As I’ve been rewatching HBO’s Silicon Valley, my favorite roast of the first season is the incessant refrain that tech is “making the world a better place.”
But that isn’t always true, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been thinking that I’ve spent a lot of time covering the capital and companies, but not nearly enough time writing about the world this technology creates. I was especially thinking that as I read my colleague Kristin Stoller’s new feature about tech addiction, published this week. It’s a story that spans years and companies. Case in point:
At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”
At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”
Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction.
Though some say tech addiction doesn’t exist, evidence is mounting that the growing string of legal cases against startups like Character and giants like Meta, Alphabet-owned YouTube, and TikTok could create an unambiguous inflection point.
Read more about who gets addicted—and whether tech is approaching a “Big Tobacco” moment here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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The post The growing problem of ‘tech addiction’ spawns a new detox economy appeared first on Fortune.
