The Fix

No one is immune from developing addictive behaviour. If there’s a history of addiction in your family, you’re more at risk. Likewise, if you have an impulsive personality – that is, score highly for ‘impulsivity’ in psychological tests – you’re more likely to do something impulsive, such as try a new drug or drink that fatal last glass of whisky before jumping into your car. Indeed, a fashionable term for various addictions is ‘impulse control disorders’.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

For me these findings fall into the ‘No shit, Sherlock’ category of scientific discoveries. They tell us nothing very surprising. The consensus at the moment is that addiction seems to be the product of genetic inheritance and environment. In other words, the nature versus nurture question is no closer to being settled in this area of human biology than it is in any other. To repeat: we’re all at risk. That’s why the contents of this book apply to everyone, not just coke-snorting hedge fund managers, bulimic receptionists and absent fathers glued to World of Warcraft.

Psychologists talk about addictive behaviours in the plural, recognising the many different impulses that tempt people. What these behaviours tend to have in common is the replacement of people by things and events. We all develop these habits to a certain degree; the people we call addicts are those people who can’t or won’t give them up even when they cause harm to themselves and others. Again, that’s a loose definition, fuzzy at the edges. Never mind; addiction isn’t an easy phenomenon to pin down.

This isn’t to deny that addictive behaviour has important consequences for the brain. It does. Indeed, it can partly be explained by the overstimulation of the brain’s fearsomely complex reward circuitry.

Different parts of the human brain govern what some scientists call the Stop and Go impulses. More primitive sections of the brain – parts that we share with other animals – tell us to consume as much as possible in order to increase our chances of survival. They say: Go. More highly developed parts of the brain, capable of reasoning and not found in other animals, hold up a Stop sign when we’re consuming too much of something for our own good. Classic addicts keep ignoring the Stop instruction, despite the high cost to themselves and others. They require instant gratification, whatever the consequences. Indeed, they’ll often seize any opportunity to indulge in addictive behaviour even when there’s no real gratification to be extracted from it. We’ll discuss this puzzling paradox later.

The Stop and Go imagery helps us understand the growing appeal of the fix. As technologies develop and converge, the speed of delivery increases. So does the speed of our expectations. We now live in a world filled with life-enhancing objects and substances that promise ever faster and more effective gratification. It’s as if everything that tumbles off a production line is stamped with the word Go.

Temptation peeks out at us from the strangest places. Who would have guessed, 40 years ago, that a piece of electronic office equipment – the personal computer – would morph into something so desirable that people would sacrifice huge chunks of their spare time (and income) in order to play with it? Or that modifications to a telephone would generate global excitement?

Changes to our appetites don’t come about by accident. The manager of your local Starbucks didn’t wake up one morning and think: ‘I know what would brighten up my customers’ afternoons – an ice-blended cappuccino!’ As we’ll see, the Frappuccino was invented when Starbucks employed food technology to solve a specific business challenge. As a result, hundreds of thousands of their customers (including me) developed a near-obsessive relationship with something they had previously lived happily without.

The pace of technological change means we need to revise our concept of addiction. Our cultural history provides us with images of stereotypical addicts, some of them dating back centuries: the grinning harridan dropping her baby down a staircase in Hogarth’s Gin Lane; the American Indians crazed with ‘firewater’; the hollow-eyed Chinese sailor propped against the wall of an opium den; the junkie shivering in an alleyway surrounded by needles. Also, anyone who lives in a city is used to the sight of spectacular drunks and morbidly obese people whose addictions are so grotesquely out of control that we avert our eyes.

These are powerful images, but if we pay too much attention to them then we can end up with a dangerous sense of immunity. We overlook our own eagerness to self-administer fixes, those sensory experiences that temporarily lift the mood while subtly detaching us from traditional human relationships. The fix can take any number of forms. Some toy very obviously with the chemistry of the brain. Anyone with a rolled banknote up their nose knows that – so long as their dealer hasn’t ripped them off – they’re about to experience the effects of a mind-altering substance. The same goes for the guy swigging from a whisky bottle. In contrast, the tubby young man who demolishes a packet of chocolate digestives while watching the football doesn’t suspect that his eating habits have left his brain unusually sensitive to stimulation by sugar; he just knows that, once the packet’s opened, the biscuits disappear. His habit of stuffing his face with refined sugar and vegetable fat doesn’t place him very far along the addictive spectrum – but, then again, it may be enough to put him in intensive care when he has a heart attack at 50.

The most puzzling addictions are those that don’t involve the consumption of any substance. Gambling is the obvious example – we’ve known for hundreds of years that it can tear apart families as ruthlessly as hard liquor. In academic circles, these non-substance addictions are known as ‘process addictions’. It’s now clear that things you don’t eat, drink, smoke or inject can nevertheless disturb your brain in much the same way as drugs. And, in an age when so much digital entertainment – notably video games and online pornography – is designed to be as addictive as possible, their potential to do this is accelerating rapidly.

The global marketplace offers a bewildering selection of consumer experiences, simultaneously delightful and dangerous. It’s constantly modifying products and experiences that were never previously considered to be addictive – or simply didn’t exist until recently.

Also, as we’ll see, corporations have learned how to supercharge old-established intoxicants by popularising new patterns of consuming them. One vivid example is the phenomenon of recreational binge drinking, particularly by women. People have always got drunk, and a minority have always enjoyed going on binges with their friends. What no one predicted was the emergence of the binge as everyday behaviour. Ordinary drinkers, with no history of a problem with alcohol, now plan evenings to end in a messy and helpless surrender to the drug. And this is seen as normal.

It would be silly to pretend that everyone is equally threatened by this changing style of consumption. But the prospect of whole populations learning new ways of tampering with the flow of pleasure-giving chemicals in their brains is one that should make us feel very uneasy.

With that in mind, let’s take another look at the cake, the phone and the pill.

In 1996 a tiny corner shop called the Magnolia Bakery opened in Manhattan’s West Village. Its old-fashioned cakes and pies quickly became the objects of guilty fantasy for women who liked to pretend that nothing more fattening than tuna carpaccio ever passed their lips. Then, in 2000, the bakery featured in an episode of Sex and the City. This was the moment America’s cupcake craze began in earnest.

In the episode, Carrie and Miranda were filmed sitting outside the Magnolia. Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, told her friend that there was a new obsession in her life. This turned out to be a new boyfriend called Aidan – but viewers could have been forgiven for thinking it was icing sugar, judging by the way Parker was pushing the rose-coloured cupcake into her face. Viewed in slow motion, it’s a faintly disgusting spectacle. The truth is, there’s no elegant way to eat a Magnolia cupcake, which is why customers adopt self-mocking smiles as the fluorescent globules of frosting tumble down their chins.

‘When Carrie took her first bite, she left teeth marks in my neighbourhood,’ wrote Emma Forrest, a journalist living opposite the bakery. ‘Not long after the episode was broadcast, the tourists started to arrive and the bakery started charging them if they wanted to take photographs of Carrie and co’s favourite haunt. With the influx of tourists came the rats, as half-eaten cupcakes were dumped into overflowing bins outside my apartment … Riding on this extraordinary upturn in its fortunes, Magnolia changed its hours, and stayed open to midnight throughout the summer. I was kept awake each night by the hoots and hollers coming from the queue that now snakes all the way around the block.’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

In 2006 and 2007 I spent quite a lot of time in the West Village visiting my friend Harry Mount, then New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. By this time, Sex and the City was off the air and the cupcake craze had gone mainstream: Magnolia-style bakeries were opening all over America. Yet, on chilly autumn evenings, there was still a queue outside the original store, and it didn’t seem to consist of tourists. ‘Our local stick-thin fashion victims can’t get enough of the things,’ explained Harry. In which case, how come they were stick-thin? Was there a parking lot at the back where they threw them up?

That was a bad-taste private joke between Harry and me, but when I recently did a word search on ‘cupcakes’ and ‘bulimia’ I discovered a blog by a bulimic mother of two entitled ‘Eating Cupcakes in the Parking Lot’. Its posts appear to have been deleted, but cupcakes feature prominently in many other blogs devoted to eating disorders. After a row with her boyfriend, one bulimic girl baked cupcakes decorated with the words ‘I am sorry’. She added mournfully: ‘And now where are those cupcakes? Floating along a sewage pipe.’5 (#litres_trial_promo)

This sort of incident isn’t unusual. Abigail Natenshon, a psychotherapist who treats eating disorders, tells another horror story involving cupcakes: ‘One young woman with bulimia found herself, at a time of great stress, compelled to drive into a 7–11 convenience store where she purchased three cupcakes; she then proceeded to stuff them down her throat whole in an emotional frenzy in the dark and deserted alley behind the store. As far as she was concerned, her binge had begun at the moment when she drove her car up to the front door and did not finish until she had purged the cupcakes.’6 (#litres_trial_promo)

The disturbing subculture of ‘pro-ana’ (pro-anorexia) websites actually encourages girls to starve themselves, or ‘b/p’ (binge and purge). A recurring question on these sites is: are cupcakes easy to throw up? Answer: not as easy as ice cream, but eating them with diet soda can help.

‘It doesn’t surprise me that cupcakes are favourites with bulimics,’ the food writer Xanthe Clay told me. ‘They’re the ultimate eye-candy, primped and styled like a teen pop star, the food incarnation of many girls’ fantasies.

‘In the gossip magazine world, where shopping is the only serious rival to celebrity in terms of aspiration, cupcakes are consumer-desirable in a way a Victoria sponge isn’t. If having an eating disorder is about a desperate attempt to take control, then eating these artificial, too-perfect creations may be particularly satisfying. More likely, the huge sugar rush will feed the craving, and provide a quivering kick of hypoglycaemia. The texture – smooth, aerated, oily – may, like ice cream, be especially suitable for regurgitation.

‘And – just my prejudice this – but perhaps the ultimate emptiness of cupcakes, those empty calories, the way they never deliver on flavour what they promise in looks, is a metaphor for the hopelessness of the woman, or man, with bulimia.’

Although a high proportion of bulimics have ‘issues’ with cupcakes, clearly the overwhelming majority of people who eat them don’t throw them up. They do, however, seem obsessed with them. A chain called Crumbs sells 1.5 million cupcakes every month in 35 US stores; in June 2011, it started trading on the Nasdaq, with an opening valuation of $59 million. And market analysts predict robust growth if Crumbs moves into emerging markets such as China.

The Facebook group for Sprinkles Cupcakes had, at the time of writing, been ‘liked’ by 325,000 people and was spreading the cupcake gospel with near-hysterical enthusiasm.7 (#litres_trial_promo) For Valentine’s Day: ‘It’s back! The first 50 people to whisper “love at first bite” at each Sprinkles receive a free raspberry chocolate chip!’ For Super Sunday: ‘Whether you’re rooting for the New York Giants or New England Patriots or just tuning in for the commercials, Sprinkles Super Sunday boxes will score a touchdown at any viewing party. Each box contains 6 Red Velvet and 6 Vanilla cupcakes, adorned with football sugar decorations and your favourite team’s name. Just don’t get tackled reaching for the last one!’ There were even signs that cupcakes were trying to infiltrate the military-industrial complex: ‘Sprinkles is excited to bring freshly baked cupcakes to the Pentagon! Pentagon employees can find us in the Main Concourse …’

This is a resilient craze, as Dana Cowin, Food & Wine magazine’s editor-in-chief told Reuters in 2011. ‘I have predicted the demise of the cupcake so many times that I’m actually going to go to the dark side now and say the cupcake trend is not going to abate,’ she said.8 (#litres_trial_promo) When an earthquake struck Washington DC on 23 August 2011, someone tweeted that you could tell it had happened because there was suddenly no line outside Georgetown Cupcakes.

Could the ‘emptiness’ of the cupcakes to which Xanthe Clay refers be part of their appeal? Their overwhelming sugar hit fills the consumer with what nutritionists call ‘empty calories’, because they have no nutritional value. But that’s not to say they have no mood-altering value. Sugar triggers production of the brain’s natural opioids, according to Princeton neuroscientist Bart Hobel, who led a study into sugar dependence. He found that rats which binged on sugar went into withdrawal when the supply was cut off. ‘We think that is a key to the addiction process,’ he said. ‘The brain is getting addicted to its own opioids as it would to morphine or heroin. Drugs give a bigger effect, but it is essentially the same process.’9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Opioids are also implicated in bulimia, irrespective of whether sugar is involved. Have you ever experienced that feeling of glorious relief after you’ve just thrown up a dodgy curry? It’s not just getting rid of the food that makes you feel good; it’s a natural elation produced by chemicals in the brain. Bulimics get off on it, to put it crudely.

As Abigail Natenshon explains: ‘The bulimic cycle releases endorphins, [opioid] brain chemicals that infuse a person with a sense of numbness or euphoria. Ironically, the relief passes in short order, only to be replaced by anxiety and guilt for the bulimic behaviours.’ Again, we need to state the obvious fact that most people don’t throw up their food. But the sort of food associated with purging is also the sort of food that many of us have difficulty resisting, because its heavy concentrations of sugar, fat or salt can magnify euphoria and neediness.

It’s easy for urban sophisticates to mock American rednecks or British ‘chavs’ who stuff themselves with fast food, and easy to recognise that they’re in the grip of some sort of addiction. Just look at their waistlines. But the marketing executive who orders a cranberry muffin to go with her morning cup of coffee really ought to ask herself: why am I eating cake for breakfast?

So what about the iPhone? Isn’t it a bit much to call our love affair with this shiny gadget an ‘addiction’? Researchers at Stanford University aren’t so sure: in a survey of 200 Stanford students in 2010, 44 per cent of respondents said they were either very or completely addicted to their smartphones.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Nine per cent admitted to ‘patting’ their iPhone. Eight per cent recalled thinking that their iPods were ‘jealous’ of their iPhones. These are strange things for students at one of America’s top universities to say about their phones, even in jest. They also reveal something about how completely the iPhone has become part of these students’ identities and social frameworks. They’re not just tools that allow us to connect instantaneously and prolifically with others: they’re also being afforded identities of their own – ‘patted’, protected and cherished.

Perhaps it has something to do with how these devices are engineered. They practically force you to perform repetitive rituals of the sort associated with obsessive-compulsive behaviour: from the initial activation of the iPhone to the weekly ‘syncing’ and nightly charging, your relationship to the phone is structured for you. And because the iPhone’s battery life isn’t quite enough to last a full day’s use – and certainly not long enough to withstand hours of constant fiddling and gaming – ‘pit stop’ charges become a regular feature of the day. iPhone users can often be seen checking for power sockets in coffee shops so that, while they get their own fix of caffeine, their phones can get juiced up as well.

‘iPhone owners live in a constant state of anxiety about their battery levels,’ says Milo Yiannopoulos, editor of The Kernel, an online culture magazine. ‘To some extent, the phone ends up structuring their day. For example, they tend not to plan to be out of the office for more than six hours at a time, in case they run out of battery and have to start knocking on doors, USB cable in hand, begging for a few minutes’ worth of charge to get them through the afternoon.’

Talk about the replacement of people by things. The 4S version of the iPhone, released in October 2011, includes a virtual assistant called Siri that responds to spoken instructions and speaks back to the user. This infant technology is already so complex that you can have entire conversations with Siri. She will then execute commands, in some cases fetching very specific data from the internet. ‘Intelligent personalised assistant software is going mainstream,’ says Yiannopoulos. ‘Never in the history of mass-market consumer electronics has the line between man and machine been so blurred.’

It’s significant that a quarter of respondents in the survey above said they found iPhones ‘dangerously alluring’. They are supposed to be. Absolutely nothing is left to chance in the design of these devices. If Apple customers have an embarrassing tendency to anthropomorphise their gadgets, that is because Apple has explored the possibilities of the human mind and body more thoroughly than any of its competitors.

For example, one of the most appealing features of the MacBook laptop line has been the status light, which pulsates gently when the computer is sleeping. Early reviewers cooed over the calming effect of the light, but couldn’t put their finger on why it felt so good to watch. Later, it was revealed that Apple had filed for a patent for a sleep-mode indicator that ‘mimics the rhythm of breathing’ and was therefore ‘psychologically appealing’. As the tech blogger Jesse Young noted, while Apple’s sleep light matched the pace of breathing while we sleep, Dell’s was closer to breathing during strenuous exercise. ‘It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsessive attention to detail,’ he wrote.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Former Apple executives – who frequently brief American technology blogs off the record about the internal culture at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California – describe the lengths the organisation goes to in order to create coveted products. There’s a design-dominated power structure that results in hushed reverence when Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, walks into the boardroom. ‘Marketing and design have been fused into a single discipline at Apple,’ says Yiannopoulos. ‘Everything, from product strategy to research and development, is subordinate to making the products as beautiful and compulsive – that is, as addictive – as possible.’

It works. To quote an extreme example, in 2010 a schoolboy in Taiwan was diagnosed with IAD – iPhone Addiction Disorder. According to Dr Tsung-tsai Yang of the Cardinal Tien Hospital, his eyes were glued to his phone screen all day and all night. Eventually, ‘the boy had to be hospitalised in a mental ward after his daily life was thrown into complete disarray by his iPhone addiction’.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Two days after it opened in 2010, I visited the Apple Store in Covent Garden – a magnificently restored Palladian building dominated by a glass-covered courtyard. The heady aroma of addiction was unmistakable. The misery in the queue for the Genius Bar, where broken computers are diagnosed, was painful to behold. Legs were crossed and uncrossed and eyebrows twitched every time a Genius read out a name. I couldn’t help thinking that these customers looked like addicts waiting for their daily dose of methadone.

I wanted to ask a Genius what it was like dealing with people who weren’t just asking what was wrong with their laptops but pleading for (literal) fixes. But finding someone who would talk was easier said than done.

First I went down the route of asking an Apple Store manager – a friend of a friend – whether he could chat off the record about the way the company seemed to encourage addiction to its products, or put me in touch with someone who would. His first response was encouraging, but then he changed his mind. He would be in big trouble if his bosses suspected he’d put me in touch with an indiscreet ex-employee, and he’d be fired on the spot if he got caught blabbing himself.

So I tried a different route. A start-up CEO friend of mine put out a message to one of his networks. Shortly afterwards, a young man called Ben Jackson, a social media entrepreneur, emailed to say he could meet me for coffee in Soho, London, a few streets from the Apple Store where he had spent two years as a Genius.

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.