Comment by diggan
21 hours ago
> ITAA is a Twelve-Step fellowship of individuals who support each other in recovering from internet and technology addiction. This includes social media addiction, phone addiction, video addiction, television addiction, gaming addiction, news addiction, pornography addiction, dating apps, online research, online shopping, or any other digital activity that becomes compulsive and problematic.
Seems to be about general IT/computing addiction (too), which seems even better than a group focusing only on "AI Addiction". Seems like a very active effort (online calendar has multiple events per day), across multiple countries and languages.
I haven't participated (or even seen this before) myself, but as far as I can tell, it's basically a fork of AA and their methodology, but I've also not participated in AA so maybe they're different in some major way? Otherwise it seems like a good approach, take something that is somewhat working, make it more specific and hopefully people into that specific thing can get the help they need.
I've taken part in 12 Step programmes and even occasionally attended AA meetings. After browsing the site for a while I can confirm it seems pretty faithful to the AA methodology, except for the addition of the "top/middle/bottom line" classification of behaviours - because in AA sobriety is universally defined as "abstaining from all alcohol" whereas this fellowship is not proposing that members should never use the internet, so the members need to define for themselves which specific patterns of behaviour qualify as "relapse" and which are risky.
This addition is not new or unique to ITAA, as I understand it was pioneered as the "three circles" model by Sex Addicts Anonymous and has been adopted by other recovery fellowships where the definition of clean/sober is not so binary or universal.