Google Glass Addiction Is Real Because Despair Is Real

While in treatment for alcohol abuse last year, a Navy service member was noticed repeatedly tapping his temple with his right index finger. He was, doctors deduced, involuntarily seeking something like a phantom limb — an appendage to which he had become so accustomed, he would reach for it despite its absence.

In the addiction unit he experienced "withdrawal," he said, and displayed the typical short-fuse responses of early recovery. But he told doctors that the alcohol withdrawal was not the main problem — he was struggling and suffering without his Google Glass device perched on his face.

The case has been described this week in the media as the first instance of internet addiction caused by Glass — the first "Glasshead." Like a fulfilled prophecy of techno-dystopias, the patient emerged, enslaved to his reliance on a computer. Before rehab, the man had reportedly been wearing Glass 18 hours a day, removing it only to sleep and bathe. What had begun as a useful workplace tool became the apparatus through which the man accessed the whole world.

Whether it makes sense to call this a case of genuine addiction may be a question of semantics, but it's nevertheless an all-important one. If we can meaningfully talk about Glass addiction, or indeed the broader category of internet addiction, this reveals something about how we conceive of our relationship to these technologies. It's possible to apply a framework of addiction pathology here, but that's a sad reflection of how we conceptualize addiction and mental illness in general.

Internet Addiction Disorder was included in the most recently updated fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). It's a positive sign that there is institutional recognition that individuals are suffering because of their relationships to cyberspace — recognition of suffering is a good thing. The issue, then, is where we locate the source of pain. To suggest that the internet, or the device, is the object of troubled dependence is arguably misconceived.

As reports on the Glass addict noted, the patient suffered from depression, social anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder. It's speculative but reasonable to consider how a wearable device like Glass might mediate and shape experience in a way that appeals to the socially anxious or depressed. Glass might be "addictive" in this way as an object relied upon for rewarding feedback. This sort of self-medication, as with substances like alcohol, can certainly exacerbate anguish and produce new problems. But the pain was already there and won't suddenly disappear when someone puts down the glass or the Glass.

That doesn't mean, however, we should talk about Google Glass as a neutral object. Nor alcohol or cocaine or any more typically addictive substance. Writing in the Guardian, Jess Zimmerman rightly stresses that Glass is no more an apparatus than any other technology through which we communicate and mediate existence — language is an apparatus, so is medicine, so are contact lenses. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben described an apparatus as "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."

Zimmerman's point, that we should not fear Google Glass rewiring our brains because everything rewires brains (that's how brains work), is valid. We are not distinct from these apparatuses insofar as we become the selves that we are through them. But our entanglement here does not make critique impossible. We can still ask if we like the sort of worlds and selves produced and maintained through certain apparatuses. We can also ask whether we like a world that produced these apparatuses in the first place.

Google Glass, as artist and writer Molly Crabapple noted after experimenting with the device, subsumes our gaze into the glare of a corporate empire. A lot of things do this, to be sure — we can talk about Hollywood's role in producing and reflecting the male gaze, for example. But Glass makes this explicit and even brazen. As Crabapple wrote, "In the networked world, we are all sharecroppers for Google. We take our deepest selves and turn them into light on glass cables, to be sold as marketing data or sandwiched between ads. Google Glass takes this further. With it, the act of looking can be separated from the looker. Eye speed can be tracked. Gaze can be owned. The consumer becomes the consumed."

Glass addiction, then, is not just a reliance on a neutral apparatus — it's a dependence, to the point of anguish, on the world as processed through Google. I'm no digital dualist: I don't think our online lives exist in a reality different from offline life. They are aspects, different modes of relating, in an enmeshed single reality of cyber- and meatspace. As such I find the idea of a Glasshead just as tragic as that of any life overdetermined and enslaved to the demands of capital. Sometimes it just hurts more than others and people end up in psych units, involuntarily tapping their index fingers against their temples.

In this sense, there is something grimly correct about considering the Google Glass case as belonging to the categories of the DSM-5. This psychiatric bible is, as Sam Kriss brilliantly imagined in the New Inquiry, a dystopic story all its own. "The sufferers of DSM-5," he writes, "have no voice; they're only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back…. DSM-5 describes a nightmare society in which human beings are individuated, sick, and alone." A world viewed through Google Glass is not necessarily such a "nightmare" world, but a world that feels navigable only through Glass is a despairing one indeed.

Follow Natasha Lennard on Twitter: @natashalennard

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