How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds
Wow, I&#x27;m glad this was posted.<p>I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s.<p>Modern app design isn&#x27;t about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem.<p>For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happens to not be be necessary for Facebook to be a successful business.<p>Go to a developer conference by one of the big tech companies, and speakers generally aren&#x27;t talking about doing good things for the user. They&#x27;ll use euphemisms like &quot;increasing engagement&quot;. There&#x27;s concepts like &quot;permission priming&quot;, psychological tricks to get the user to do what you want. There&#x27;s books written about how to maximize app addictiveness. It&#x27;s stuff that mildly screws over the user, and it guides the product designs that affect the lives of billions of people. It&#x27;s not good.