The Happiness Industry (24 page)

The DSM-V, which was launched in early 2013, added a further item to the menu of dysfunctional compulsions: internet addiction. Many doctors and psychiatrists are confident that this latest syndrome qualifies as a true addiction, no less than addiction to drugs. Sufferers show all the hallmarks of addictive
behaviour. Internet use can overwhelm their ability to maintain relationships or hold down a career. When internet addicts are cut off from the web as a form of ‘cold turkey', they can develop physiological withdrawal symptoms. They lie to those they are close to in an effort to get their fix. Neuroscience shows that the pleasures associated with internet use can be chemically identical to those associated with cocaine use or other addictive pastimes.

If we can look beyond the neurochemistry for a moment, it is worth asking one simple question: what is the internet addict addicted to exactly? One of the psychiatrists who has explored this phenomenon most closely is Richard Graham, based at London's Tavistock Clinic. And the conclusion he has reached brings us squarely to the pathologies of the new concept of the ‘social'.

In 2005, Graham was studying the ways in which video games impacted on the behaviour and attitudes of young people. It was thanks to this expertise that a teenage boy was referred to him with symptoms of depression, who was also a compulsive player of computer games, in particular a game called Halo. The boy played for four or five hours a day, obsessively trying to reach the next level of the game, cutting him off from his friends and family in the process. His parents were concerned about the amount of time he spent in his room. And yet the gaming in itself didn't strike Graham as a particular cause for concern.

But in 2006, the boy's situation became rapidly more serious. He switched to playing World of Warcraft, which coincided with a marked increase in his amount of gaming time, to as much as fifteen hours every day. His parents became increasingly concerned but felt powerless to do anything. The situation continued like this for another three years. Reaching breaking point on Mothering Sunday, 2009, they turned off his modem. The boy
immediately became violent, to the point where they had to call the police. His relationship to the video game had become beyond his, or anyone else's, control.

The key difference between the two games is that World of Warcraft involves playing against other gamers in real time. It involves respect and recognition from real people. Unlike Halo, which the boy had played obsessively but not addictively, World of Warcraft is a social experience. Even while the boy remained alone in his room staring at moving graphics on a monitor, the knowledge that other players were present offered a form of psychological ‘hit' that wasn't available from regular video games. Clearly, the boy was not simply addicted to technology but to a particular type of egocentric relationship which networked computers are particularly adept at providing.

Graham has since become a noted authority on the topic of social media addiction, especially among young people. What he noticed, in the case of the World of Warcraft addict, was simply an extreme case of an affliction that has become widespread in the age of Facebook and smartphones. Social media addiction may be classed as a particular subset of internet addiction, as far as the DSM is concerned, but it is the social logic of it which is so psychologically powerful. Not unlike the gamer, people who cannot put down their smartphones are not engaging with images or gadgetry for the sake of it: they are desperately seeking some form of human interaction, but of a kind that does nothing to limit their personal, private autonomy. In America today, it is estimated that 38 per cent of adults may suffer from some form of social media addiction.
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Some psychiatrists have suggested that Facebook and Twitter are even more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol.
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The ubiquity of digital media has become a lightning rod for
media hysteria. The internet or Facebook can be blamed for the fact that young people are increasingly narcissistic, unable to make commitments to one another, cannot concentrate on anything which isn't ‘interactive'. This typically includes some latest discovery about what ‘screen time' is doing to our brains. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that individuals who use social media compulsively are more egocentric, prone to ‘exhibitionism' and ‘grandiose behaviour'.
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But rather than treat the technology as some virus that has corrupted people psychologically and neurologically, it is worth standing back and reflecting on the broader cultural logic at work here.

What we witness, in the case of a World of Warcraft addict, a social media addict or, for that matter, a sex addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page, when they're supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal, is the heir to Jacob Moreno's ethical philosophy, in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next. This inevitably leads to vicious circles: once a social bond is stripped down to this impoverished psychological level, it becomes harder and harder to find the satisfaction that one desperately wants. Viewing other people as instruments for one's own pleasure represents a denial of core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.

One grave shortcoming of this egocentric idea of the ‘social' is that none (or at least, vanishingly few) of us can ever constantly be the centre of attention, receiving praise. Nobody can be God the whole time; mostly they must be the angels who surround the deity. And so it also proves with Facebook. As an endless stream
of grandiose spectacles, Facebook has been shown, on balance, to make individuals feel worse about themselves and their own lives.
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The mathematics of networks means that most people will have fewer friends than average, while a small number of people will have far more than average.
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The tonic to this sense of inferiority is to make grandiose spectacles of one's own, to seek the gaze of the other, thereby reinforcing a collective vicious circle. As the positive psychologists are keen to stress, this inability to listen or empathize is a significant contributor to depression.

A key category in social network analysis is ‘centrality'. It refers to the extent to which a given ‘node' (such as a person, but it could potentially be an organization) is integral to its own social world. In Moreno's terms, one might even say that it offers a measure of social ‘godliness'. Again, where a network is larger than a few dozen people, this is something that is almost impossible to calculate without computing power. But throw in twenty-first-century processing power and the ubiquitous digitization of social networks, and the logic of centrality comes to divide and rule. It governs the Twitter user, who keeps anxious check on her ratio of followers to those followed. It underpins the depression and loneliness of the person who feels marginalized from a social world that he can observe but not participate in. The fetish of celebrity permeates our own social lives, now that we are able to gaze at the carefully curated images and utterances of people we are actually acquainted with.

If happiness resides in discovering relationships which are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic, than those which an individualistic society offers, then Facebook and similar forms of social media are rarely a recipe for happiness. It is true that there are specific uses of social media which lend themselves towards
stronger, more fulfilling social relations. One study of Facebook use distinguishes between a type of ‘broadcast-and-consume' model of usage (in which individuals are either on display, or watching others on display) which leads to greater feelings of isolation, and a more email-based usage, which can lead to cohesion through dialogue.
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A group of positive psychologists has drawn on their own evidence of what types of social relations lead to greater happiness, to create a new social media platform, ‘Happier', designed around expressions of gratitude and generosity, which are recognized to be critical ingredients of mental well-being.

What is left unquestioned by the science of happiness and any social media innovations that may spin off from it is the social logic in which relationships are there to be created, invested in and – potentially – abandoned, in pursuit of psychological optimization. The darker implication of strategically pursuing happiness via relationships is that the relationship is only as good as the psychic value or kick that it delivers. ‘Friend rosters' may need to be ‘balanced', if it turns out that one's friends aren't spreading enough pleasure or happiness. This logic undoubtedly has a hedonistic variant that may spiral into social addiction and narcissism, and a more Zen-like holistic version, which enjoys longer time horizons and fewer ups and downs. But the social serves an almost identical purpose in each case.

Neoliberal socialism

Our society is excessively individualistic. Markets reduce everything to a question of individual calculation and selfishness. We have become obsessed with money and acquisition at the
expense of our social relationships and our own human fulfilment. Capitalism spreads a plague of materialism, which undermines our connectedness, leaving many of us isolated and lonely. Unless we can rediscover the art of sharing, our society will fragment altogether, making trust impossible. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of nihilistic ennui.

These types of claim have animated various critiques of capitalism and markets for centuries. They have often provided the basis of arguments for political and economic reform, whether moderate attempts to restrain the reach of markets, or more wholesale demands to overhaul the capitalist system. Today, the same types of lament can be heard, but from some very different sources. Now, the gurus of marketing, self-help, behavioural economics, social media and management are first in line to attack the individualistic and materialist assumptions of the marketplace. But all they're offering instead is a marginally different theory of individual psychology and behaviour.

The depressed and the lonely, who have entered the purview of policy-making now that their problems have become visible to doctors and neuroscientists, exhibit much that has gone wrong under the neoliberal model of capitalism. Individuals want to escape relentless self-reliance and self-reflection. On this, the positive psychologists have a very clear understanding of the malaise of extreme individualism, which locks individuals into introverted, anxious questioning of their own worth relative to others. Their recommended therapy is for people to get out of themselves and immerse themselves in relationships with others. But in reducing the idea of society to the logic of psychology, the happiness gurus follow the same logic as Jacob Moreno, behavioural economics and Facebook. This means that the ‘social' is an instrument for
one's own medical, emotional or monetary gain. The vicious circle of self-reflection and self-improvement continues.

How would one break out of this trap? In some ways, the example of ‘social prescribing' is an enticing one. While it starts from a utilitarian premise, that individuals can improve their well-being through joining associations and working collaboratively, it also points towards the institutions to make this happen, and not simply more cognitive tips and nudges. If people have become locked in themselves, gazing enviously at others, this poses questions that need institutional, political, collective answers. It cannot be alleviated simply with psychological appeals to the social, which can exacerbate the very problems they aim to alleviate, once combined with digital media and the egocentric model of connectivity which those media facilitate. There is a crucial question of how businesses, markets, policies, laws, political participation might be designed differently to sustain meaningful social relationships, but it is virtually never confronted by the doyens of ‘social' capitalism.

What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called ‘neoliberal socialism'. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it doesn't interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people's moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learnt to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it; what was once the enemy of utilitarian logic, namely moral principle, is instrumentalized for utilitarian ends.

The logic of neoliberalism, stating that ‘winners' deserve whatever prizes they can grab, risks usurping the faint glimpse of social reform contained within this agenda. The ‘social neuroscience' of Matt Lieberman, Paul Zak and others may prove most decisive here, because it offers a firm physiological basis on which to analyse social behaviour as a component of health, happiness and wealth. Focused resolutely on the individual brain and body, this science clearly offers as much – and probably more – to the powerful and rich as it does to the lonely and marginalized. Once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can become dragged into the limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.

It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organization altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch's media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity.
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The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars. Facebook has had to go to great lengths to ensure that the same mistakes are not made, in particular, anchoring online identities in ‘real' offline identities, and tailoring its design around the interests of marketers and market researchers. Perhaps it is too early to say that it has succeeded. Resistance to Facebook's techniques of psychological control gave rise to Ello, a social media platform with no immediately apparent commercial logic, and which includes the right to anonymity. Even if Ello turned out to be a false dawn, it at least highlighted the extent of public dissatisfaction with social networks that are analysed and manipulated for the benefit of marketers.