Is Nonfree Software the Cause of Computer/Internet Addiction?

What is "proprietary Internet"?

Tim Berners-Lee made WWW all free to use. Html is an open standard. Abrowser is free software.

i think youre half right. i would say no, humans have evolved for millennia and more to value interaction, and action. we all used to run through forests and hunt animals (or be hunted.) we are thrill seekers. then we would get tired and rest. we had active lifestyles and people were not as common but we often had someone around. we are tribal. no matter how modern life tries to condition us to something else we form tribes, cliques, clubs and clans.

and modern life tries to condition us to something else-- office workers, passive consumers, investors. im not an anti-capitalist but this isn't really who we are as a species. (to this day,) this isn't in our dna.

so we are BORED. and we crave interaction but its increasingly superficial (not all of it, im not trying to paint this as bleak. modern life is a parody of life itself.) im not saying modern life invented using chemicals, shamans and other cultures have used them for longer. but emotions and especially thrills are chemicals and if the world is bored, abuse of chemicals increases.

television taps into that need, but video games do it better. i dont think you can blame that on video games being non-free, there are just more non-free games. if they were all free software they would work the same.

but not everything would work the same if it were free software. like ive said so far, a lot of this is the modern human condition. the part where i think youre right, is that media companies exist to turn media into soft drugs. and they want control, more than they want money. i mean if you control people, you can take their money and get them to do more-- control is worth more than money. lots of people (most clincical narcissists and every large corporation that acts that them) will actually throw away money on gaining more control of people, because it is a sound investment if business isnt something you care about the ethics of.

so youre right, but i think at least half of it is just the modern human condition (under these circumstances) with or without software.

i believe in the principles of free software, but id like to extend them to a free society. one of the things i like about free software is that it isnt action alone-- theres a lot of thought in it. and id really like that thought applied to more than software-- coding is my favourite hobby since i was kid and ever since, but i dont want this philosophy to stop with "just" software even if its an essential place to start because the modern world is heavily shaped and structured by digital platforms.

(what is proprietary internet? everything online that isnt free. sure the platform is free-as-in-freedom, but it is full of non-free applications and some of it runs on non-free extensions. "proprietary internet applications/usage" would probably be more accurate.)

I just realized...what I really meant when I said "proprietary internet" was "proprietary ISPs." I think I made a huge mistake here.

i don't believe that software being proprietary has to do with addiction at all the behaviors would likely be the same if people used GNU/Linux just with less governmental backdoors i belive addiction would still happen even if the vast majority of people used gnu/linux the main reason why we dont hear of addition to gnu/linux is that the vast majority of people are not using gnu/linux as far as nonfree games there is no evidence that acess to the source code would remove addiction unfortuanly addiction to technology is a thing even tech companies such as apple acknowledge it as reality

i would recommend the American Psychological Association and

American Psychiatric Association

certified professionals

What's wrong with punctuation? Not using capitals, commas or full stops.

no full stops is a tricky one. thats all devanagari has, and ancient hebrew (the torah at least) doesnt even have that.

a lot of python and bash stop behaving as intended when you capitalise some of the names, but you can fix that sometimes:

Dir=dir ; Dir()

a lot of extras are sacrificed when people enter things on a phone keypad. the original apple computer, like modern devanagari, sometimes did not have letters with more than one instance of case.

It's an intriguing question. As we learn more about addiction, we realize that it's not caused by "drugs", or gambling, or sex, or danger, or any of things people get addicted to. Like fetish, addiction is a set of compulsive thoughts and behaviours that can become focused on *anything*. So obviously that includes media; TV shows, video games, internet.

But I agree with what freemedia says, companies make their software proprietary software because they want to gain control. They want to control user behaviour in ways that allow them to accumulate wealth, and they want that wealth because it gives them more control. Making technology more addictive than it needs to be to accomplish its supposed purpose (for the user) is one way to control users, and leverage their time spent using the technology to accumulate wealth (by showing ads, selling collected user data etc).

Another way of looking at it though, is that the people building technology are being given the wrong goals by managers who haven't really thought properly about their organization's goals. Joe Edelman talks about this in his talk 'Is Anything Worth Maximizing':
https://vimeo.com/155525207

He uses the example of CouchSurfing. If you told the developers working on the CouchSurfing website that their success was being measured by how much time each users spends on the website, they would set about making the website as addictive as possible. But if you make the metrics about how many users report having found a satisfactory place to spend the night using CS, that would give them a totally different motivation. One that's much less about ensnaring the user, and more about serving their real needs. This IMHO is software freedom ethics applied to network services.

There's Facebook addiction, there's video game addiction (mainly from Nonfree games), there's cell phone addiction (mainly via iPhone), there's overall internet addiction (via proprietary internet), you know what in talking about. At the same time, I barely hear of computer/phone addiction associated to GNU products. Therefore the question above.
Short answer:
no. Addiction can be associated with free or non-free software.
Example: Diaspora has a "Love" button, like a "Like" button.
https://diasporafoundation.org/about#features
Internet (or ISP) addiction: what does that even mean? Too much browsing of any kind?

Longer answer:
"Addiction is a disorder of the brain's reward system / Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences."

There's little smartphone addiction without social media imho.
Many people might be able to balance online life with the rest of their lives. Still, you know about that nagging feeling.

How it works:
https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-social-media

Consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Networking_and_Psychology
http://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health/
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a9931660/psychology-social-media-likes-mental-health-issues/

Devil's advocate:
http://thefuturebuzz.com/2010/04/18/social-media-addiction/

Ways to fix that (therapy aside):
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/managing-your-social-network-addiction.html

Proprietary software is inherently exploitative. You cannot be surprised when it is put towards exploitative aims. That being said, I'm not sure that Facebook is exploitative because is is closed source and proprietary. It is exploitative because the company analyzes human psychology and creates false reward systems for people. It manufactures addiction for more monetary value.