The Acceleration of Addictiveness

July 2010

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is
that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.
Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the
scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures
diseases: technological progress. 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.
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