No matter how often we say we’re creeped out by technology, we acclimate surprisingly quickly if it anticipates what we want.

our behavior has become a design material, just as our intuitions about the physical world once were—and those behaviors are often involuntary.

It’s not just that objects can make our lives easier—it’s that the objects in our lives can in fact change us.

Over time, our society puts more and more of ourselves into the objects we create; we invest them with a greater and greater sense of who we are, and who we want to become. Those artifacts, in turn, allow us to become more than we were before. This work isn’t done. The next phase in user experience will be to change our founding metaphors so that

people would readily reveal something hidden about themselves, if you asked. But doing so took a special kind of courage.

In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next. Our prior assumptions lend us confidence about how a new technology works. Over time, we find ourselves farther and farther from the rungs we started with, so that we eventually leave them behind,

“Facebook’s most consequential impact may be in amplifying the universal tendency toward tribalism. Posts dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ rise naturally, tapping into users’ desire to belong. Its gamelike interface rewards engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and responses, training users to indulge behaviors that

This was a designer’s way of looking at the world: the sense that if our better selves are within easier reach, then of course we’ll be better people.1

the software wasn’t a thing separate from the laptop. It was all the same experience, one big web of interactions.