Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
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Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
The world now offers a full complement of digital drugs that didn’t exist before, or if they did exist, they now exist on digital platforms that have exponentially increased their potency and availability. These include online pornography, gambling, and video games, to name a few.
Anna Lembke • Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximize button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features turned soc
... See moreGurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
asked directly, developers invariably claim that players want “entertainment” or “fun,” defining this as stimulating engagement that derives from risk, choice, and a sense of participation. “Entertainment is the common denominator,” Randy Adams told me. “People want entertainment.” Gardner Grout confidently stated the same at the start of his inter
... See moreNatasha Dow Schüll • Addiction by Design
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and ke... See more