Technology operates as an engine of sociotechnical addiction not only because of the dopamine loops it inhabits but because of the recursive deficit embedded in every function it provides. Each convenience extracts slightly more than it gives back, yet disguises this loss through displacement: the cost is shifted outward, onto others, into the future, or into the abstraction of “the system.” What emerges is not merely a transfer of energy or value but a compounding of problems encoded into the very logic of technological growth. The dividend of complexity is never neutral—it is debt structured as progress.
Entropy here cannot be confined to wires, heat, or wasted cycles. It spills into interpretation, into meaning, into the abstraction of communication itself. The continuum runs unbroken from material disorder to semantic overload, from the energy of circuits to the ambiguity of words. As new options proliferate, meanings fold back on themselves like a non-orientable surface, inverting reference and sense across the entire network. Addiction, then, is not only chemical or psychological but systemic: the system learns to crave its own expansion, even as each new layer accelerates its disintegration.
Daedelus Kite 