Could the ‘emptiness’ of the cupcakes to which Xanthe Clay refers be part of their appeal? Their overwhelming sugar hit fills the consumer with what nutritionists call ‘empty calories’, because they have no nutritional value. But that’s not to say they have no mood-altering value. Sugar triggers production of the brain’s natural opioids, according to Princeton neuroscientist Bart Hobel, who led a study into sugar dependence. He found that rats which binged on sugar went into withdrawal when the supply was cut off. ‘We think that is a key to the addiction process,’ he said. ‘The brain is getting addicted to its own opioids as it would to morphine or heroin. Drugs give a bigger effect, but it is essentially the same process.’9
Opioids are also implicated in bulimia, irrespective of whether sugar is involved. Have you ever experienced that feeling of glorious relief after you’ve just thrown up a dodgy curry? It’s not just getting rid of the food that makes you feel good; it’s a natural elation produced by chemicals in the brain. Bulimics get off on it, to put it crudely.
As Abigail Natenshon explains: ‘The bulimic cycle releases endorphins, [opioid] brain chemicals that infuse a person with a sense of numbness or euphoria. Ironically, the relief passes in short order, only to be replaced by anxiety and guilt for the bulimic behaviours.’ Again, we need to state the obvious fact that most people don’t throw up their food. But the sort of food associated with purging is also the sort of food that many of us have difficulty resisting, because its heavy concentrations of sugar, fat or salt can magnify euphoria and neediness.
It’s easy for urban sophisticates to mock American rednecks or British ‘chavs’ who stuff themselves with fast food, and easy to recognise that they’re in the grip of some sort of addiction. Just look at their waistlines. But the marketing executive who orders a cranberry muffin to go with her morning cup of coffee really ought to ask herself: why am I eating cake for breakfast?
So what about the iPhone? Isn’t it a bit much to call our love affair with this shiny gadget an ‘addiction’? Researchers at Stanford University aren’t so sure: in a survey of 200 Stanford students in 2010, 44 per cent of respondents said they were either very or completely addicted to their smartphones.10 Nine per cent admitted to ‘patting’ their iPhone. Eight per cent recalled thinking that their iPods were ‘jealous’ of their iPhones. These are strange things for students at one of America’s top universities to say about their phones, even in jest. They also reveal something about how completely the iPhone has become part of these students’ identities and social frameworks. They’re not just tools that allow us to connect instantaneously and prolifically with others: they’re also being afforded identities of their own – ‘patted’, protected and cherished.
Perhaps it has something to do with how these devices are engineered. They practically force you to perform repetitive rituals of the sort associated with obsessive-compulsive behaviour: from the initial activation of the iPhone to the weekly ‘syncing’ and nightly charging, your relationship to the phone is structured for you. And because the iPhone’s battery life isn’t quite enough to last a full day’s use – and certainly not long enough to withstand hours of constant fiddling and gaming – ‘pit stop’ charges become a regular feature of the day. iPhone users can often be seen checking for power sockets in coffee shops so that, while they get their own fix of caffeine, their phones can get juiced up as well.
‘iPhone owners live in a constant state of anxiety about their battery levels,’ says Milo Yiannopoulos, editor of The Kernel, an online culture magazine. ‘To some extent, the phone ends up structuring their day. For example, they tend not to plan to be out of the office for more than six hours at a time, in case they run out of battery and have to start knocking on doors, USB cable in hand, begging for a few minutes’ worth of charge to get them through the afternoon.’
Talk about the replacement of people by things. The 4S version of the iPhone, released in October 2011, includes a virtual assistant called Siri that responds to spoken instructions and speaks back to the user. This infant technology is already so complex that you can have entire conversations with Siri. She will then execute commands, in some cases fetching very specific data from the internet. ‘Intelligent personalised assistant software is going mainstream,’ says Yiannopoulos. ‘Never in the history of mass-market consumer electronics has the line between man and machine been so blurred.’
It’s significant that a quarter of respondents in the survey above said they found iPhones ‘dangerously alluring’. They are supposed to be. Absolutely nothing is left to chance in the design of these devices. If Apple customers have an embarrassing tendency to anthropomorphise their gadgets, that is because Apple has explored the possibilities of the human mind and body more thoroughly than any of its competitors.
For example, one of the most appealing features of the MacBook laptop line has been the status light, which pulsates gently when the computer is sleeping. Early reviewers cooed over the calming effect of the light, but couldn’t put their finger on why it felt so good to watch. Later, it was revealed that Apple had filed for a patent for a sleep-mode indicator that ‘mimics the rhythm of breathing’ and was therefore ‘psychologically appealing’. As the tech blogger Jesse Young noted, while Apple’s sleep light matched the pace of breathing while we sleep, Dell’s was closer to breathing during strenuous exercise. ‘It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsessive attention to detail,’ he wrote.11
Former Apple executives – who frequently brief American technology blogs off the record about the internal culture at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California – describe the lengths the organisation goes to in order to create coveted products. There’s a design-dominated power structure that results in hushed reverence when Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, walks into the boardroom. ‘Marketing and design have been fused into a single discipline at Apple,’ says Yiannopoulos. ‘Everything, from product strategy to research and development, is subordinate to making the products as beautiful and compulsive – that is, as addictive – as possible.’
It works. To quote an extreme example, in 2010 a schoolboy in Taiwan was diagnosed with IAD – iPhone Addiction Disorder. According to Dr Tsung-tsai Yang of the Cardinal Tien Hospital, his eyes were glued to his phone screen all day and all night. Eventually, ‘the boy had to be hospitalised in a mental ward after his daily life was thrown into complete disarray by his iPhone addiction’.12
Two days after it opened in 2010, I visited the Apple Store in Covent Garden – a magnificently restored Palladian building dominated by a glass-covered courtyard. The heady aroma of addiction was unmistakable. The misery in the queue for the Genius Bar, where broken computers are diagnosed, was painful to behold. Legs were crossed and uncrossed and eyebrows twitched every time a Genius read out a name. I couldn’t help thinking that these customers looked like addicts waiting for their daily dose of methadone.
I wanted to ask a Genius what it was like dealing with people who weren’t just asking what was wrong with their laptops but pleading for (literal) fixes. But finding someone who would talk was easier said than done.
First I went down the route of asking an Apple Store manager – a friend of a friend – whether he could chat off the record about the way the company seemed to encourage addiction to its products, or put me in touch with someone who would. His first response was encouraging, but then he changed his mind. He would be in big trouble if his bosses suspected he’d put me in touch with an indiscreet ex-employee, and he’d be fired on the spot if he got caught blabbing himself.
So I tried a different route. A start-up CEO friend of mine put out a message to one of his networks. Shortly