The Military Cure
You lose track of time online without really noticing. A few hours gone and you don’t have anything to show for it, but you also don’t particularly regret it. In China they decided this was a disease. Serious enough that by 2008 it became state policy—internet addiction in teenagers required actual intervention.
They built camps for it. Military-run rehab centers where parents could send kids who were spending too much time online or in internet cafés. The cure was basic: discipline, drills, routine, authority. Strip away the comfort and force them back into structure. The logic being that if you just remove the choice long enough, the addiction breaks.
I doubt it actually works the way they think. You can force someone to run drills and stick to a schedule, but you can’t force away the fact that being online feels better than whatever’s actually happening in their room. The program assumes addiction is a weakness that enough military discipline can cure. Maybe it works on some people. Probably most of them just learn to hide it and resent the people who tried to fix them.
What strikes me is how different we handle the exact same behavior. Here, spending hours gaming or scrolling is just life. Nobody panics. Nobody sends you to boot camp. There, it’s treated like an emergency. At least someone’s panicking. At least someone thinks it matters enough to do something drastic, even if that something is completely wrong.