exploring the inner workings and dynamics of companies building products engineered to hook us, addict us, and hijack our attention to sell more ad inventory
Business model shapes outcomes. In a subscription based model, you build tools people use and pay for. In an ad-based model, you build engagement hacks.
As Tristan Harris put it:
âwe've moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based... See more
One of the weirdest things about the Internet is that even though weâre just a click away from the greatest authors of all-time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to just scrolling Twitter
The reason weâre so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation â even in that we skip forward â is that weâve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more