Essential secrets they don’t want you to know…
The trap is not one thing. It is a stack of them, laid on top of each other so carefully that from the inside it just feels like a normal evening.
There is the feed that never ends, so there is never a natural moment to stop. The reward that arrives on an unpredictable schedule, which is the exact pattern slot machines use because it is the pattern that holds attention longest. The count of likes, which quietly turns other people into a scoreboard. The autoplay that starts the next thing before you have decided you want it. And underneath all of it, a business that only makes money while you are still looking.
None of this requires anyone to be a villain. It only requires a company to be measured on engagement and to be good at its job. The recording below walks through the whole mechanism, piece by piece. Once you have seen how it is built you cannot quite unsee it — and that turns out to be the most useful thing that can happen to you.
First published 20 February 2018
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.