Are you a victim of "pathological Internet use"? Internet addiction is in the news again, heralding an epidemic of compulsive clicking, marathon chatting, and willful ignorance of the basic tenets of good hygiene. Who says all news is bad news? If "Internet addiction disorder" (IAD) is accepted as a bona fide crisis, we may be forced to suffer renewed reports of broken marriages, neglected children, and "psychomotor agitation" (the cybershakes), but these are merely risk-factor footnotes in the great millennial prospectus. Better, instead, to turn to those who stand to profit via this no-longer-nameless dread.
The gatekeepers
Forget everything you think you know about attrition. Don't even dream of short-selling AOL, AT&T, or CompuServe - access will always be the stop at the top of the Net's tragic cycle. If IAD packs any sort of memorable buzz, stump-fingered key-clackers will be showing up in Calvin Klein spreads any day, and Clinton will be hacking up eulogies for the new waves of strung-out chat junkies, unified by a core desire for a connection, like tarheads clamoring for a clean rig. The big winner: WebTV. Everybody (with the exception of ABC, whose new campaign shows evidence of some doubt) knows TV is already addictive. Matching it with the Web should prove to be the most richly unproductive coupling since Sid and Nancy.
The dealers
According to Dr. Ivan Goldberg, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, IAD is associated with "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." This suggests great things for clickthrough - and nobody minds more traffic. Advertisers like Microsoft, who just announced intentions to nearly double their annual online-ad spending from US$24 million to $41 million, will be overjoyed to receive the addled masses who'll punch their banners as instinctively as Club Med vacationers swatting at mosquitoes. They'll hand out copies of Internet Explorer like methadone and send them back to us content-dealers. We'll repeat the vicious cycle without much undue scolding - because, hey man, we've been there, too. We're here to help, not judge.
The rehabilitators
When addicts aren't talking about scoring, they're talking about quitting. There's bounty to be found in the going as well as the coming, but 12-step groups are passé and reek of chat rooms - the source of our problems in the first place. If we want to win the war against (((hugs))), we may have to fight it with drugs. Prozac, Zyban, Sominex, Immodium AD - whatever relaxes the appetites of flummoxed bitstreamers is ripe to hype, and new medications (Bitalin?) should cascade over pharmacist's counters in no time. With the FDA's recently announced ad guidelines mandating that URLs must be present in all televised pharmaceutical ads, it'll be like packaging Jenny Craig vouchers with McDonald's Extra Value Meals.
So, let's keep our fingers crossed that the world puts down its cigarettes and starts smoking the fat pipes we've been promised for so long now. Once we're all jonesing for the packet-loss-free pure stuff, twitching with hunger for just one more click, the only question worth asking will be who'll get to be the Marlboro Man.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
