{"id":1404,"date":"2010-07-28T18:10:37","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T00:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1404"},"modified":"2010-07-28T18:10:37","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T00:10:37","slug":"more_please_and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1404","title":{"rendered":"More, please, and faster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Graham has a perceptive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulgraham.com\/addiction.html\">post<\/a> on what he terms &#8220;the acceleration of addiction,&#8221; describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don&#8217;t want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it&#8217;s the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t thought about it in those terms before, but of course he&#8217;s right &#8211; and his observation explains a lot (though he overlooks how commercial interests will tend to amplify the amplification process, as companies compete to profit from our compulsions). The recent evolution of the web, as a consumer technology, can to a considerable degree be seen as the product of the competition among technology companies &#8211; Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. &#8211; to feed our native and not necessarily rational craving for new information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Graham has a perceptive post on what he terms &#8220;the acceleration of addiction,&#8221; describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior: Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}