The Increasing Rate of Addiction

“We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to,” says Paul Graham. The essayist writes that technological development creates addictive products from drugs to the Internet. “Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.”