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    The Fix
    The Fix
    The Fix
    Ebook262 pages4 hours

    The Fix

    By Damian Thompson

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Addictions to iphones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and sex are taking over our lives.

    Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control. Damian Thompson, who has himself struggled with a range of addictions, argues that human desire is in the process of being reshaped. Shunning the concept of addiction as disease, he shows how manufacturers are producing substances like ipads, muffins and computer games that we learn to like too much and supplement tradition addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling. He argues that addictive behaviour is becoming a substitute for family and work bonds that are being swept away by globalisation and urbanisation.

    This battle to control addiction will soon overshadow familiar ideological debates about how to run the economy, and as whole societies set about “fixing” themselves, the architecture of human relations will come under strain as never before.

    The Fix offers a truly frightening glimpse of the future and is essential reading for fans of Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’, Oliver James’s ‘Affluenza’ and Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World’.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMay 24, 2012
    ISBN9780007436118
    The Fix

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    • 2/5
      The most disappointing read of 2014 thus far. I'd be surprised if I read a worse book this year.
    • 3/5
      Interesting. However, he doesn't manage to back up his science re: addiction-as-not-a-disease very well, and his arguments about addiction as a growing problem would benefit from some actual statistics.
    • 3/5
      Author Damian Thompson is a recovering alcoholic and also someone who doesn't buy the addiction as illness route. Though I have no expertise or reason to totally disregard that addiction might be the result of illness, I found that Thompson does make some really good points.

      One is that with most diseases, you don't have the option of quitting (of course, having said that, if addiction is a symptom, then it may well be that the root cause is something that can't be quit/cured).

      Second, he marks out a pretty fundamental characteristic of addiction, which is that addicts go after things they 'want' not 'need'. He says that in an addict, the wanting phase is more important than the actual liking and it seems to me that any of us with even slightly bad addicty habits can benefit from dissecting our own relationship to things we want/need/like.

      It's a very interesting read, covering addiction to drugs, technology, food, pornography, gambling and gaming. The overall assertion seems to be that addiction is not a disease, but rather a habit that is enabled and cultivated and then nurtured. I personally think there's a little more to the disease case, but this book provides some valuable debate and insight.
    • 4/5
      "My name is Ken and I am addicted to books....." I almost think that Mr Thompson would approve of my 'coming out'. He certainly takes the idea of addiction to the extreme. There are large parts of this book which I found fascinating and well worth reading but the author does have a tendency to take things beyond their limits and announces truisms, without any sign of evidence to back them up. Internet pornography is a growing problem - this is undoubtedly true because the internet is still expanding but, Mr Thompson waves aside the fact that it is replacing top shelf magazines. He feels that internet smut is dragging us all into its clutches and he asserts, without any evidence that, once one has been infected with this terrible addiction, one is drawn, inevitably, into child pornography (unless one is a Catholic priest, in which case, it is merely a sign of one's loneliness and does no harm!) Early in the text, Damien Thompson launches a rebuke to an American bakery that produces cup cakes. These are attractive to look at, give a pleasant sweet sensation and are well advertised: clearly, if the company had a single moral scruple, they would produce ugly, bitter tasting confections with an advertising slogan along the lines of, "Don't eat this rubbish". Apple are equally guilty of the crime of discovering what pleases their prospective customer and making it. Shouldn't be allowed.Mr Thompson is a journalist, with one of Britain's many right wing newspapers, and I suspect that a lot of this book may have originally seen the light of day in articles for crusty old generals, who would like to return to the good old days when all this depravity did not exist (or was not spoken of). There is an interesting book about the changing methods used by twenty-first century western man to obtain pleasure, within these pages: but be warned, the reader does need an "In my day....." filter to reach it; but the effort is worthwhile.

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    The Fix - Damian Thompson

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