Breaking news: Silicon Valley pioneer Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, and Tim Cook will be stepping up from his previous role as chief operating officer to become CEO.

This post talks a bit about my employer, Pixar Animation Studios, but in no way should be construed as anything but my own opinion. I cannot, and do not desire to speak for them.

Without doubt, TV, papers, blogs and everyone else will be spending time over the next few days looking both forward and back over his career and predicting what the future holds for Apple and Steve himself. I won’t peer into my crystal ball for either: I have no special insight with regards to either, but in the twenty years I spent at Pixar, I did have a view from the side lines, so I thought I might offer a bit of perspective.

Anyone who has talked to me for any period of time knows that I’m not a typical fan boy. I have an inherent skepticism about the rich and powerful. We have a culture in the U.S. which tells us that the those who are successful must be different from the rest of humanity. They simply must be smarter, or braver, or more creative or more insightful than the rest of humanity. I don’t believe it. The fact is that while all those factors play some role in success, good old fashioned luck also plays a role. You could be smart, diligently apply all the advice you got from all the smart people you know, and you won’t necessarily become the next Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates or (yes) Steve Jobs. I suspect that there are alternative universes where Steve Jobs isn’t even Steve Jobs: where a seemingly meaningless event occurred in his alternate existence, and Apple doesn’t get formed. I’m also one of those lefty socialists who doesn’t believe that there is necessarily a link between that which is good and that which is profitable.

But in spite of those caveats: I still think Steve is a remarkable leader. Perhaps uniquely so.

I’ve worked at Pixar since 1991, and in those early days Steve was seen regularly around our campus. I was just a beginning programmer back then, in my first real job, and I couldn’t help but be intimidated (not a usual emotion for me). He was a force of nature. He was ruthless and uncompromising in his pursuit of his vision, and seemed to have little patience for those who didn’t share it. But I’ve experienced the reality distortion field first hand, and it’s very real.

Here’s the thing: he really does have a vision. A bold vision. An inspired vision. And he has an amazing talent for surrounding himself with people who could help in achieve that vision.

The success of Apple and Pixar both required a bit of luck. You can look back to individual things that occurred, and had things worked out a bit differently, perhaps neither would have become the iconic brands that they both have become. But there is no doubt in my mind that Steve’s leadership was essential to the success of both.

Pixar and Apple share a simple principle: that producing good products is the way to build a good company. For Pixar as a film studio, story matters. For Apple as a producer of computers and consumer products, design matters. Both companies try to produce stuff that is simply insanely great. There is a certain respect that both companies have for consumers. Both believe that it is important to put out good products. Customers can tell the difference. Your second best work is not sufficient. Only your best can change the world for the better.

And yes, before everyone piles on, there are lots of things that I don’t particularly like about Apple, not the least of which is my aforementioned skepticism about anybody or anything which becomes too powerful or influential. I don’t really want Apple (or Facebook, or Google) serving as mediator for all my interactions with my fellow man. My support of open source and the culture of sharing is in conflict with the universe that Apple and Steve himself would probably desire. But whatever philosophical differences I have with Apple, I’m reassured that Apple at least has a philosophy, and whatever failings it might have: it’s forward looking, and centered around producing the kinds of products that people want to buy.

Tim Cook, you’ve got some big shoes to fill.

To Steve Jobs, thanks for challenging not just your companies but the entire computer industry to “think different”. You’re going out on top. Best wishes for health and long life.

My tweets this morning included a link to a story by Scientific American editor Anna Kuchment, entitled “How to raise a science fair champ”.

How to raise a science fair champ | Scientific American Blog Network

On the one hand, it’s a mildly interesting look at some talented kids who have risen to the top of the increasingly prestigious world of science fairs. But the thing that struck me was how it totally failed to deliver on the promise of the title. The story repeatedly mistakes correlation with causality.

Here’s the basic problem: Kuchment is looking at 15 finalists for the first Google science fair, and trying to determine what they have in common, and then implies that if you can do the same thing with your children, they could join the same kind of elite company as these 15. But that’s a serious mistake, and an incredibly persistent one.

Take for instance this:

Leaving stats aside, the top things finalists named as the foundation of their interest in science was having a family member who was interested in science and making trips to the local science museum.

That seems like an interesting fact, but it is actually not a fact, but just a story. There are plenty of people who aren’t science fair champs (or even interested in science at all) whose family members are interested in science and who take them to science museums. Kuchment is reasoning from the result back to the cause. If one is to actually learn something about what makes science fair champs, one needs to look not just at champions, but all the non-champions as well. And when you do that, I suspect that you’ll find thousands of candidates who have many or all of the distinguishing characteristics of the golden fifteen that Kuchment interviewed, save that they didn’t win science fairs.

As human beings, we are all interested in achievement. Mark Zuckerberg becomes Time Magazine’s Man of the Year because he was the brains behind Facebook. We idolize Steve Jobs because of the meteoric rise of Apple over the last decade. We like to read the stories of the rich and famous, because we hope that if we can just do what they did, that we could attain some small portion of the success that they have. But it is devilishly difficult to learn anything truly useful from the stories of the few, because we naturally don’t hear the stories of the many who did all the same things, but didn’t end up rich and famous.

No doubt that a lot of my current sensitivity to this kind of thinking is coming from the fact I’m currently reading Duncan Watt’s Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer. It’s an excellent book, and tries to shake our confidence in the common-sense reasoning that we all seem to rely on when we look at the world around us.

This morning, I was a bit late coming into work. I decided to sit until 8:26AM Pacific to see if Atlantis would be launched on the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. Low cumulus clouds threatened, but in the end the shuttle rose on its pillar of fire for the last time, and in eight and half minutes, discarded its main fuel tank and was safely in orbit.

Reporters have been trying hard to find some perspective on the event, and in my experience, mostly failing. They put microphones in front of kids and ask them if they want to travel to space someday. They talk to astronauts and former astronauts and ask what it was like to be in space.

I think all that is slightly off the mark.

I was born in 1964, and was a child of the Apollo space program. I remember watching the first tentative steps of Neil Armstrong on the moon on our old Zenith black and white set. Even at that young age, I was interested in space and astronomy. It was a few years later that computers entered my consciousness and come to dominate my time, but I continued to be interested in space and astronomy.

For kids my age, the usual default answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” was “an astronaut.” But more than just being an astronaut, there was sense of optimism: that if the moon was reachable, what other achievements could we reach if we applied our energy and our industry. We dared imagine a world without hunger, and without poverty. Diseases? Cured. Poverty? Eliminated! Ignorance? Educated.

Perhaps it was just a dream, but it was a healthy one. It was a dream that challenged us to greatness.

This morning, Atlantis launched for the last time. Vying for attention on CNN was President Obama, who held a press conference to discuss the meager 18,000 jobs that were created in the last month, the weakest performance since September of last year. When coverage returned to the launch, reporters interviewed a number of people, and the question of the expense of the launch was mentioned. After the launch, the economic news reasserted itself. One reporter said that the growth industries for the next year are likely to be in retail sales and in food service.

I was lucky. As a kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut. Today? Kids dream of being to make just a little more than minimum wage. It’s a pity that I didn’t see my wish fulfilled, but it’s a tragedy that a generation of young Americans won’t experience their dream, even as limited as they are.

Here’s the reality: the space program is little more than a jobs program. Certain industries and certain states (CA, FL, MD, TX) benefit from our dreams of slipping the surly bonds of earth, but the vast majority of Americans don’t get nearly as much benefit. In purely economic terms, the Space Shuttle is a disaster: it never delivered the cost savings that optimistic forecasters suggested were possible in boosting satellites to orbit. So, people argue that the money would be better spent elsewhere, that our dreams are simply too expensive.

The U.S. military spent more on air-conditioning temporary structures in Iraq and Afghanistan than NASA spends in a year. While I appreciate and laud the efforts of our troops, I can’t help but think that cutting our dreams so we have enough money to air condition tents isn’t the kind of society that we should be dreaming about.

For a generation, the space program provided us with inspiration and optimism. As the shuttle program winds down, for all its faults it still seems like the end of a dream. I can’t help but wonder what dream will unite the next generation of Americans in their quest for greatness.

It’s Friday, and Fridays are good days for thinking. It’s unclear that it is a good day to write about what you’ve been thinking, but here goes anyway.

I’m involved in a couple of different communities (hacking and amateur radio) which might be characterized as “ageing”. As a young adult, I was influenced by Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. It gave a name to the kind of computer exploration that I was interested in, and the description of the early MIT hacker community showed that there were other people in the world who were interested in understanding and programming these amazing machines. Despite the fact that I was coming onto the scene as part of the microcomputer revolution of the 1980s, I felt that the spirit of these hackers was akin to my own. They seemed to experience the same odd pleasure that I got when exploring a machine, and making it do something unusual or unexpected. Many people in this community who are my age are interested in trying to instill some of these ideals into a younger generation of hackers, and have asked what we can do to mentor them along.

In amateur radio, there is a long history of “Elmers”: hams who help younger and more inexperienced hams by giving them the benefit of their experience. There is little doubt that the ham radio community is aging: while attending Pacificon last year, I suspect I was in the youngest two percent of attendees, and I’m in my late forties. It’s a very common thing for hams to actively seek ways to bring new blood into the ranks of the licensees. For some, it’s just a way to help ensure the continued use of the frequencies that they enjoy, but I would suspect that the majority of hams merely want to pass on some of the experiences and joy that they have derived from their favorite hobby.

But here is my somewhat skeptical observation: neither community does a very good job. And frankly, that’s been a source of some puzzlement on my part. For all the effort that we expend trying to extol the virtues of computer exploration or the construction and use of radios, we aren’t attracting huge numbers to the hobby. In fact, I suspect that this kind of advocacy hasn’t resulted in any measurable increase in either community. Why is that?

I suspect it is because mentors don’t actually create interest in subjects. No amount of extolling the virtue learning about antennas or building radios or learning CW ever convinces anyone that they should become a radio amateur. No promoting of the virtues of programming, learning the internals of machines or security will ever make it interesting to someone who isn’t already curious and interested. Either you find such things interesting, or you do not. No amount of advocacy can turn your apathy into interest.

Consider it this way: I’m deeply uninterested in fashion. There are people who nonetheless view it as their passion, as a source of considerable joy in their lives. That’s actually okay. I’m just not one of them, and no amount of cajoling on their part is likely to change my mind.

I’m also relatively (and somewhat oddly) unmoved by music. For me, piano lessons was always mostly a chore. I simply don’t experience the joy and emotions that people get from listening to most music. Intellectually, I can appreciate it, but I don’t feel passionate about it.

If I can’t be mentored into a passion for music and fashion, why am I puzzled when my own efforts to mentor people into things I do enjoy fall mostly on deaf ears?

That’s not to say that mentors can’t be helpful: they absolutely can. The experience of people is incredibly useful, and can help the inexperienced see farther and better than they could stumbling on their own. And, if you happen to find a mentor who has gone along a path you are already interested in, they can serve as inspiration. But they do not themselves create the passion and drive that makes a person try to master a new subject. TThat comes from individuals themselves, and it is inappropriate for “mentors” to imagine that it is through their own virtue that their passions are perpetuated.

A couple of illustrative examples of how things can go wrong:

To become a ham radio operator, you need to become licensed, which means passing a relatively straightforward exam. The entry level license is for a “Technician” class license, which basically requires getting 70% correct on a multiple choice test drawn from a published question pool. It’s not very hard, and in fact a great many ham radio clubs hold “ham cram” events, where they meet for a day to try to cram enough stuff into your head so that you can pass the exam the same day.

One particular ham I know hates these events. His claim is that these events are “cheating” and that they deny the new licensees the opportunity to learn the material “properly”. He usually follows this with a story about how he learned this stuff. How he had to be licensed as a novice, and had to upgrade. How he had to master Morse code, work his way up through the license classes. How he learned to do everything at the foot of his mentors, and how he was glad they were around. He’ll then usually lapse into a diatribe about how kids today “play too many video games” or “don’t work hard like we used to” or “feel they are entitled”.

It makes me groan inside.

A ham radio license isn’t a diploma. It’s a license, just like a fishing license. It grants limited, uses of a shared public resource. Without it, you can’t transmit on amateur frequencies. Hence, it’s really just a road block: it gets in the way of you experiencing the thing that you might be passionate about. From my perspective, you should figure out a way to get licensed so you can get on with your passion. From my friends perspective, that road block should be as high as possible, so you really deserve the privileges you enjoy.

He’s not a bad sort, really. He thinks he’s helping novices, but in reality he’s just trying to shore up the road blocks that keep people from entering the hobby. His “mentoring” is significantly blunted by his desire to make people “pay their dues”.

I’ve heard a number of people speak on “how do we encourage the next generation of hackers”. I similarly find these kinds of talks misplaced. When I reread Levy’s Hackers, I experienced some nostalgia, but I also thought there was a lesson to be learned. Levy highlighted three different groups of hackers: the original MIT hacker community which grew up around the PDP-1, the Hardware Hackers who brought about the Altair computer, and the game hackers who surrounded Sierra Online. What I think is amazing is that none of these stories gave any hint of the revolution in computing that was to come. The rise of the Internet, search and social media simply isn’t visible in this book. Richard Stallman is mentioned as the “last real hacker”, with a sort of wistful nostalgia, with the near certainty that he will simply fade into obscurity, totally missing the revolution of free and open source software that he helped inspire. There is no sense that some of the early work of (say) the Xerox Alto would eventually fuel the second phase of Apple’s existance, and ultimately change pretty much everything about computers.

In other words, much of the “hacker” revolution that some of us (myself included) like to refer to with a sense of wistful nostalgia wasn’t as closely linked to the revolutions that were to come as we would like to imagine. When we draw on our own early experiences to try to find ways to educate or inspire newcomers, we often do so through this overly narrow view of history. We might think that “really” understanding machine code or architectures are important, and that the only way to do that is to go through the same sort of exercises that we did. But consider this: if we would have had access to the machines and information back then, we wouldn’t have tolerated this kind of spoon feeding either. We would have simply grabbed all that we could in pursuit of our passions.

Young people today are no different.

Here’s my recipe for success: don’t bother trying to recruit people to your passions. The best you can do is find those already interested, and make it easy for them to find you. Use social media. Publish your passions on your blog. Do what you love, and do it visibly. And when you find others who enjoy the same thing, try to engage. Do stuff. Collaborate. Gather. Exchange.

And most importantly: don’t try to convince someone that the way you enjoy something is the only proper way. Don’t dismiss their approach to their passions, simply because they aren’t the same as your own. Seek to help remove the roadblocks that keep them from progressing, don’t introduce new ones yourself to justify your own approach.

And most of all, have fun, and keep doing what you are doing!

What do you all think?

I was directed to a posting about the lawsuit between Geohot and Sony by a twitter from @adafruit.

Sony drops lawsuit against Geohot – a maker, hacker and innovator… « adafruit industries blog.

I think the article’s title is rather misleading. Sony didn’t drop the lawsuit: the lawsuit was settled. While Geohot admitted to no wrongdoing, he agreed to a permanent injunction barring him from distributing the information and code that he developed for the PS3. I don’t actually view this as a victory for hackers: Sony knew full well that once this information was published, the cat was already out of the bag. They also likely knew that any monetary damages they could have conceivably extracted wouldn’t pay for the costs of actually fighting the case. The only thing that they could really hope for was to use the threat of legal action so silence Geohot and any other PS3 hackers from further dissemination of their works.

Which is precisely what they did, and precisely what they got. The message from Sony wasn’t that “if you hack our system and publish the results, we realize that’s within your rights as an owner of Sony equipment”, it was “you can expect us to have our lawyers call you, and threaten you with a lawsuit that could cost you your life’s savings unless you capitulate.”

I don’t view this as a huge victory for owners of Sony products.

Some of you might be wondering what it is about this Karplus-Strong algorithm that has got me interested. Of course, long time readers of my blog might well have wondered that about any of a number of things that I’ve written about. What is it about checkers that prompted me to write a checkers program? What is it about prime numbers or pi that made me write programs to compute them? What is it about the FFT? What is it about FPGAs and computer architecture? Why did I find Brian Beckman’s Physics of Racing intriguing?

I think it has something to do with hidden complexity.

Consider for example the Karplus-Strong algorithm that I coded up. It’s relatively simple: just a few lines of code. But it has complex behavior: behavior that is in some sense surprising. It’s hard to see from examining it how it can generate the kind of sounds it produces. Ken Steiglitz’s book doesn’t really provide enough background on how it works until 100 pages in, and even then, there is a lot of subtlety which isn’t really apparent. There is genuine genius in the dozen or so lines of code that make it up: genius that hints at hidden knowledge and new ideas.

Ditto for checkers. Payne did some of the first analysis of so-called “First Position” back in the late 1700s. These are some of the most basic checker positions: two king versus one king and one man endgames. Yet, inside these positions are some deeply complex principles, principles which still make writing a good checker playing program difficult.

Beckman’s Physics of Racing provides some insight into how race cars actually work. Making a car go fast around a track is more than just weight and horsepower. It’s about understeer and oversteer. It’s about balance. It’s about friction and slip.

There is more in these systems that are evident from first glance. In many cases, mathematics provides an insight into the underlying structure and complexity. Computers can lend insight into systems which are too complicated to understand from first principles. And in the end, engineering and actual physical implementation provides us with the glory of music, the fun of games, and the thrill of racing.

Richard Feynman once famously mused that science provided a glimpse into a kind of deep beauty. Rather than paraphrase him, I’ll let him talk…

The world of mathematics and physics and computing provides us an opportunity to explore the deeper inner beauty of things in new ways. And geeky as it is, that’s what I think underlies some of the themes I explore on this blog.

There, glad I got that off my chest. Now, back to work.

I’ve had a few days to sit and think about the proposal that Google and Verizon have published, and I think it is time to write some of it down. If nothing else, in the future it will provide me perspective in future years, as August 12th rolls around each year, this post will circulate back to the top and I can see how prescient I was.

First of all, if you haven’t read it, you probably should. It’s only a couple of pages, so surf on over and give it a read. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal

Okay, did it leave you with an uneasy feeling? It did me. Most of the people I respect seem to think that I should feel uneasy, but a select few seem to think that I’m overreacting. I am not sure which is right, but I’ll let you know what my specific qualms are, and then follow it with a few general comments.

First of all, the section on Consumer Protections qualifies that broadband Internet service providers should not prevent users from accessing “lawful content of their choice” or “running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice”. IANAL, but I’m a little troubled by this concept of “lawful content” or “lawful applications”. Lots of people are whining about this provision, presumably because it prevents them from downloading copyrighted material on the Internet. I’m a bit concerned by this, because it gives the ISP a convenient excuse for nearly any modification of internet access: “we are trying to prevent trafficking of copyrighted materials”.

The section on Network Management is similarly a bit strange. I agree that ISPs need to be able to efficiently run their networks in an efficient manner, but I am a bit concerned at the idea that “any technically sound practice” can be used, without any guidance as to the underlying principles that must be followed. A technically sound practice might include simply disconnecting the top 1% of the bandwidth users to mitigate connection problems. It might even be agreed to by the majority of service providers, but it isn’t necessarily the right choice for consumers. I think it is entirely reasonable to allow ISPs to limit the total bandwidth or capacity, or to price their service according to bandwidth used, but not to pick and choose which services or which users are “managed” out side of those basic constraints.

But the section that really disturbs me is the “differentiated services”. I wonder really what those differentiated services are, and they were very coy in their proposal. Some people might think that delivering VOIP over the internet is a “differentiated service”. Or running an FTP server. Or downloading Netflix. Applications to your mobile phone. All of these things were “distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet” at some point, but now are part and parcel of what people use the Internet for every day. I cannot help but think that this is an attempt for ISPs to carve out special exceptions for neutrality on new services so that they have a preferred track to sell such services and prioritize them over the more “traditional” Internet services. This is bad for competition, and bad for consumers.

I’m also troubled by the desire for an exemption for wireless networks. There is simply no rationale given, merely the assertion that they have “unique technical and operational characteristics”, so the requirement of transparency would be required for operation over the wireless networks. I can imagine that the cellular phone networks are very happy with this provision, since they already run some of the least consumer-friendly and most lucrative networks available, and this provision is essentially carte-blanche to permit or deny any service on their networks that they like. They would have the power to be the kingmakers of the wireless internet, purely by allowing or denying companies access to consumers.

Okay, those are pretty specifically the parts that annoy me. In the end, we give up network neutrality on wireless networks, we grant the ISPs the power to differentiate their networks by selling differentiated products and we have to deal with consumer agencies who are asked to fill a law enforcement role (or who can at least hide behind it as an excuse for nearly arbitrary changes in service). We also agree to allow the industry players to decide what practices can be used to solve their networking problems. And in return consumers get….? Greater transparency, okay. And the ability to ask the FCC to investigate on a case by case basis any abuses, but without any additional rulemaking power.

I’m underwhelmed. I think you should be too.

Google is partnering with Verizon on this proposal, and I think we as consumers should be skeptical of this. After all, the wireless industry engages in all sorts of activities which are terrible for consumers, and which are antithetical to the principles that allowed the vibrant Internet growth of the last decade or more. Wireless companies uniformly try to lock consumers into long term contracts, with high penalties for early cancellation, and often include excessive activation fees for account changes. Consumers often have no protection against accidental overages, or must pay (again) excessive charges to prevent overages. Consumers pay high fees for SMS messaging, despite the nearly neglible costs associated with sending SMS because of the incredibly low amount of information sent. Consumers have to deal with phones which are locked by vendors to prevent a consumer from leaving a particular network and going to a competitor. Consumers cannot get any information about the delivered call quality, or the percentage of dropped calls.

The Verizon-Google proposal talks about the “increased competition” in the wireless arena, but even though there are probably three or four carriers that might reasonably be used in an area, often the effective number is only two or even one major carrier. When you combine this with the long contracts and high penalties for switching, this presumed “competition” simply vanishes.

Consider AT&T’s most recent filing with the SEC. As part of that filing, they had to list the risk associated with the possibility of losing the relatively lucrative exclusivity agreement with Apple and the iPhone. They downplayed this risk in a number of ways, including statements like:

As these exclusivity arrangements end, we expect to continue to offer such handsets (based on historical industry practice), and we believe our service plan offerings will help to retain our customers by providing incentives not to move to a new carrier. As noted above, more than 80 percent of our postpaid subscribers are on Family Talk® Plans and business plans that would involve moving the whole group to a new carrier. Moreover, the vast majority of our postpaid subscribers (including Family Talk® Plan users) are allowed to accumulate unused minutes (known as rollover minutes), a feature that is currently not offered by other major post-paid carriers in the United States, and users would lose these minutes if they switched carriers. As is common in the industry, most of our phones are designed to work only with our wireless technology, requiring customers who desire to move to a new carrier with a different technology to purchase a new device. In addition, many of our handsets would not work or would lose some functionality if they were used on another carrier’s network (even a carrier using GSM technology), requiring the customer to acquire another handset.

The cynic in me reads this as “the majority of our customers won’t switch because our industry has made it painful and costly to switch”.

Okay, so what is my answer? I think that we need clear separation between carriers and service providers. Carriers should not be allowed to sell services or differentiate traffic with respect to source or application. They should be required to be transparent. They should be permitted to sell Internet bandwidth in ways which allow customers to pay for the bandwidth and latency that they need. Consumers should have portability of devices, and be protected against absurd overages and upgrade fees. And the future Googles and Facebooks of the world shouldn’t be stifled by Verizon and AT&T.

Okay, back to work.

Paul Graham has a interesting little missive over on his website on the increasing trend toward addictiveness in our society:

The Acceleration of Addictiveness.

I don’t think it is bad as far as it goes, but I wonder why he didn’t ask what I thought was the obvious question: “why are things becoming more addicting?”

Let’s consider what we eat as an example. Hardly a day goes by when you can’t find a story about the obesity epidemic that is going on here in the United States. We’re getting fatter, and we are having fatter kids. And everyone is asking why this should be happening.

I think the answer is really quite simple: we are addicted to food. Well, not food precisely, but to things that we eat which sort of vaguely resemble food, but are engineered to be addicting.

No doubt some of you are tsk-tsking. You’ll probably post a comment which says that what we eat is a personal choice, that we have control, and that we simply don’t exercise enough and that we eat the wrong things. You probably will also look at the people you know who still smoke, and wonder why they simply don’t quit.

I’m going to say that while you are right in a sense (nobody can get you to quit except you) but you are wrong in that it is simple or easy. Nobody really likes to be overweight, if it were easy to avoid being so, they would. If you examine the rate at which people successfully lose weight and keep the weight off, you’d find it was vanishingly small. In that respect, it seems very similar to drug and alcohol addiction. The actual effectiveness of even well accepted treatment options like AA is near zero, if not actually negative. But that’s another posting…

If there is an acceleration in addictiveness, it seems to me that there is an increase in the number of suppliers of these addictive products. Let’s call them what they really are: pushers. Pushers are willing to sell products to consumers which aren’t really good for them. They are eager to reduce the cost of their product, to increase its availability, and to increase their potency. They may not start selling addictive products intentionally, but let’s face it: it’s much easier to sell products to addicts than to people who can take or leave your product.

Pushers will tell you that they are just filling a demand, and that their consumers are adults who are responsible for their own choices. At best this is denial. At worse, it’s just a lie that attempts to shift responsibility to the addict.

It astonishes me that there are still people farming tobacco and making cigarrettes. Not because it should be illegal, but because it takes an inhuman lack of respect for others to profit from selling them products which are so dangerous. I’ve begun to feel the same way about many packaged food producers and fast food purveyors, who carefully market “food” which is sadly nutritionally deficient and which maximizes the use of things like HFCS and processed white flour to reduce costs and to unnaturally manipulate appetite. And perhaps we should begin to consider companies like Facebook to be in this realm as well: they are using games and social interaction as an enticement to reveal much of your private information, and this only works if they can entice you to return again and again.

If we are concerned about our increasingly addictive, impatient, immediate gratification based society, perhaps we should all be asking ourselves whether we are becoming pushers: purveyors of behaviours which are ultimately bad for us. If we are, perhaps we should consider forgoing the profits that dealing addiction can reap, and figure out how to apply our effort and ingenuity in more productive directions.