I don't know what to think. I used to believe that porn wasn't a real addiction until I read pic related.
Most porn is not as expertly crafted as gambling machines. A huge portion of it comes from a community formed around sex and fetishes, made by artists or amateurs, not technocrats and stakeholders. What do those do? OnlyFans and Pornhub? Japanese games where you replay the same animation over and over? AI? I believe that what's addictive here isn't the sites or the even the content itself (though some goon/porn mommy videos come close to trying to fuck your mind MKUltra style, but I don't think we're there yet). I believe there is a way to make pornography truly addictive, but we haven't figured it out yet for some reason. But with the advances in AI maybe we'll soon hear about someone masturbating to death.
The biggest take away from the book is that the truly degenerate gamblers don't play to get rich, they play to keep playing. They enter a mental state where they melt away and cease to exist for a while. Money is not the reward, it's the fuel for their trance. They are burning away and they know this, but as soon as they are no longer in the furnace they start feeling pain. Do you know what kind of people end up here? Old lonely ladies, losers and cowards, people who had no idea these machines were meticulously designed to hold and keep their attention.
I recently started reading Eroticism by George Bataille, and what I take away from it is that people are lonely and afraid of death, and non-reproductive sex is one way for them to overcome this state (discontinuity) temporarily. "Continuity" for him is what lies beyond the individual: it is existence itself, it is what death is. The gambling machines have the same effect of "killing" an individual and making them melt into a continuity that lasts as long as their money allows them.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't think porn addiction is a real thing yet, not for the vast majority of porn consumers. I think it's still acceptable to call it a "compulsion" (although academia and the psychology field and le experts are absolutely fucking pozzed, either being paid for or totally insane, and are not to be trusted at all).
I believe that what makes you act like this is
>a total lack of purpose or meaning in life
>fear of life and death
>constant bombardment of irrelevant and disturbing information
>low self-esteem
Getting a job, having a girlfriend, being a normalfag wont cure you. I don't think a single book will cure you either. When I read Ted K I thought it related to this too. There's nothing to do, nothing to keep your mind busy...
Do you think that if the infrastructure that keeps alive the internet and electricity collapsed tomorrow because nukes started flying and now you're in WW3, you'd feel so compelled to jack off? And then you'd start experiencing excruciating pain and nausea if you didn't cum?