What is Technology Addiction?

 

People enjoying the fantastic view atop Whiteface Mountain in New York

What exactly is technology addiction? Why is it not recognized for what it is? Being that anyone reading this is likewise addicted to technology, what's the point of bringing it up here? Before getting started on the details, let me present one qualifier. I am not saying that technology use is 100% bad. That's a judgment call, which is subjective. Hopefully, the facts below will alter the way you see technology and its use and you will be able to make your own decisions and opinions. Just as an aside, technology addiction in the sense that this article lays out is not about a gaming addiction or an addiction to smartphone usage; those are subsets to the main subject of technology addiction.

I have pointed out many times that our behavior of technology use is precisely what has caused ecological overshoot, and it began over a million years ago when our ancestors learned how to control fire, which allowed many things to occur, such as burning land and cooking food, and later, to smelt metals. Who at that time could have foreseen fire being used to propel machinery or generate electricity or build modern technology such as cars and computers? Technology use harnesses far more energy and resources than we could ever manage without it, and as such, it reduces our labor at the same time it helps produce surplus materials such as crops and raw materials to manufacture goods of one sort or another. It necessarily reduces or removes negative feedbacks which once held our species' numbers in check, which produces the self-reinforcing positive feedback loop of population growth. Population growth then fuels more technology use through more people using it and those people innovating more clever devices we can use for making life easier or more productive in one way or another. 

Because technology use provides our water, our food, our transportation networks, our electricity, our warmed or cooled homes, our clothing, and pretty much every other item that we need as part of our living arrangements, there is now almost no chance someone living in a city or suburb has any kind of idea what living without technology use would look like. Everyone I know, including people who live "off-grid," still use technology to obtain all their needs - from fire and agriculture to water pumps and manufactured goods.  

Most people don't see our use of technology as an addiction, and yet, can you live without it? Even though one could potentially survive without it, provided that he or she understood how to do so, how long could you go without using technology? If you are truly being honest with yourself, not very long at all. Our clothing is technology. How would you find clean, potable water without it? How about food? Cooking is using technology of one sort or another, so you wouldn't be able to cook. See? You wouldn't make it more than a few hours, if that, without it. So, yes, we are all addicted to it.  

Check out this post from Martyn Stewart regarding addiction, quote:

THE COST OF CRAVING

By Martyn Stewart

"Addiction has many faces.

Some whisper, some roar, and some slide into your life dressed as necessity.

I know this because I’ve lived alongside it for as long as I can remember. My pain management requires opioids—three times a day. Miss a dose, even by an hour, and the world begins to fracture: flashes in my eyes, waves of unease rolling through my bones. I don’t take them to escape—I take them to function. Yet even that, the “medical” addiction, reminds me how fragile the line is between control and collapse.

When I was younger, cigarettes were my constant companion. I quit at 27, proud of myself, but the truth is the craving never completely leaves. It lurks somewhere deep, like a ghost tapping on a window. You ignore it, but it never really goes away.

Then there’s alcohol—how many people have I watched disappear into that bottle? I’ve seen it swallow futures whole.

But none of it hit me as hard as watching my own daughter spiral.

She was over-prescribed opioids after a car crash and surgery—legal pills, handed out as if they were harmless. They rewired her. Her personality changed. Her spirit dimmed. I honestly thought I’d lost her forever, as if the daughter I knew was drifting further and further into a fog I couldn’t reach. And then—somehow—she fought her way back. Nine years clean. Nine years of rebuilding a life that almost slipped away because someone signed a prescription.

But there’s another addiction—one far more widespread, far more insidious.

It doesn’t live in bottles or syringes.

It lives in bank vaults, boardrooms, and polished shoes.

Money.

It consumes people faster than any substance I’ve ever encountered.

Because from money grows greed, and from greed grows justification.

If something makes profit—even if it destroys forests, oceans, wildlife, people—someone will exploit it without a flicker of hesitation. It’s the quietest addiction, yet the most catastrophic. Cigarettes harm the smoker. Opioids harm the dependent. But greed? Greed harms the world.

We celebrate billionaires as if the number in their account reflects the size of their contribution. But most use wealth not to heal, not to protect, not to lift—

but to multiply itself.

One million dollars used to mean something. Now it’s a rounding error for those who hoard more wealth than entire countries. And what do they do with it? Build bigger empires. Buy influence. Shape laws. Tighten their grip.

Power is a drug too.

A potent one.

Once people taste it, they’ll sacrifice almost anything to hold on to it—truth, morality, humanity, the planet beneath their feet.

There’s no rehab for greed, no detox for domination.

And yet the consequences are everywhere: burning rainforests, rising oceans, poisoned skies, disappearing species, divided nations.

Sometimes I ask myself:

How many people with vast fortunes use their wealth for the good of the planet?

Not someday. Not after profit. But now—because we’re running out of “later.”

Addiction destroys lives.

Greed destroys worlds.

And of all the poisons humans have created, that may be the hardest one to cure."

Once one truly understands comprehensively the predicaments we face caused by our behavior of technology use, one realizes that there is no escape. The ideas I have brought forth in my articles about Fantasies, Myths, and Fairytales (among all other forms of hopium) are exactly that - fantasies. They will never "solve" or even slightly mitigate what we have done because we are still in the process of making it worse and have still not matured to the point where society realizes that our way of life is completely wrong because it is utterly unsustainable.

I've known for quite some time that the predicaments we face have an ugly outcome, but this video regarding the development of AI demonstrates that even the worst nightmares I have envisioned (prior to AI) will pale in comparison to what AI will now bring to the forefront. See also this synopsis. One can see the wetiko described in the video, and this is part and parcel of our intertwined relationship with technology use.

I have written fairly extensively about technology addiction in different ways, and here are eight different articles covering some of the articles that include it here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

I need to remind everyone that I don't post this material to scare anyone, although let's be honest and admit that this IS scary! (I also don't post this material to "mansplain" any of the subjects I write about. If someone feels they need to accuse me of that, then there probably is no hope whatsoever that they have the intelligence to understand anything I might try to explain in the first place.) I post it to bring awareness to the facts of just how far into extreme overshoot we are and how we are just about to tilt everything off the scales. For instance, take this article about the latest developments regarding extinct species for 2025. I've been pointing out the facts behind extinction for quite some time (more than a decade now) and yet I still get naysayers who claim that "the future isn't written yet." I actually agree with that statement, but just show me where there are any measurable signs that anything is improving rather than worsening. The trajectory is clear and it isn't wavering much. Check out this article regarding a toxic algal bloom. Are there any signs that folks have had enough of our continued and increasing use of technology?

As if that isn't dark enough, how about growing your food by spreading PFAS as a pesticide (weren't we already doing enough damage with Teflon [PTFE]?)? Or how about eating PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene) to lose weight? What could possibly go wrong?

Geoffrey Deihl illustrates how technology addiction has brought us to the point of killing off people who defend the places they call home and having that home be inhabitable in this revealing article. This, of course, is inspired by the wetiko mindset as mentioned above. In a separate article, he explains similar material to my article about pollution loading; more specifically targeting nano- and microplastics.

A new book is available detailing the sounds of nature titled, The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause and he talks about it here, quote:

"It is a peculiar irony that, as the world’s technological reach extends ever deeper into the Earth’s composition, the primal sonic expressions of the natural world—those intricate soundscapes born of wind, water, leaf, and creature—have never been more imperiled. My field, soundscape ecology, is a discipline predicated on the conviction that the collective voices of the non-human world are not only eloquent but essential. These biophonies, faithfully recorded and archived, spawn abiding ledgers that reveal the environmental health of our planet, a record as valuable as any genetic database or satellite image. In my own career, spanning over half a century and encompassing more than 5000 hours of carefully harvested marine and terrestrial recordings, I have closely observed with some degree of dread, the subtle symphony of life and its alarming decline."

The book can be accessed and you can listen to the sounds here.

Not that anybody needs more convincing (because by now if someone doesn't know about the mass extinction we're in, that someone is either braindead or living in a cave deep underground), but this video is now 3 years old. Has anything really changed? Nope. The same trajectory is still worsening.

A new post on un-Denial by Hideaway demonstrates precisely the predicament we're in and how we lack agency to be able to do much about it. Different ideas are expressed as to how to extend better outcomes but the requirement of everyone understanding what, why, and how in order to cooperate cannot be achieved - this part is highlighted in the comments below the main article in this snippet from Hideaway on December 3 at 4:03 PM:

"It’s not that simple, which is why I have often stated it requires a large book or series of books to fully explain the totality of our situation and why the general public will never grasp all of cactus..."

I agree with that statement, as it requires a broad "large picture" comprehension of overshoot and the hyperobjects that form the systems affected by it in order to appreciate how everything fits together. This requires years of work to accomplish the experience necessary to navigate these concepts. Few people in larger society will be interested in the discipline required to learn these topics except for those specifically interested in them. This goes back to an article I wrote two years ago, quote:

"Over two years ago I asked myself why I was still writing these articles. Yet here I am still writing them. At the time, part of that question hinged on an article I read in Tom Murphy's blog that led me to realize the same attributes to my blog and that few people might find my blog interesting enough to pay much attention to, especially given the sheer amount of information today competing for said attention. Needless to say, I realized that few of my articles would actually get much attention and yet I'm still finding pleasure in writing them. Perhaps this is because I still have so many questions about the topics I write about. I keep getting more of them answered on a fairly routine basis by writing these articles, so there is a double benefit there as well." 

Many people have lots of romantic notions about how our species could possibly "unwind" the predicaments we face, but therein lay the trouble. Romantic notions don't equal actual actions that are both feasible and actually have half a chance of being followed through to completion. Wishful or magical thinking just doesn't cut the mustard. This comment from Jack Alpert recently came up in my 
Substack on one of my articles. I've known Jack for a long time and have used some of his videos in my earlier articles. His idea is a proposed "solution" to lead society through a population bottleneck. It is rather complex and unfortunately requires a fairly substantial amount of time to accomplish. Of course, we don't really have that kind of time to avert the coming disaster of collapse and die-off and the proposal has some serious blind spots. This was my response:

"I appreciate the offer, Jack. Unfortunately, there is no human-built or human-engineered civilization that is fit for the task you are proposing. Human-built infrastructure is unsustainable because it relies on technology use for every single part of its lifecycle from designing it to decommissioning and disposal/recycling.

This is pure anthropocentrism and actually the very cause of the predicament you are attempting to solve. What I have attempted to highlight in my articles is our ignorance, our hubris, and our stupidity in consistently coming up with all these "solutions" never realizing that predicaments cannot be solved. Your ideas are reductionistic which preclude a holistic manner of working that only nature can provide. Therein lay the fault of logic here.

Sure, there are ideas that MIGHT mitigate the circumstances we find our selves in, but these are rational ideas. Our species, however, is NOT rational. We are a RATIONALIZING species. We also lack free will, rendering most of your ideas unworkable at best. Even autocratic ways of attempting to deal with these issues won't work because people will always find a loophole or simply refuse to cooperate.

While I appreciate your continued attempts to find ways to mitigate these predicaments we face, the overwhelming trouble is that you appear to be forgetting WHO and WHAT we are as a species. The reason we are at this point in time is precisely because of that - we are very clever innovators - but that same strength is also our greatest weakness. We appear unable to see that predicaments don't have solutions and so we continue attempting ridiculous ideas that never had any capacity to deal with complex issues in a holistic manner in the first place.

A prime example is the technology of antibiotics. Antibiotics have been truly revolutionary in their ability to help us fight disease. But microbes evolve, and they have now evolved loopholes around these antibiotics and many are now resistant to many of them. As a result, there are now infections with no effective cure which can easily kill a person. Just like all technologies, they also reduced and/or removed negative feedbacks which once held our numbers in balance with the surrounding landbase. This technology use created the self-reinforcing positive feedback of population growth. Population growth led to more technology use and more population growth, and the vicious cycle was begun.

We forget that we are only animals on this planet just like all the other animals; we are not nature and have no capacity to control nature like many people often think we can. Every attempt we have made to command and control nature has wound up with us simply making a bigger mess than what existed to begin with. This is the nature of our innovating spirit (or what many call our ingenuity). The unfortunate side effect is that our ingenuity is what has landed us in this set of predicaments. It promulgates our behaviors and provides the delusions and illusions we get ourselves wrapped up in. In reality, collectively we are no smarter or wiser than yeast in a vat of sugar water.

It is our illusion of control and illusion of self and separation that allow for the delusion of any ability to extract ourselves from the predicament we got ourselves into. The one simple fact about all of this is fundamental - our behavior of technology use is what got us into this mess and it cannot solve or mitigate the circumstances using it has caused, despite our false beliefs to the contrary. This means that any attempt to extend civilization is nothing more than pure bargaining - a refusal to accept the reality that civilization is utterly and irredeemably unsustainable. Nothing will change that simple fact because of what civilization is and who and what we are as a species - we are unable to change our behavior on a species level, which would be required to maintain equilibrium with the environment we live within.

As long as you continue denying this reality and/or attempting to bargain with it, you, like millions of others who have refused acceptance, will continue to fail. I understand completely what you want to accomplish, but doing so takes us in the wrong direction. What you want cannot be accomplished. It's somewhat humorous and ironic that you can see how so many other people cannot be convinced of the predicaments we face and yet you cannot see this same scenario in yourself. I do think of it as the idiosyncrasy of the human predicament.

What we need Jack, are more people who understand the facts as I just laid out, not more marketers selling snake oil."

While the idea is anthropocentric in the extreme, many people think of anthropcentrism as a recent phenomenon, when in reality it goes back to ancient times, long before civilization developed, as Elisabeth Robson shows in this article. Jack is just one of many, many people who find acceptance of who and what our species is simply too difficult to accept. Some people accept the reality but continue to attempt developing ideas anyway. Perhaps Jack is in that camp. I'm one of a very few individuals who has chosen to accept the outcome of the overwhelming predicament we face and yet still make these posts and continue to preach reducing technology use. Yet, at the same time, I think very strongly that this was supposed to be the outcome all along. Let us be grateful for what has transpired and what we still have left.

In that vein of thought, I have posted media from Stephen Jenkinson here before and this short video explains the meaning of death and how it is required for life. This article I wrote quite some time back goes into further detail. Likewise, this poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also deals with death:

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The traveller hastens toward the town,

      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;

The little waves, with their soft, white hands,

Efface the footprints in the sands,

      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls

Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;

The day returns, but nevermore

Returns the traveller to the shore,

      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

For some reason, my mind thought of this song by Belinda Carlisle. Interestingly enough, Carlisle has another song from the same album titled, "Heaven Is A Place On Earth," which just happens to be the title of this article from Mike Brock that explains something very powerful:

"In that recognition, you finally see why love and tragedy are not two separate forces, but the dimension in which meaningful choices are made.

That’s why love and tragedy are fused.

That’s why the tragic dimension isn’t bleak — it’s sacred.

Because a being who cannot fall cannot choose.

A being who cannot be wounded cannot give themselves.

A being who cannot lose paradise cannot understand devotion.

This is why utopia is always the false promise of the devil.

And why evil wants to live forever: because evil is terrified of meaning.

Meaning requires loss.

Loss requires finitude.

And finitude demands sacrifice — which evil refuses to give.

That’s why evil always ends up alone."

The bottom line here is that now one can understand why experiencing loss is a natural part of life, one that helps develop more advanced and mature recognition of the fact that both individuals and species die out and there is nothing unusual about this in a mass extinction. It feels strange only because our cultural conditioning has caused us to think that we are the pinnacle of intelligence and there "should" be nothing we can't do. But neither of those statements are necessarily true; we do have limits, and there are other species which might actually be as intelligent, if not moreso, than us. There are lessons our species still needs to learn, and I think that we will be taught these things as time moves forward as part of these predicaments we face. Who knows exactly what we will learn as a result? 

Because I decided to publish this much earlier than I originally planned, I don't have any additional picture sets on Treasured Traditions for this article. But each week still has a new set of pictures as scheduled, so you'll see yet another new set this coming Wednesday!