My Broyher's Peculiar chicken
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
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. Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. "Good" and "bad" technological progresses aren’t sharply differentiated, so you 'd find you couldn 't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs" show, bans often do more harm than good. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. As far as I know there 's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it 's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can
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. Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. "Good" and "bad" technological progresses aren’t sharply differentiated, so you 'd find you couldn 't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs" show, bans often do more harm than good. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. As far as I know there 's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it 's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can