Bruce K. Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit (2008)

This is a remarkable book - quietly, and often persuasively, radical. I was alerted to it by David Courtwright, in Age of Addiction. Alexander makes three main claims: 1) what he calls "psychosocial integration" - basically, people's embeddedness in community - is necessary for human well-being; 2) in modern times, the spread of the free market ineluctably destroys communities, thereby "dislocating" individuals; 3) addictions - which Alexander defines as negative "overwhelming involvements" - are an adaptation to this dislocation. I agree with these points, though I think Alexander could have spent more time fleshing out what, exactly, psychosocial integration looks like. This is all the more necessary because Alexander defines addiction (and by implication the absence of psychosocial integration) so broadly. "Overwhelming involvements" with alcohol and drugs are only a small fraction of addictions in his eyes; other addictions are to gambling, eating, love, work, attention, fame, having more stuff, religion, etc. By contrast, he implies, only a life of balance, and in a community, is whole, healthy, and integrated. The majority of the world's population is addicted, Alexander speculates. This broad definition of addiction, and the damning picture of modern, capitalist life that follows, is what makes the book so radical. Questions remain - for example, is there any place here for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" state? According to Csikszentmihalyi, this is the "optimal experience" that occurs when we are fully engaged (overwhelmingly involved?) in mastering a challenge. Alexander does make room for positive addications, but seems to imply that these, too, may be incompatible with complete psychosocial integration. Alexander aknowledges the enormous material gains brought about by capitalism; he doesn't advocate its overthrow, only its taming. I think this non-Marxist stance made the radical arguments go down easier for me. I found myself nodding along to thinkers I had previously scorned, such as Karl Polanyi and even Noam Chomsky! It would be worthwhile to weigh this book's arguments against those in Angus Deaton's Great Escape to develop an overall assessment of capitalism and modernity.

Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (2025)

This book came out the same day that Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call did (see my previous post). Generally overlapping in their critical assessments of the digital revolution and even in the responses they recommend, the two books are still different enough to make them both well worth reading. While Hayes is perhaps flashier and more conversational, Carr - as in a previous book of his which I also highly recommend, The Shallows - argues more carefully and writes in sharper prose. One of the threads of Superbloom is the belief that more and more universal communication will knit ever-widening circles of humanity together. With antecedents in Enlightenment thought, this idea animated the early American sociologist Charles Cooley and, in the wake of WWII, Margaret Mead. In a section that I wish Carr had expanded a little, he shows that the same confidence lay behind the fateful lack of regulation of the internet in its 1990s infancy. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, two key doctrines that had governed communications previously were quietly abandoned: secrecy of correspondence (the Faustian bargain we enter with Google and its ilk is that we get their services for free in exchange for allowing the content of our messages to be mined for opportunities to advertise to us) and the obligation of "broadcasters" to serve the public interest, which had been established in the original 1934 Communications Act but had already been eroded when it came to radio and cable TV in the 1970s. Interestingly, like both Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing) and Hayes in The Sirens' Call, Carr doesn't place great hope in legal or policy remedies for the damage being inflicted by digital technologies. All three emphasize individual action, which may eventually inspire collective action. On the last page of his book, Carr recommends "the taking up of positions, first as individuals and then, perhaps, together, not outside of society but at society's margin, not beyond the reach of the information flow but beyond the reach of its liquefying force." This is almost exactly what Odell means by "standing apart." And it's how I'm trying to live my life.

Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025)

I read this book (as well as Nicholas Carr's Superbloom, which came out on the same day - see my next entry) for the class I'm currently teaching, Media and Minds. Hayes's earlier book Twilight of the Elites (2012) had impressed me. Hayes seemed to be a creative thinker and observer, who was able to take concepts from one realm and apply them fruitfully in another (I still remember - and use - his adaptation of Robert Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" into an "iron law of meritocracy"). In Sirens' Call, Hayes again produces numerous insights into a field I thought I knew well. Here are some of the major nuggets I took from the book: - just as labor was turned into a commodity in the industrial revolution, attention is now undergoing the same process. Also in a Marxist vein, just as workers felt alienated from their labor, we now all feel alienated from ourselves. - grabbing attention (siren as in the wail of a firetruck) is easier than holding it (siren as in Odysseus's temptresses). Digital platforms try to do both, but have come to rely on the former. - the slot machine is the main model of digital addiction. - boredom didn't exist for hunter-gatherers, but has been historically conditioned, growing over time as our options have increased and as filling the hole left by boredom (and in turn regigging the hole) has become big business. - the explosion of entertainment over the last 150 years has arisen as industrial capitalism has solved the material struggle for existence. Assured of material comforts, we've lost a sense of purpose - what are we living for?I had previously focused on the suppy side - the technologies that made mass media and entertainment possible. Hayes, drawing on Keynes and others, makes a plausible case for demand-side reasons. - attentional regimes, like raising your hand when you want to speak in a classroom. In our current politics, there no longer is one. Anyone who wants can scream for attention at any time, practically in any way. Despite these considerable strengths, perhaps the book could have used another round of editing to make its argument and writing even tighter. For example, it doesn't fully support its central claim, that attention is now the world's most important resource.

David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (2019)

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. The topic has been on my mind for the last decade, as I've become increasingly alarmed by our phone-based lives. Courtwright has read very widely and integrates evidence and ideas from many fields. His writing is taut, witty, often masterful. His judgment, at least in my eyes, is superb - for example, while castigating "limbic capitalism" - a term he coins here - he pays homage to the great good done by its benevolent twin, plain capitalism. He contrasts undisciplined and disciplined pleasures. The book belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in "big history." Courtwright starts with hunter-gatherers, who generally stumbled on limited pleasures in their diverse habitats, before he quickly and skillfully moves through the role of trade and the first globalization in creating globally homogeneous pleasures (as well as glocalized ones). The last two-thirds of the book consider the accelerating pleasure revolution of the last two hundred years, as pleasures, vices, and addictions have been engineered and relentlessly marketed. Courtwright makes interesting observations about the reasons why the anti-vice movement of the Progressive Era generally lost out to the pro-vice movements of World Wars and rising affluence. He cautiously subscribes to the recently emerging consensus that all addictions share the same neural footprint, all being diseases of the brain. Courtwright acknowledges that his emphasis on the supply-side of addiction (engineered pleasures, big business) must be complemented by the demand-side story, which traces the rise in addiction to the dislocation, isolation, and anomie of modern life. Bruce Alexander has pursued this story in The Globalization of Addiction. Age of Addiction was persuasive enough to make me rebalance my assessment of capitalism. Its somber assessment must now join Shoshanna Zuboff's indictment of surveillance capitalism and Fred Hirsch's and Robert Frank's works on zero-sum status competition (as well as older works by Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell on the cultural contradictions of capitalism) as another dark, and possibly growing, stain on capitalism's reputation.