How many businesses can I remember around addictions? What s the most famous anti-TV addiction company? Anti-cigarettes? Anti-sex addiction? If it's none, then the opportunity is not underappreciated.
Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.
This is a good point (about #'s of comparable products), but I disagree that anti-addiction products are inherently unsellable.
I think you could make the argument that weight loss products could fall into this category. There are a ton of diet books/advice, and Weight Watchers has a market cap of 4.4B.
As for actual products, I know there's the kitchen safe:
I think the underlying challenge here might be that the most "successful" businesses often make us the most addicted. I'm curious how many of the very large companies, if any, don't rely on a business model of (borderline) addiction to their products.
This is certainly a difficult problem, and I think that as we learn more on this subject people are going to be increasingly uncomfortable with the answers available to us and what it means for the products we create.
What I feel is that, regardless of regulation on a societal level, it is up to us as individuals to decide what we feel comfortable with in regards to the products we create and the risk of harming others that we are willing to take on. We should be able to acknowledge the fact that - regardless of whether or not addiction is a personal failing or an inescapable biological flaw - intentionally leveraging and profiting off of it is an unethical action. It is exploitation regardless of the nature of the flaw being exploited.
It's complicated, because I think there are many types of products that can't avoid the potential for addictive use. In those situations, we have to ask ourselves whether we're targeting that addictive use, or whether it's an undesired side effect that a user may come across - and in that latter situation, to find ways to mitigate those harmful outcomes. If we want to provide outcomes that help our customers and provide them value, we need to be willing to accept that we may have to create awkward-feeling and profit-limiting mitigations.
Flawed as it is, education and the promotion of people developing self-awareness about their addictions is a strong tool we have for mitigation as long as it isn't something buried where users won't easily find it. Setting limits or ceilings on spending (spending of both time and money) is another mitigation. Avoiding monetization models such as gambling mechanics that inherently exploit addiction is another. Promoting and sticking to direct sales of products for discrete costs is another. But there is still so much we need to learn, and many potential pitfalls.
Nobody is forced to manufacture addictive products, advertise them in misleading ways, pay celebrities and filmmakers to use them conspicuously, or buy prominent product placement everywhere a person trying to quit has to go, either.
You are introducing irrelevant other ideas to distract from the core of the OP's argument, which while a bit excessive IMO, warrants an honest discussion, not hyperbolic overreaction.
I just don't want to say that people are inevitably going to be addicted to justify monetizing addiction, but the fact that relatively harmless addictive products are available might serve a purpose.
Unfortunately, we're in a system with asymmetric incentives for product development. Products that addict us get more of our time and attention, and therefore higher DAU, VC funding and ad dollars. Products that help us fight addiction are in a negative feedback loop. The better they work, the less we need them or pay attention to them. The gains that users realize from addiction-fighting apps are external, often in the analog world, and by definition harder to monetize and monitor, because they have left the platform.
Might not be heroin but who can argue addictive technology is bad for the business that brings it to market. In another lens I see now what it takes to make profitable technology for entertainment at least.
The advertising business model is why those companies built addictive products. To make money from ads, you have to keep them coming back as often as possible, even if it isn't adding value to their lives.
I think thesis is absolutely ridiculous: "we need a group of new businesses to rise up and make money off of solving tech addiction"
There's not a lot of money to be made in stopping people from self-abstaining from pleasure. If someone wants to quit drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, then they can do so without having to pay for much (assuming they're not vulnerable to D.T. health wise). And while there's marginal amounts of money to be made off of nicotine patches or AA literature, these products pale in comparison to the amount of money generated by the alcohol and tobacco industries.
> It's called "advertising" and it wouldn't keep growing if it didn't work.
For the record, it doesn't. Advertising is a fairly consistent percentage of GDP over decades.
More importantly, "advertising" doesn't automatically make products addicting. Literally every industry does advertising, that doesn't mean people are "addicted" to insurance.
For the record, I agree that junk food is addicting. It's probably the addiction I'm most prone too. But that's not because of advertising, it's because the products themselves are addicting.
In fact, by far the biggest addiction in my life is bread from a local bakery. I don't blame advertising (they hardly do any) and I don't even blame "modern food" (this is whole wheat, unrefined bread). I simply acknowledge that I love bread, it tastes great, and if I'm feeling depressed then I overeat it. My bread consumption depends much more on my internal mood and habits than anything "industry" does.
Likewise, technology is not addicting because it's evil. It's addicting because it's good and pleasurable, and if you don't have a solid hold on your mental health it's easy to fill the void with pleasurable products, whether they be bread, Facebook, or alcohol. The solution isn't to ban/quit the product, it's to address that hole in your life.
It can be both. They can be intentionally and powerfully addictive... and finding a way to develop a resistance to it can still be the most practical/effective option.
Regardless, it's in your best interest to work towards a resistance. These kinds of businesses aren't going to change things until they're forced to, and no matter what that'll take time, and they'll probably just come back in new and exciting ways eventually.
You're right, also television! But also other things. Which makes me think of the products that I use that are algorithmically built for addictiveness - not to say all products are initially built with the intention of being addictive, but products gradually become so and a company then unethically pushes new features that will further the addictiveness since that keeps the user coming back/on the product. An example of the latter is Netflix or Spotify. Netflix, last time I checked, now auto plays previews of shows on the main page - a way to get the user to be intrigued, stay on the product, and keep watching more shows. Spotify, while a revolutionary product, I find is addictive - millions of songs a user has yet to listen to? Well, then that is more of a reason for the user to plunge into two hours of music searching and while the user is at it, why not create a playlist for every occasion that might occur.
The latter two examples being poor examples, but yet, there are products/services all around us which manipulate our mind. I have always been keen on building something, a product or service, something morally and ethically just - no advertisements, no gimmicks, etc. I.e. Spotify should have a optional pop-message say: "You have been listening to music for five hours. You should let your ears rest and make some pumpkin pie." Or from Netflix: "You have just watched the entire season of two shows. You should really go lay under a tree in a park and eat some grapes." Again, the latter two examples are not likely, they are dream-like features but this is what I dictate to be a movement towards more healthy products/services to which we need.
In modern day, we must then be extra aware of what we consciously consume and put in our head day in and day out in our everyday life. We might even decipher if this is what we want to consume, if it is healthy, if it is the way we want to lead our lives. The latter being an approach I took to deciding to stop: watching, reading, and listening to the news, bookmarking countless of articles I find (Pocket, the bookmarking saving tool, is particularly overwhelming), sticking to just a few websites I regularly visit, not using/having any social media account, etc.
Above all, I'll finish this comment off with two of my favorite quotes and a video about everyday virtue that I think is appropriate in regard to the article and something teenagers should come to know:
Thomas Merton: "The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.”
Andrei Tarkovsky from Sculpting in Time: “Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”
Everyday Virtue, an analysis of the independent film Paterson with support from ideas of David Foster Wallace (it's about awareness, normal and ordinary everyday life, etc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnGvWTRQ9j4
"Addicted to caffeine, teenagers have no clear path to quitting".
"Addicted to fortnight, kids have no clear path to quitting".
"Addicted to social media, millennials have no clear path to mental health".
We've spent 100 years creating companies that grow because addiction works. It's gonna take a concerted, societal effort to disconnect addiction and incentives.
The problem is that what is addictive to someone is harmless for someone other. You cannot ban everything that makes someone addicted.
When you have a market niche - then sooner or later it will be filled. It does not make much sense to blame "concrete companies" - because once you close them they will be replaced by others. You need to make laws that would close the niche of providing the 'particular types of services that are problematic' entirely. And making those laws is difficult - because forbidding something always limits the freedom. There are lots of people here who believe that drugs should be legal.
And it is internet and smartphones that created these market niches putting us into that awkward position. It is also practical to focus talk on them - because there are concrete advice on how to configure your (or your children) smartphone (or internet connection) to make it less addictive. It is something that can be done without any collective action problems.
What should we make of this? A successful business model? A warning sign that humans can't control themselves in the face of addictive products? Or just another fad, to be replaced by another fad in a short time?
Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.
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