China’s Solution to Internet Addiction Was to Make Real Life Worse

While I’m spending an afternoon clicking through nothing in particular—some gaming, some YouTube comment sections, some inexplicable online shopping—the worst thing that happens to me is that my back starts to ache and I feel vaguely hollow. Chinese teenagers who showed similar tendencies in 2008 were getting sent to camps. Actual military-style residential facilities, months long, run by people who apparently believed the best cure for too much screen time was structured humiliation and drill-sergeant supervision until the kids broke down crying and wanted nothing except to go home.

China declared internet addiction among teenagers a top-priority social problem in 2008. A documentary that went inside these camps is about as grim as you’d expect. The logic seems to have been: make real life sufficiently awful and the internet will seem less appealing by comparison. Which is one theory of behavioral correction, I suppose, though not the one most psychologists would endorse.

The kids had mostly been going to internet cafés. That was the crime. Hanging out in a room full of computers, playing games, doing what teenagers with access to technology naturally do. The response: months of confinement with people who had strong feelings about discipline and weak feelings about the kids’ wellbeing.

My ass goes numb from sitting too long and I complain about it. These kids had it measurably worse.