by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
USA Today publishes “CyberSpeak” from columnist and radio talk-show host (not to be confused with “talk radio show host”), Kim Komando. For over a decade now she has been helping people become more comfortable with digital technology and the Internet. She has won the 2007 Gracie Award, and is a journalist I greatly admire.
I give her that introduction, because I’m going to rip her latest USA Today column, entitled “Web Delivers New Worry for Parents: Digital Drugs,” to shreds, turn the shreds into mulch, and turn the mulch into compost.
We all know that music can alter your mood. Sad songs can make you cry. Upbeat songs may give you an energy boost. But can music create the same effects as illegal drugs?
This seems like a ridiculous question. But websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.
All your child needs is a music player and headphones.
The article goes on from seizing the “maternal fear gland” by the throat to explain that she’s talking about binaural beats, which supposedly affect your brain waves and give the listener a high not unlike taking a drug. If this sounds familiar, it’s a lot like the plot behind the William Shatner-created “Tekwar” series of novels.
(Continued…)
There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They’re often called “idozers” or “idosers.”
One thing that Komando failed to note in her article – but which came up with a quick google search, was that the slang name probably came from “i-Doser” – an application which sells these audio files with the explicit indication that they simulate the effects of different drugs.
However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files (“doses”) that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.
So, assuming it’s not a scam, selling audio files that mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana is sinister – how? Even so, we’re talking about purely digital intoxicants – if they do work (they don’t, as we’ll see later) they are not actually physical toxins. I don’t have a kid, but if I did, I’m pretty sure that I’d rather buy him a $50 set of good headphones and some MP3s and tell him to go nuts than see him use the real thing.
A sound file isn’t going to harm you chemically, like illegal drugs can. There’s no legal liability. The only thing that’s left is some sort of mental damage, and I’m pretty much sure listening to glitch noises ain’t gonna turn your kid into Reverend Jim Ignatowski.
In fact, Komando even admits that:
Dr. Nicholas Theodore, a brain surgeon at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, said there is no real evidence that idosers work.
However, Dr. Ignatious P. Thimblebottom, who lives in the Fairie land of Gallifrey and teaches at Gumdrop University with a Doctorate in Pixienomics, has made it clear that there is conclusive make-believe evidence that i-Doser works.
Companies that sell digital drugs claim they’re safe. Supposedly, they won’t affect your physical health.
Let’s think about this for a moment.
Yes. Let’s.
The sites claim binaural beats cause the same effects as illegal drugs. These drugs impair coordination and can cause hallucinations. They’ve caused countless fatal accidents, like traffic collisions.
Of course, if you’ve got headphones on while driving, that can also cause traffic collisions…
If binaural beats work as promised, they are not safe.
Why? It’s easy to strengthen the evidence for the argument without strengthening the argument. There’s simply no evidence that binaural beats are not safe, probably because there’s no evidence that they work. Even so, I think that a sound file that you listen to, with an effect that wears off quickly, is a wee bit safer than ingesting or injecting a chemical into your body, which can stay in your system for days, weeks, months, or years.
They could also create a placebo effect. The expectation elicits the response. Again, this is unsafe.
If i-Doser does work for some people, it is probably because of the placebo effect, much like that episode of DeGrassi Junior High that I barely remember, where two Canadian girls buy “pills” from a guy with a skateboard who turns out to be selling them multivitamins, yet they make complete idiots of themselves anyway.
But why are placebos unsafe? By definition, placebos are the safest drug known to mankind. Placebos are the only drug that has no side effects. In fact, I hope they come out with placebos for all the illegal drugs. “Phonyjuana,” “Fauxtacy,” “Hero-ain’t with Opi-yums,” and my favorite: “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.”
At the very least, digital drugs promote drug use. Some sites say binaural beats can be used with illegal drugs.
Trippy music combined with illegal drugs is not news. People have been doing this since they found out that jazz went really well with bathtub gin. (Before that, it was tobacco, peyote and fire-dancing, but none of that was technically illegal until the Puritans came and ruined it for the rest of us.)
So, talk to your children. Make sure they understand the dangers of this culture. It could be a small jump from digital drugs to the real thing.
And… the moral outrage is complete. Truly, we have not seen such quality reporting since Melvin P. Thorpe’s insightful and shocking expose that “Texas Has A Whorehouse In It.”
Maybe before talking to your children to make sure they understand the dangers of this culture, it might be a better idea to make sure that you understand the real dangers – instead of going off half cocked. Moral panic, like “Fat, Drunk, and Stupid,” is no way to go through life. (I used to be an arch-conservative in high school, so I’ve tried both…)
Of course, this isn’t the first call to action asking parents to overreact. There have been moral crusades against Rock & Roll, Heavy Metal, and Rap, Comic Books, Video Games, Dancing in a Lithgow Occupied Zone, and Dungeons and Dragons.
In fact, regular readers of Network Performance Daily will note that I, myself, engage in such hippie-drug-culture freaky hobbies as playing diced roleplaying games, and am something of an afficionado.
There’s one RPG in particular, “StarChildren: Velvet Generation,” in which aliens who have been listening to 1970s radio come to our planet, but due to the pesky speed-of-light transmission propagation delay problem, don’t actually get here until 2070, at which point the “Ministry of Music” wages a “war on rock and roll” because “music can alter your mood – just like drugs!”
At the time, I thought it was an insightful parody of the war on drugs combined with an excuse to create a game with the tagline: “They came from the stars… to rock!” At no time, until reading Kim Komando’s article, did I realize that it could also have been subtitled: “A Dire Warning Of Things To Come.”
Which is appropriate, because, unlike, I presume, Kim Komando, I actually tried some of these i-Doser files, and recorded myself doing it.
I cautiously sent out an e-mail warning my co-workers that I would attempt to alter my brain in an attempt to “get high” and that if I was to be seen trying to open up one of the windows in a misguided attempt to fly, to break out the tranquilizer guns.
We also talked about what happened if, by some chance, the stuff actually worked, and that I’d be exposing IT departments around the world to the new “digital devil.” We pointed out that if i-Doser actually represented a threat, that they could detect the files using existing anomaly detection software and keep a forensic record with a retrospective network analysis device.
My experience, documented in the YouTube video embedded below, speaks for itself. That’s not going to stop me from speaking for it anyway because doing so means the search terms will show up on Google, we will get hits, and my bosses will hail me as a genius for writing such an article on such a stupid premise.
The long story short – listening to the “Alcohol” track, which is supposed to give me a buzz equal to 5 glasses of gin – didn’t do anything but give me a headache, much akin to the kind you get when you end up seated next to the engine on a long commercial flight. I was neither enjoying myself, nor was I impaired. Other than being the kind of guy who thought this was something worth testing in the first place, I had no additional mental instability.
I have no idea what the i-Doser application developers were high on at the time that they thought they could charge money for this, but I am absolutely sure that whatever it was, it wasn’t i-Doser.
The irony: I feel higher and more elated after listening to “The Perfect Drug” from Nine Inch Nails. We know music can affect mood, but by Kim Komando’s argument, music itself is a threat because it does exactly that.
The problem, of course, with moral panic, is that sometimes things like “evidence,” “reason,” “proportionality,” and “common sense” get thrown to the wayside in the effort to “think of the children” – and about nothing else, apparently.
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