The Addiction Economy

Addicted, Overwhelmed, Oversubscribed: How Technology Hooked the World

Sponsored By: Flatfile

Today's newsletter is brought to you by Flatfile, the customer data onboarding platform.

Clients can’t use your application without being able to populate their data, causing the CSV import problem to present itself at the most inopportune time—during onboarding.

Slash time-to-value, onboard customers faster, and cut product churn with a 1-click data import experience from Flatfile:

  • Cut hours off data cleaning and focus on growing your company.
  • Import customer data in less than 60 seconds.
  • Migrate data using stringent compliance standards

Since launching in 2018, Flatfile has onboarded data for over 1.5 million customers spanning 400+ of the best companies around the world. In just a few clicks, Flatfile intelligently imports, transforms, and validates your customers’ data, solving the most critical part of onboarding, in seconds.

TikTok was the first time I was personally terrified by technology. At 9 pm on a Tuesday night in Southern Utah, I downloaded the app thinking I would check it out for 5 minutes. Then, without warning, I looked over at the clock and it was 3:30 in the morning. I had been scrolling for 6 ½ hours straight. At first, I thought I had a stroke or the clock was wrong, but the more I thought, the more I realized that I had just been laying in bed, flicking my thumb up the screen, my mind ignoring the passage of time. Tiktok had grabbed control of me—body and mind. It was spooky.

The next day I tried to describe to my family what had happened and what TikTok was. After several minutes of failed explanations, I finally hit on something that felt right.

“TV on crack.” 

It was the most addicting, dopamine-fueled app I’d ever used. Normal TV was dull and slow in comparison.  

My experience was not mine alone—the average TikTok user is on the app for 89 minutes a day. They open it over 19 times a day. The app is the third most used social app in America, topping Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. It is used by over a billion people a month. Assuming a 50% dropoff from monthly to daily active users, the app consumes 84,608 man-years a day. This is just a mind-boggling amount of time wasted by the human race. 

Perhaps TV on Crack was even an underestimation of the service. And it’s not the only thing that has gotten more addictive lately.

In 2010, Paul Graham published an essay entitled “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.” In it, he proposed that as technological progress continued its inexorable march forward, it would cause product improvements in every category. For the majority of products, that means they become more addictive. Graham argues,

“The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”
Learn more

This post is for
paying subscribers

Subscribe →

Or, login.

Thanks to our Sponsor: Flatfile

Thanks again to our sponsor Flatfile for today's newsletter. Click below to view the data onboarding platform that the world’s best companies use to onboard their customers.

Read this next:

Napkin Math

Why MasterClass Isn’t Really About Mastery

And other lessons from a 9-figure edtech startup

247 Jul 1, 2020 by Adam Keesling

Napkin Math

Product-Led Growth’s Failure

How a Scrappy Utah Software Company Ignored Every Silicon Valley Heuristic and Won Anyway

201 Jun 3, 2021 by Evan Armstrong

Napkin Math

You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup

It’s overrated—both financially and emotionally

214 May 20, 2021 by Evan Armstrong

Napkin Math

How AI Changes the Media Business

Why community and social network effects will be key to winning the future

64 Mar 23, 2023 by Evan Armstrong

The AI Copyright Fight: A Guide

How copyright's past may shape AI's future

29 Mar 21, 2023 by Helen Jiang

Understand AI

Get one actionable essay a day on AI, tech, and personal development

Subscribe

Already a subscriber? Login