Inside China’s Internet Addiction Rehab Camps

Posted By: JacobSloan Jan 23, 2014

internet addictionThe New York Times has a short film exploring life inside one of China’s hundreds of boot-camp-style treatment centers for electronics-addled youth who spend night and day gaming online, in some cases allegedly wearing diapers to avoid taking bathroom breaks. The camp director compares the internet to “electronic heroin” and warns that the teens “know the internet inside and out, but nothing about human beings.”

Questions abound: Is China at the forefront of what will become a global epidemic of Compulsive Internet Use? Are computers being scapegoated for problems that are in fact more subtle and complex? Could you survive several months cold turkey?

JacobSloan

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  • BuzzCoastin

    the internet is indispensable
    if you’re under 40
    above 40 & you can pull a foggy excuse out of your hat

    20 years ago in China it was 1929 US
    few cars, Moa style clothing, consumer goods were shoddy & scarce
    today
    about 100 million cars hit the street in the last 10 years
    millions of multistory buildings went up
    500 million Chinese went online
    they build homemade smart phones

    everything changed overnight
    and they’ll never recover from this techno-nuclear bomb

    • American Cannibal

      Neither will we. The tech bomb is not exclusive to China.

  • echar

    Seems like a great racket. If I was one of those kids, I’d likely leave hating my parents and authority in general.