Ben, like many former Apple employees, inhabited the cooler end of the geek spectrum, with glasses offset by a gym-honed body. He didn’t need any prompting to talk about addiction to technology: the experience of seeing the addiction every day – deliberately stimulated by the company – was one of the reasons he left the store.
‘I saw a whole range of addictive behaviours. It’s one of the things that made the Apple Store such a surreal place to work. At one end of the scale you have the total Apple obsessives who exhibit a sort of religious fanaticism that the company does nothing to discourage – it encourages it, in fact. They’re the people who will book the same tutorial again and again, being shown how to do stuff they already know.
‘When a new product is launched, it’s the same faces at the front of the line every time. They treat the staff almost like celebrities, trying to ingratiate themselves. At the Genius Bar, they’ll show you Apple products from years ago, and you’ll have to pretend you haven’t seen them before, because they need their egos massaged. It’s kind of sad. Well, it is sad.’
But it’s not only the true obsessives who are touched by addiction, according to Ben. ‘There’s a general perception that Apple is awesome in a way that other companies aren’t – a perception that’s quite at odds with the way it operates behind the scenes. Even the products are considered awesome, which is why otherwise normal people would get quite disproportionately angry and upset if anything went wrong with them. And it’s also why there’s such unease if people think they’ve fallen behind, that their stuff is out of date. But the point is that you can’t keep up to date without spending a lot of money on things you don’t need, because the products are just coming out too fast.
‘I’ve seen people burst into tears because a credit check wouldn’t allow them to stretch to the latest upgrade. That’s when I started thinking: I need to get the hell out of here.’
Admittedly, many psychiatrists don’t believe in ‘internet addiction’ as a medical condition, let alone addiction to a specific model of smartphone. They argue that obsessive users aren’t addicted to the internet so much as to the experiences it provides, such as digital porn and computer games. But few experts would deny that gadgets such as iPhones can produce behaviour that bears the hallmarks of addiction. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the ability of manufacturers to stimulate this behaviour is racing far ahead of our ability to cope with the psychological and social problems that are created as a result.
The science of pleasure is playing a greater role in the marketing strategies of all sorts of companies: the people who waft the smell of freshly baked doughnuts at you in the shopping mall have fine-tuned their recipes in the laboratory, not the kitchen. But Apple is in a class of its own. No other company has managed to mix such a finely balanced cocktail of desire, in which the crude flavour of compulsion is disguised by a deliciously minimalist aesthetic.
‘More than any other product, the iPhone has encouraged the tech industry to concentrate on getting people hooked on things,’ says Yiannopoulos. ‘Apple’s marketing genius, and the incredible attention to detail paid to the design of their devices, filters down into the iPhone developer ecosystem.’
He cites the example of Angry Birds, a simple computer game app that, by May 2011, had been downloaded 200 million times.13 The premise of Angry Birds is simple: players launch birds across the screen with a slingshot, judging the trajectory of flight and altering the force and initial direction accordingly. It sounds harmless enough. But type ‘Angry Birds addiction’ into Google and you’re presented with 3.24 million results. So many people complain about being addicted to the game that it has spawned self-help pages all over the internet. Some of these pages ask whether Angry Birds addictions are changing people’s brains. Self-described addicts say they don’t know why they can’t put the game down, and talk about compulsively tracing their fingers on tables as they subconsciously recall the catapult action of the game. These sound suspiciously like the little rituals associated with alcoholism and drug abuse.
Again, perhaps a degree of scepticism is called for: it can only be a matter of time before some opportunistic researcher diagnoses ABAD – Angry Birds Addiction Disorder (which would presumably be a particular strain of IAD, since the game is played mostly on iPhones). No doubt the Angry Birds craze will fade, as these crazes always do. But it may well leave behind a residue, in the form of the compulsive instinct to perform repetitive actions.
It’s not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the primary task of iPhone game developers is learning how to manipulate our brains’ reward circuits. They cheerfully admit as much. At the 2010 Virtual Goods Summit in London, Peter Vesterbacka, lead developer for Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, described how they make the game so addictive. ‘We use simple A/B testing to work out what keeps people coming back,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to guess any more. With so many users, we can just run the numbers.’14
We can just run the numbers. Remember those words. Where previously advertising and marketing were more creative disciplines that involved a huge element of risk, a new generation of manufacturers doesn’t need to guess what will keep us coming back for our fix: they already know.
Viewers of House, America’s most popular medical drama – and at one time the most watched television programme in the world – are familiar with the sight of Dr Gregory House, the snide, sexy, crippled antihero, tipping back his head and tossing a couple of Vicodin into his mouth. He’s even been known to throw a pill into the air and catch it like a performing seal. The screenplays go out of their way to portray House as an addict: several times we’re shown him shivering and sweating his way through opiate withdrawal. But, in the end, the Vicodin is as integral to his charm as his twisted humour. The one fuels the other.
Although Dr House, played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, is prescribed the drug to dull the pain of a leg injury, he also uses it to stave off boredom and stimulate his work as a diagnostic detective. Any similarity to the cocaine-injecting Sherlock Holmes is surely intentional. But only the very earliest Holmes stories actually depict drug abuse: Arthur Conan Doyle, worried that he might encourage addiction, quickly made his hero abandon the vice. Not so the makers of House, who have sustained the central character’s dependence on Vicodin despite criticism from some medical professionals (and, reportedly, the Drug Enforcement Agency).
‘Since the first episode I have been concerned with the show’s message and have attempted several times to educate the writers and producers regarding the danger of Vicodin abuse,’ wrote one physician, coincidentally named Dr John House, who specialises in hearing loss, a devastating side effect of Vicodin.15 He lobbied long and hard for this symptom to be recognised in House and eventually it was, albeit in a throwaway line. (As I write, the series is coming to an end, and so far one symptom that hasn’t been mentioned, so far as I can tell, is the awful constipation it causes: a truly realistic scenario would force the good doctor to spend most of the season straining on the lavatory.) The fictional House does succeed in giving up Vicodin after suffering rather implausible hallucinations caused by the drug and completing a period of rehab, but after a couple of seasons he is shown relapsing.
Vicodin was already a fashionable recreational drug when the show first aired in 2004. It was passed around like after-dinner mints at Manhattan dinner parties. In 2001, USA Today described Vicodin as ‘the new celebrity drug of choice’. Matthew Perry, one of the stars of Friends, had already gone into rehab for his addiction to it – twice. Eminem had a Vicodin tattoo on his arm. David Spade joked about it at the Golden Globes. ‘Who isn’t doing them?’ asked Courtney Love. ‘Everyone who makes it starts popping them.’16 Celebrities favoured it for the same reason other users did: it was (and is) relatively easy to persuade doctors to prescribe it. In the US, Vicodin falls into the Schedule III category, less tightly controlled than stronger opiate painkillers such as Oxycontin, classified as Schedule II. You can phone in a prescription for Vicodin to a pharmacy;