From: drwier@clients.switch.ch (Dennis Wier)
Newsgroups: alt.recovery
Subject: Computer Addict?
Date: 13 Nov 1992 17:24:35 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


An Introduction to Technophiliacs  Anonymous
	(By Dennis R. Wier )

The same Truth has many forms.

Technophiliacs Anonymous is a fellowship of persons and institutions 
who desire to stop their addiction to technology.

Technophiliacs Anonymous is supported entirely through contributions 
of its membership and is free to all those who need it.

To counter the destructive consequences of addiction to technology we 
draw on these resources:
1. We use our personal willingness to stop our addictive behavior on 
a daily basis.
2. We use the support of the fellowship of Technophiliacs Anonymous 
to increase our capacity to stop our addiction.
3. We practice the principles of Technophiliacs Anonymous to 
recognize and properly respond to addictive behavior.
4. We develop our perceptions and awareness of the correct use of 
technology by the regular practice of meditation.
5. We support the efforts of those who expose the hidden side effects 
of any technological activity.

Technophiliacs Anonymous is not affiliated with any other 
organization, movement or cause, either religious or secular.

What is a Technophiliac?

The word technophiliac is a newly coined word and it means "having a 
pathological love of technology." We use this new word to imply that 
the love is a dysfunction of some kind. We are all technophiliacs in 
the sense that we as a society are dependent on the wide-spread use 
of technology --such as electricity, cars, telephone, TV, computers 
and many other forms. We need to seriously ask ourselves if this 
dependence helps or hurts our human relationships. We need to 
constantly examine this dependence to see if the hidden-side effects 
of technological dependence are destructive to our families, society 
or environment.

Are You A Technophiliac?

Has the use of technology improved or worsened your
 financial condition,
 health,
 relationships with friends and family,
 relationships with your mate or lover,
 relationship with your self?

How many hours a day do you
 watch television,
 work on a computer,
 operate technical equipment,
 talk on the telephone,
 tinker with your car?
Add those hours up. 

Is your total use of technology an indication of your addictive 
relationship to technology?

Now honestly look at your human relationships with the planet, your 
environment your family and your inner self:
 do you know what phase the Moon is in right now?
 do you know which way the seasonal clouds are moving and their 
shapes?
 can you comfortably walk alone in the woods at night without a 
flashlight?
 do you know the type of earth around your house?
 do you tell your children stories, or do you let them watch TV so 
they leave you alone?
 are you aware of environmental stress through your personal 
sensitivity to the behavior of local animals and plants?
 Do you choose to spend time on your computer or watching TV or 
talking on the telephone or tinkering with your car or with other 
technology rather than being with your mate or children?

Long-term focused awareness on technology or on technological matters 
to the exclusion of natural or human relationships indicates a life 
profoundly out of balance.

The cumulative effect of many lives out of balance creates a 
world-wide disaster with profound effects on the environment, social 
and group interactions, institutional and political behavior, human 
and family values and ethics, interpersonal relationships, and 
physical and psychological health, with immense costs in all areas.

What is Technophiliacs Anonymous?

Technophiliacs Anonymous is a multi-faceted fellowship based on a 
desire to know the hidden side-effects of technology, to popularize 
the awareness of the hidden side-effects of technology on our social, 
psychological, economic and spiritual beings, and to counter the 
destructive consequences of technological addiction. With established 
meetings in many cities in the United States and abroad, this 
self-help fellowship is open to anyone, and any institution, who 
suffers from a compulsive need to use technology, and those 
desperately attached to a specific technology such as the telephone, 
the computer, the television, the automobile, etc. Technological 
addiction also includes a pathological interest in destructive, 
coercive and invasive technologies. What all members have in common 
is the realization that the compulsive attachment to technology has 
become increasingly destructive to all areas of their lives -- 
family, career, environment, society and political institutions.
Technophiliacs Anonymous welcomes the participation of anyone 
directly involved in technology or directly affected by technology 
--either beneficially or otherwise, or in the government, or in the 
spiritual areas corned with the subtle effects of technology. We 
especially welcome the participation of human potential workers and 
facilitators.

We seek to understand, and to make known to all, how technology, 
generally and specifically, affects our spiritual, mental, emotional, 
physical, economic, political and social lives, and to cure, whenever 
possible, the deleterious effects of technology; and to learn, by 
sharing information, the correct ways to manage our lives for the 
continued benefits of life-supporting technology without subjecting 
ourselves to the hidden malevolent side-effects.

Technophiliacs Anonymous was first begun in June, 1988 in Berkeley by 
Dennis R. Wier, who realized that technological dependency was 
affecting life in the same ways as chemical, alcohol and love 
addictions, but not only were the deleterious effects felt in 
personal lives, but also in ecological, political and spiritual 
realms. Thus, what may be said of a personal addiction to a 
technology also may be said in a global way as well, that is, one 
side effect of our addiction to automobiles causes air pollution, one 
side effect of our addiction to telephones causes separation between 
people, one side effect of our addiction to television causes loss of 
awareness through induction of trance, one side effect of our 
addiction to computers causes loss of judgement and cognitive 
abilities. There are other, more hidden and more sinister side 
effects of technological addiction.

Co-Dependency

If a technophiliac is addicted to technology there are those around 
him or her who are co-dependent. Co-dependents may not be addicted to 
technology but they derive important benefits from the addiction. 
Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages are co-dependent to alcoholics 
in different ways than a person in a close personal relationship with 
an alcoholic is co-dependent, but both are co-dependent in that their 
common behavior supports the continued addiction of the alcoholic.
A technophiliac has the same problem. Manufacturers of the newest 
computers are co-dependent with the technophiliac. And, if the 
technophiliac is highly paid, those persons dependent financially on 
the technophiliac psychologically support his dependence even though 
it may be personally destructive to the technophiliac.

One of the differences between AA, SLAA and Technophiliacs Anonymous 
is that many institutions --government, educational and business 
--support and encourage technological addiction because they are not 
aware of the hidden side-effect of technological addiction. It is 
possible to make a change in awareness. A change in awareness will 
help bring about an important social change. Some years ago, 
cigarette smoking was socially acceptable and tolerated if not 
encouraged by many social institutions. Smoking was generally 
tolerated as a common and nearly harmless bad habit. Now, with 
greater social awareness of the dangers of cigarette smoking, society 
is now attempting to reduce cigarette addiction by prohibiting 
smoking in public places and requiring manufacturers to place health 
warning messages on tobacco products.

It may seem that technological addiction is a trivial and unimportant 
matter compared to the more obvious and important issue of cigarette 
smoking; yet, technological addiction has greater consequences for us 
all the longer we ignore it. Technophiliacs are not the only victims 
of their addiction, but their creations often are at the root of 
important and world-wide dangers and all of us become victims. 
Beneficial social changes came about because of increased social 
awareness of the dangers of the hidden side-effects of tobacco 
addiction, and the same social awareness now extends to alcohol and 
drug addiction. The same social awareness is now beginning to be felt 
in environmental and ecological areas, because of PCB contaminations, 
acid rain, toxic waste treatment procedures, atmospheric pollution 
and other technological hidden side effects now making themselves 
known. It may become obvious that there is an increasing awareness of 
the hidden side effects to technological things we think are simple, 
 are not.

It is the position of Technophiliacs Anonymous that society needs to 
become aware of its dangerous addiction to technology and to begin to 
cope with its co-dependent issues, as well as the underlying and 
important hidden side effects.

Because technological addiction is so pervasive and is encouraged by 
co-dependent governmental, educational, business and institutional 
entities, the members of Technophiliacs Anonymous include not only 
those who recognize their compulsive need for technology, and those 
with a desperate attachment to one specific form of technology, but 
also those leaders and visionaries who may conceive of the 
possibilities of a right relationship to technology.

Why Technology Can Be Addicting

The use of technology for the purpose of lessening pain or augmenting 
pleasure, by a person, institution, government or business who has 
lost control over the rate, frequency or duration of its use, and 
whose corporate or individual psychological, economic, social and 
spiritual life has become progressively unmanageable as a result is 
addicted to that technology.

Technological addiction extends from teenagers addicted to 
television, to yuppie programmers making piles of money, to a 
military establishment addicted to acquiring newer, faster and more 
exotic destructive forces, to a government intent on knowing and 
controlling everything possible, to real estate agents with a 
perverted sense of "highest and best use."

Technophiliacs Anonymous believe that an addiction exists not just 
because we need or use technology more than others, but because of 
the motive. A technophiliac uses technology to lessen the pain that 
comes from problems in other areas of life. Governmental and business 
institutions use technology to regulate and control life, a behavior 
which is typical of co-dependents.

As we collectively or individually seek someone or something to 'take 
us away from all this,' we are really seeking to avoid reality 
altogether. We come to use a technology as a substitution for other 
satisfactions, to comfort ourselves for real or imagined needs, or to 
avoid or try to make unnecessary attending to a life that seems to 
give us too much pain.

Even the humble electric light, used to provide illumination at night 
to read, has become a substitution for other satisfactions such as 
observing the night, and it comforts us in driving away the 
mysterious darkness, and helps us avoid our own thoughts, those same 
thoughts we need to think in order to keep our life in balance. Even 
the electric light has the side effect of keeping our life out of 
balance in very subtle ways. The cumulative effect of millions of 
lives out of balance causes disastrous effects over the entire planet.
More technology is not the answer.

In our addiction to technology it seems as though the power lies 
elsewhere, and that our lives are being destroyed by forces and 
tensions that cannot be denied and by problems that cannot be escaped.
For the technophiliac, closeness to others has become increasingly 
rare and difficult. It is easier for the technophiliac to have a 
relationship with his car, television or computer than with his mate, 
his children, or his neighbors.

Within an institution, it may be easier for an institutional 
technophiliac to buy more computers, hire more consultants, process 
more data faster, make heavier reports, create ever more 
sophisticated military hardware, than to have a real and meaningful 
relationship with its clients, citizens or employees.
What can you do if you admit, however reluctantly, that technological 
addiction might be the problem, instead of lack of 'enough' or the 
'right kind' of technology?

The Road to Recovery

The road to recovery starts with an awareness of the existence of the 
problem. To get aware that technological addiction is the problem, 
try this experiment: turn off all your electricity for five days. 
Most technological devices depend on electricity in order to work. If 
the changes you go through during the five days are not painful, but 
"business as usual," then you are not addicted to technology. 
However, if the changes are painful, frightening, or perhaps so 
difficult that you cannot finish the five days, then you are a 
technophiliac.

The beginning is simple, but not easy. The admission of powerlessness 
has to be coupled with a readiness to break the addictive pattern -- 
to stay away from all technology for long periods of time. This 
withdrawal from the addictive use of technology generally brings 
symptoms just as physical and as painful as the withdrawal from drugs 
or alcohol. On our own the tension would be too much, the temptation 
to indulge just one more time would be unbearable, and the belief 
that there could be another way to live would weaken.

First we find a sense of wholeness and dignity within ourselves. Even 
while working with technology we need to keep balanced and at some 
distance from it. To find wholeness within ourselves we first must 
know that part of us which is human and then to explore the intimate 
and mysterious relationship we have with the planet.

Meetings

For information on meetings in your area, please write to us and we 
will send you a local meeting schedule or give you information on 
organizing a local chapter.

Evolving A Proper Relationship

The hard questions cannot be ignored. The most difficult questions 
are ultimately the most important because they represent those 
aspects of life which we tend to ignore or deny. In place of facing 
these difficult questions which are different questions for each one 
of us, we create substitute problems, such as technical problems, as 
symbols for our own internal processes. There is the mistaken belief 
that by solving these technical problems somehow the more difficult 
questions will also be solved.

Technology can be known in many ways which will enhance our 
relationship with ourselves and with the universe.
The proper relationship with technology is a distant and cautious 
one. Without spiritual protection in place, dealing with any 
technology ultimately is damaging to us. Any other relationship 
ultimately damages our spiritual, social, environmental and 
psychological life.

Developing spiritual protection is a life-long continuous practice 
which is helped by meditation in all of its forms. The support of 
others in a community devoted to personal awareness and growth lays 
the foundation for right social action and planetary unity.

How you can help 

If you want to help in a real way to popularize these concepts, 
please discuss these ideas with your friends and the media, send 
pertinent newspaper clippings, cartoons to us and write us for any 
information. Help us start a chapter in your area. We will appear on 
TV and talk on the radio about these concepts. Write for helpful 
details, but ultimately the power, benefits and responsibility is 
yours.

---
Comments on the above are welcome by e-mail.  Yes, I am ALWAYS
on my computer!

		Dennis