The 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?
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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
Neither will we. The tech bomb is not exclusive to China.
Seems like a great racket. If I was one of those kids, I’d likely leave hating my parents and authority in general.