Addictions Are Being Engineered | Hacker News
People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.
Cal Newport • Digital Minimalism
It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness. The type of content that gets created and recommended is not the best content, but the content that elicits the most compulsive and predictable response from the human brain.
Jonah Peretti • The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
Tristan Harris, a “design ethicist,” was quoted in Irresistible explaining why people have such a hard time resisting certain sites on the internet: “There are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz • Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller
His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.
“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.
“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper ask
... See moreCal Newport; • Digital Minimalism
These apps and slick sites were not, as Bill Maher put it, gifts from “nerd gods building a better world.” They were, instead, designed to put slot machines in our pockets.