addiction to all things media and all things digital starts out innocently enough but eventually turns against us. Eventually it turns against us to steal our time and money and freedom.
Clearly, much of Huxley’s dystopian vision is unfolding right before our eyes. The only surprise is that the operative pharmacological agents he warned against aren’t delivered in pill or other physical form. Rather, they’re delivered in bits and bytes. And we don’t call them heroin or crystal meth or crack; we call them media, and our irrefutable addiction to them has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We search for, find and ingest media everywhere we go. Our kids are hooked on media before they enter pre-school, and our lives are shaped and defined by them at every stage and in every possible way. We are, per the prescient title of media ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and we are born like crack babies into a Brave New Digital World where none us of will soon be able to find or fashion context or meaning for our lives beyond the High-Definition bits and bytes we consume virtually nonstop through all our digital devices.
Oblivious to and utterly complicit in our own patently obvious dependencies, we turn time and again to the biggest dealers on the block for advice and counsel about addiction – and everything else. And like all drug dealers, the global media and digital technology cartels – whose size and influence make the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia look like rank beginners – are more than happy to comply. They inundate us with tens of thousands of highly credentialed financial, health and lifestyle management experts across millions of channels, websites, blogs and mobile apps, 24/7. They ask and answer every possible question, then tell us to stay tuned for more. Yet somehow – despite all the experts and all their sage and indispensable advice – we are poorer, fatter, sicker and far more anxious and fearful of everything in our lives than we were a mere generation ago, before our digital media addiction assumed control of our lives as moderator over all our most important internal and external debates. Like all other late-stage addictions, our digital media addiction sits over us like a feudal lord and rules with an iron fist.
Make no mistake, all technologies and media are Faustian bargains. Each new technology and each new medium generates winners and losers, and each comes with a price tag. If we choose to look, we will see the real price tags of our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital emerging all around us. The same digital tools and media that once amassed immense wealth and produced millions of jobs now turn against us as net destroyers of jobs and the middle class. The same digital tools and media that promised to improve healthcare, bring costs down and create more transparency have produced the exact opposite: an increasingly expensive and opaque bureaucracy driven by immense corporate and government intermediaries. The same digital tools and media that were deployed after 9/11 to protect our security now steal our privacy and trust and civil liberties. True enough, freedom of consumer choice exploded as advertisers and marketers raced to fill the digital pipeline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but freedom of consumer choice is an ersatz freedom offered by a false god. Real freedom is the freedom not to choose, the freedom not to participate. And the freedom not to participate is the first freedom stolen by our addictions, regardless of the narcotic.
Once our addictions take over as moderators and arbiters of our life narratives they begin to bend our perceptions of reality to suit their own agendas – precisely what happened in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s demise when our massive addiction to all things media and all things digital did what it always does in the wake of any celebrity overdose: steer the media debate to yet another expert-driven discussion of heroin or crystal meth or cocaine or prescription drugs. The truth, however, is that addiction is not about heroin and not about crystal meth and not about cocaine and not about prescription drugs, just as it’s not about HDTV and not about laptops and not about tablets or smartphones. All of these things are mere drugs of choice, and addiction is not about drugs. Addiction is about behavior, and all addicted behaviors are pretty much the same, regardless of the narcotic. Heroin addicts behave pretty much like compulsive gamblers who behave pretty much like cocaine addicts who behave pretty much like sex addicts who behave pretty much like alcoholics who behave pretty much like food addicts who behave pretty much like meth addicts who behave pretty much like media addicts. As addicts we typically underestimate the narcotic power of our addictions just as we typically overestimate our ability to beat them. Heroin, cocaine, alcohol, food, sex or media, in the end we surrender our time and money and freedom to our addictions, regardless of the narcotic.
Addiction is an extreme state by definition, but no one can see the extreme forest for the trees when everyone is addicted to the same narcotic, as Huxley so boldly predicted in Brave New World – a society whose citizens are all addicted by state mandate to soma and sex but can’t see or fathom their own enslavement because everyone is addicted to the same narcotics. The real threat to liberty and freedom in Huxley’s imagined world and our very real world come not from the things we hate and fear but from the things we love and invite into our lives. We consume electronic media almost every waking minute of every waking day, and we think it’s normal because everyone around us is behaving the same way…but it’s not. It’s a form of mass psychosis invoked by the constant and relentless release of media-induced dopamine in all of our brains almost all of the time. And when addiction becomes the societal status quo, the rule rather than the exception, our lives and homes and businesses and communities begin to buckle under the strain. The undisclosed truth (and the dirty secret that the major media cartels won’t discuss) is that we can no longer afford to pay the spiritual, social, emotional and physical price tags for our default addiction to all things media and all things digital. Those who would Occupy Wall Street need look no further than their own iPhones and the cash reserves of Apple and Google and Yahoo and Facebook and Microsoft and Disney and Comcast and Time Warner and Verizon and AT&T and Nintendo and Electronic Arts to explain the accelerated polarization of wealth and the destruction of the middle class in 21st-century America. Follow the money and it will lead you directly from your own smartphone, tablet, laptop and HDTV to the balance sheets of the biggest digital and media dealers (and their paid proxies at all levels of government), those most enriched and empowered by our default addiction to digital media.
Meanwhile our addiction tells us in no uncertain terms that the answers to all our problems can only be found in the consumption of still more media and still more digital devices. It draws upon the institutionalized sales language and imagery of personal empowerment and freedom to enslave us further. Indeed, we love to attribute events like the Arab Spring and other popular liberation uprisings to the rise and proliferation of social media. But personal empowerment and the digital democratization of media are largely the mythic golems of digital marketers and professional spinmeisters with billion-dollar budgets. The same digital and social media tools that we love to describe as liberating forces have already been co-opted by powerful corporatist agendas with big budgets and little tolerance (beyond that expressed in their own advertising, marketing and PR) for the feel-good platitudes and slogans of media-driven and induced pop culture. No, the true bias of digital media is neither personal empowerment nor freedom. The true bias of digital media is the consolidation of power and wealth among those who already have power and wealth. The real bias of digital media benefits most those commercial and government institutions that manage and manipulate terabytes of data each and every day. Witness the fact that the financial institutions deemed too big to fail back in 2008 are – for the most part – twice the size and only half as accountable in 2014.
Like all addictions, our addiction to all things media and all things digital generates two primary byproducts: complexity and inertia. The accelerated complexity of our lifestyles since the mid-1990s is everywhere obvious and self-evident. Inertia, however, is all but invisible and far more insidious, and explains why addiction is so very tough to beat. Old habits and new addictions die hard for a reason: massive complexity begets impenetrable inertia, both institutional and personal. Together they inhibit innovation, erode the soul and suppress or kill any corresponding will to challenge the status quo — precisely why busting through the clutter these days requires either a very big budget or a very big bang. The overwhelming complexity and inertia we see at work in the government institutions and industries that manage almost every facet of our lives is very much symptomatic of our late-stage addiction to all things media and all things digital in the early 21st century. All good intentions aside, executive fiat and media-borne demagoguery become the tools of choice to rally popular sentiment and compel cosmetic change that looks and sounds good on the surface by design but can’t and won’t actually challenge the status quo. Personal freedoms and civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency and profit, and Fascism — the religion of the state — is typically not very far behind…
In the end – per Huxley’s vision – we are likely undone less by the things we fear or despise and more by the things we love. Yet the answers we seek will not be found in more media or more powerful smartphones, contrary to the self-serving pundits of all stripes who claim otherwise. In this great age of addicted excess the answers we seek cannot be found in more of anything except wisdom and common sense, perhaps because the quality of life in 21st-century America is no longer a function of more. Wisdom and common sense suggest that the quality of life in 21st-century America is a function of subtraction and moderation, neither of which are found anywhere in the DNA of our popular culture, and certainly not in our default addiction to digital media. And there’s the rub: No one ever got rich by selling less – especially less media or less digital technology.
As a nation we can no longer afford to wait for solutions from corporate and government masters with no incentive whatsoever to change the status quo. Skepticism is our first obligation to ourselves and our children, and we must stop looking to the biggest dealers for answers to our own addictions. So in the spirit of freedom and independence, I offer the following common-sense suggestions to help improve the quality of your life right away:
Designate your dining room and bedroom as smartphone-free zones.
Never split your attention between two or more screens. Limit your digital media interaction to one screen at a time. Contrary to popular folklore, we’re simply not equipped to multitask – at least not very well.
Never desecrate the sanctity of your church, synagogue or mosque with your smartphone. Leave it at home. Meaningful ritual is the sworn enemy of all addiction.
Never desecrate the sanctity of nature with your smartphone, tablet or laptop. Leave them at home or in the hotel. If you need to take photos, take a real camera.
Always wait at least one hour before you check your email in the morning. Doing so will help you start the day on your own terms instead of reacting to the agendas of everyone whose email just happens to be in your inbox.
Use your break time at work to go someplace quiet – away from all digital distractions – to think quiet thoughts or talk with a good friend or read a book, and leave your smartphone at your desk when you step out to lunch.
Don’t expect your kids to moderate their digital media use if you won’t moderate yours. They don’t care what you say. They only care what you do, and their addictions are reinforced by yours.
Perhaps the revolution referenced by Aldous Huxley in the opening quote to this piece speaks less to the inevitable consolidation and victory of corporatist power over individual will and liberty and more to the fulfillment of our chemical destiny as a species wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain at a time in our technological evolution when the supply of affordable narcotics is suddenly universal and utterly relentless. Maybe Darwin had it right, only backwards: Instead of evolving from apes, maybe we’re evolving into apes. Maybe with a little luck we’ll all wind up high atop the jungle canopy with a great view and a fruit platter.
I conclude with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses From the Rock:
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Goodbye Philip. Hello Aldous…
