A Discontented Land

What makes internet addiction so notoriously hard to escape? Drawn from long-term fieldwork at an internet addiction rehab in the Pacific Northwest, A Discontented Land offers a fresh perspective on the urgent question of technological dependency. But it also poses a deeper question: what do high rates of internet addiction indicate about a troubled American society—particularly its young men? Through a series of rich character studies, Joseph Tulasiewicz shows how digital technology created a vicious cycle of compliance and convenience among rehab clients, an extreme example of a wider social malaise in the US for frictionless experiences engineered by Silicon Valley technologies. By placing emphasis on a luxury healthcare facility and affluent and stagnant young men, this book provides an important complimentary perspective to the research on addiction that has tended to focus on situations of precarity. This shift in vantage enables a new critique, one that explores the crisis over-abundance in the context of widening inequalities.

Tulasiewicz demonstrates that popular medical and neuroscientific theories do not adequately explain or treat internet addiction. His in-depth portraits of rehab clients indicate that we need to think more imaginatively, exploratively, and humanely. The answer to escaping the ennui of digital life, evoked most intensely by internet addiction, may not be expensive medicalized therapy, but the cultivation of an exuberant, uninhibited, and purposeful way of being.