The Acceleration of Addictiveness
What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.
Context & Ripple Effects
Graham's essay lands five months after Techdirt picked up the question of whether internet addiction might earn a place in the DSM — but where that debate asked whether heavy internet use is a disorder, Graham reframes addictiveness itself as a supply phenomenon. His core claims, stated plainly: hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin and crack are all concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors, and the process producing such concentrations is accelerating.
What makes the piece notable is where it comes from. Graham sits inside the startup machine he is warning about, writing for the founders who will build the next round of products — so this reads less as outside critique and more as a memo to the people best positioned to act on it, arriving just as clinicians weigh whether behavior-based addiction deserves formal classification.
First-order effects
- Founders and product designers in Graham's immediate audience gain a sharper test for what they build — not 'is this engaging' but 'is this a more concentrated form of something milder' — at exactly the moment behavioral addiction is on clinicians' agenda.
Second-order effects
- If consumer software follows the liquor-and-tobacco pattern Graham describes, competitive pressure among makers pushes toward progressively stronger engagement mechanics ahead of any clinical or regulatory check, since none yet applies to attention-driven products.
Third-order effects
- The essay points toward addictiveness becoming an explicit design dimension — evaluated alongside utility and cost the way potency eventually was for alcohol and tobacco — with the DSM debate marking the first institutional step in that direction.
The trend: Products across categories are being refined into ever more concentrated forms of their addictive predecessors, outpacing the clinical frameworks built to classify them.