The (Partial) Solution To "Limbic Capitalism"

"Limbic capitalism" is the term of art given to the phenomenon by which Big Business deliberately engineers addiction to various products and services to encourage more consumption, and therefore more profit.  It is an externality-generating practice that is ultimately a collective action problem at base.  We currently see it in practically everything from Big Tobacco to Big Tech to Big Media to Big Food to Big Booze to Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big Casino and so on, all the way up to and including Wall Street, the world's largest casino of all.  And of course, the only true and complete solution to end limbic capitalism for good is to end capitalism itself completely.

After all, it's all part of the same general addiction at base:  i.e. growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host. 

That said, partial solutions can still be worthwhile, and we should not let the Nirvana Fallacy paralyze us in that regard.  Ending capitalism itself completely is a lot easier said than done, or at the very least is NOT a particularly quick process.  Thus, in the meantime, one "low-hanging fruit" measure to take is to pass a broad law that makes it categorically illegal to deliberately, and for no legitimate purpose, design a product or service to be more addictive than it would otherwise be.  That would of course include wilfully adding any gratuitous and questionable additives or features that cannot otherwise be legitimately justified.  That would of course include a wide range of troublesome food additives, and of course practically all tobacco additives a fortiori, but also the more subtle things such as curated "addictive feeds", "infinite scroll", and "frictionless sharing" on social media, and various blatantly gambling-like features built into some MMO video games as well.

Some things are of course naturally or inherently addictive (to one degree or another) in themselves, granted.  And humans are wired to seek such things out, thanks in part to our evolutionary baggage.  But there is NO justifiable or redeeming reason at all to deliberately make such things MORE addictive than they would otherwise be, for the sake of filthy lucre.

Of course, at the same time, we would also still be wise to heed Lysander Spooner's famous and timeless maxim:  vices are not crimes.  We ignore such a crucial distinction at our peril, as history has shown.