Dr. Carl Erik Fisher

And we kind of get stuck into a binary view, which is both misleading and harmful, where we say, oh, you're either addicted or you're perfectly normal.

In 2026, nobody feels normal about the internet.

Yeah, I would start by saying the supposed distinction between behavior and substance addictions is maybe not as big as we think.

And this is where the culture starts to come in.

Because of a legacy of oppressive criminalization in the United States especially, and because of some really sort of nasty and stigmatized narratives about drugs, we've invested substances with special powers as if they are the main thing driving addiction.

That's a relatively recent...

socio-historical phenomenon.

Like nowadays in official modern medicine, there's a very strong distinction between substance addictions, alcohol, tobacco, et cetera, and then behavioral addictions.

And the only one that's really strongly recognized by the medical authorities like psychiatric organizations and the WHO is gambling addiction.

But, you know, there's some addiction theorists who say all addiction is a behavioral addiction because if I drink alcohol, I have to do the behavior of drinking the alcohol.

Yes.

There are a lot of people studying it.

In some ways, there's almost more research in Europe.

The Germans in particular are very big on social network use disorder.

There's a few other labs here and there that are studying it, but they haven't really reached consensus on how to characterize what social media addiction means in a clinical definition.

I'm more of a bioethicist and a theorist, and my focus is more on just the core concept.

Like, how can we clean up the core conceptualization of addiction?

And I think the problem with social media is precisely that the old models of addiction don't quite apply.

If you apply a different model that says everybody lives on the spectrum of diminished control somewhere...

Then it makes more sense because most people would say casually, I think, oh, I feel so addicted to my phone or I feel so addicted to like streaming or everyone's got something.