'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Advertisement as a revenue model exacerbates this problem, but I submit the problem stems from how we define success for mobile apps and websites. We directly designate "engagement" as success, rather than customer value provided or even asking our customers if they like the service.

We assume if they are there that they have made a clear-eyed assessment about the value proposition of our product compared to every other aspect of their lives and decided this is the best use of their time.

Because of that hidden assumption, our UX folks are encouraged to ruthlessly push by any means available to get more of that time. There is an assumption that the cutoff switch is somehow built into the user; that the user will say, "Enough is enough" if the engagement every reaches a toxic level in their lives.

And I think what many of the people in this article are trying to say is: That is a bad assumption. We're making our products so sticky that we're starting to surpass some our user's ability to say, "No."

That's the type of stuff smartphones and the web should be used for - supplements that make us have a richer real life, not addictive junk food that competes with reality.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/

Assuming that the publisher openly states they're mining instead of showing ads, and the user understands what's happening, browser-based mining is an attractive alternative to ads.

The first benefit is in privacy: you don't need to track your users personal preferences or identities. The second benefit is that there's no signup, no login, and no fraud.

It does not wholly solve the issue of attention-based revenue. That is, there is still some incentive for publishers to "manipulate" the user into long session times on the site. However, unlike ads, long session time doesn't have to mean long attention time in order for mining to happen.

Browser-based mining is sort of like micropayments: the user is paying the site in electricity. Many people don't want to pay subscriptions and they don't want to see ads. Browser-based mining is a viable alternative.

- Appeal to donation banners are not content, they are a purposely made distraction with a money-making goal. Just like real ads.

- Most people agree that when Windows 10 gives you a popup to buy another Microsoft product, it's an ad. So the "self-advertising" rule is not absolute.

- Charities sometimes purchase advertising space on Google, Facebook, etc... They obviously count as ads, and are blocked by ad-blockers. So nonprofits can post ads too.

- When I looked at Wikipedia fundraising reports ( https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports ), I found it striking how similar it feels to regular ad campaigns. They use A/B testing, talk about conversion rate and all the usual tricks to incite you to pay more.

So I think that while it is safe to call Wikipedia independent, I wouldn't call it ad-free. Whether these aggressive campaigns are justified is another debate.

I'm looking for one that was a browser plugin - you click it every site you want to support (if that site opted in).

Then, your monthly spend eg. $5 is split between all of the sites you chose to support.

It let users commit to paying $N per month for their favorite sites, without having to calculate "should I give 1 or 10.." etc.

Anyone remember this? I saw it on a few webcomics

That is not a system that aggregates or works with the nature of creativity.

What you need is payment for labour hours provided - consistent payment for effort not results.

The challenge is how do you determine effort without looking at results. How do you influence the transformation of labour hours into the right sort of labour services without payment.

http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-fr...

The lecturer gave me a b+ and went on to berate me for using Wikipedia as a source that was not to be trusted. I was 42 (older than than the lecturer) at the time and had innumerable experiences of people questioning facts during my previous life because they didn't fit their narrative, and politely asked him to point me to where in the Wikipedia entry the political manipulation strayed from the science and process... He couldn't and after a phone call to confirm, my mark was bumped up.

Utter academic bs and cognitive bias clouded all judgement on his part. I was pretty pissed off he'd dismiss something before reading it, and the rest of the diploma was spent playing to what they would accept as sources.

Two years later my Pinot noir got 95/100, ironically marked (in part) by our other (more experienced and realistic) lecturer in a blind tasting.

Fuck academia and their fucking higher than thou bullshit based on nothing other than their own ego. And don't get me started on that other clusterfuck Turnitin.

/rant

It's remarkable how well some of Richard Stallman's quotes have aged. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users..."

The idea of a program controlling its users must have seemed very esoteric when that quote was first penned in 1985, at a time when home PCs (let alone ones with GUIs) were exotic: the first Mac had launched only a year ago. By the time I first heard of Stallman's ideas in the '90s, I was surrounded by PCs with GUIs, but still didn't get it.

Now here we are, 30 years later. The first thing most of us do when we wake up is roll over, grab our phone, and look at some software. The existential costs of the non-free software are so high that we read new stories about them in the media every week, and the tech revolution's architects are banning the products they built from their own homes.

For the less frequently cited ending to Stallman's quote is this: "...If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power."

The concerns addressed in the article make it much more difficult to take the posture you’re taking here.

That's might be because of thinking of first order effects only.

>Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans.

Well, who said access to Wikipedia is something good in itself? For one, it might (and I say it does) reduce the number of deeper study on a subject, because of "I can look it up in Wikipedia". So, people that get interested in something don't need to build a deeper connection with their subject, buy books, follow it over time, connect with other people studying it, as a basic (and often crude) summary is always at small distance, and is perceived as enough.

What's worse, there's a whole new entitlement and arrogance about topics, from people who have just cursory experience with them from Wikipedia or some other such source, and feed as qualified on them as actual people who've studied them/experts. Wikipedia feeds the "Read 1 lemma for 5 minutes expert".

It's even worse when the source of their knowledge is not Wikipedia, but random web BS pages -- from conspiracy theories to homeopathy pages to alternative diets, to plain old bad journalist/click-baits.

>They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages.

Both quite irrelevant to the discussion (which is about mass effects), as only a tiny outlier group will ever read those anyway.

It's not the internet/smartphone that is the real problem though. It's that as a civilization we've relinquished control to structures whose only motives are profit-making.

Their "we're changing the world" lip-service always has that ("to make more money") proviso -- not "for the better".

Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans."

This is not really a valid argument. The mere _potential_ to read medieval Latin, or even classical Greek, on your smartphone says very little about the actual overall effect of people having smartphones.

I suspect a lot more smartphone time is spent on Snapchat filters than Homer.

But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social media, games, shopping etc. In that sense, we can be called a bit zombie in the head.

"In your pocket" represents a world of difference.

He talked about it in multiple places, but Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (an interview) discusses it a lot.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7144014-although-of-co...

I also think about distractions (pop ups, bullshit social media, etc) as interrupts that disrupt program execution. The mindfulness movement has organic parallels.

Is mainstream news nourishing to my brain?

The biggest story of the week (year?) has no leakers and limited facts. The media have made virtually no progress on explaining who this person was in Las Vegas.

We do have 12 sources that prove some DC douche called another douche a moron.

I am not letting the media run code on my cpu anymore. Their code doesn’t nourish.

Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Especially with marketing to young children(Animals, Colorful packaging, etc).

Combined with the both parents working, 'busier' modern lifestyle lots of families don't have time to cook 'real' food or dinners. So quick and easy food with low nutritional value is substituted.

It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds.

That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.)

I'm excited about the kind of lifestyle patterns we can design that would be more kind to ourselves but not any less performant.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287

[2]: https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE

We know that it isn’t good for us but we don’t realky have any idea just how destructive it is to not only the user but to society.

My analogy breaks down in that cigarettes have very little to 0 use where as the internet is in fact useful and can be safely used - much like sugar.

I absolutely abhor and condemn his actions and what he had done, but his essay is absolutely brilliant, and is prescient, taking into account it was written way back in 1995.

He is wrong on many counts, but some paragraphs are interesting:

* You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts.

* Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

* A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on.

* While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.

* Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.

* Technicians tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work.

* In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology.

* Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127, 132, 153.)

* What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

* On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.

I hate his actions and his strategy, but it's a chilling read.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been particularly strong in the midwest.). It's like night and day.

It's not a coincidence that the food was remade by large corporations during that time. And likewise it seems obvious to me that we will look back on this time in 20 years and see that big corporations were hacking the human brain, like they were hacking the human body 50 years ago.

Now I don't think it is a matter of evil people in dark boardrooms. But if you believe in capitalism, and you believe in biology, then this effect is almost inevitable. It would be surprising if it did NOT happen.

I’ve always wondered if in the near future, working for Facebook and Google might be considered shameful, just like how working for Big Tobacco became. I remember one person from college who got a job with a tobacco company promoting Reynolds brands cigarettes to his regions Walgreens and Gas Stations. Despite making more than me (and I’m a Linux / AWS Engineer), he was ashamed, didn’t have a LinkedIn, and would tell people he was unemployed.

1: Those who do not use FB, and who make every effort not to be under their influence; and more importantly..

2: Those who do use FB and want to limit their exposure, along with the damage that have endured.

If there is a way to turn the second group into a lucrative business case, FB will make sure they have a piece. After all - throughout the history of the human race, few things have been more profitable than selling both the poison and the cure.[ß]

ß: Incidentally, we have already seen this, perhaps by accident, with the very same tobacco industry you made the comparison to. Tobacco industry sells addictive nicotine products. The pharmaceutical industry sells what they can to make money off of that addiction. Both industries are required to manage their wealth responsibly... and via an intermediary or three, own decent chunks of each other. The more money they individually leech off of their customers, the bigger the second bite is.

If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it!

Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life".

More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates poor children from their mothers, criminalizes their survival, abandons entire communities after natural disasters, bulldozes neighborhoods to make way for hi-rise condos no one can afford, etc. Or the even bigger trauma of living in a world that has the guns & money of this toxic society pointed at them, literally or potentially, every day, forcing migrations and threatening survival of entire populations.

All of these things come into play when we look at why virtual realities are more attractive than real ones, and lead us to have some sympathy for those who use them for networking with others and temporary escape.

If you have not seen it, I recommend reading some of Gabor Mate's work on addiction, for instance "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts".[1]

[0] https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04

[1] Interview with him: https://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/3/addiction

I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they using that to build new machines that pay dividends over time?

You can make an analogy involving software, sure, but it really seems quite different to me. The way I think about it is this: if we all had amnesia and forgot that company XYZ existed, would it still have any value? Under traditional capitalism, yes, they would just need to advertise a bit and rebuild their customer base. But FB and google would be worth close to zero no matter how much software they have.

Infinite Jest is worth the read, it's funny but potent stuff. I'm still struck by the way it depicts the ultimate futility of addiction/pleasure-as-a-goal through the impact of the "Entertainment".

Google has been using AI techniques to optimise ad targeting for 15 years now, certainly since around the time they floated (I used to work there so I know this for sure). These techniques were very successful. Nothing the algorithms did was based around weird psychological hacks, it was mostly to do with NOT showing people irrelevant junk that wasted their time and attention.

You need AI at scale to stop these systems doing stuff like showing tampon ads to men, or video game ads to elderly women. But nobody sane would describe these outcomes as even remotely the same as "addiction", even though they increased click through rates a lot. To do so makes a mockery of people who suffer with actual addictions.

This sort of article in the Guardian presents vague handwaving that sounds superficially intellectual without actually being so. The goal is to whip up hysteria to justify some crusade against tech companies, when the actual problem is not addiction but rather people who actually quite enjoy social media but perhaps feel a pressure or expectation that they should be doing something else.

Will we transcend the instincts that got us here, or will we become perpetual slaves to a finely tuned techno-capitalist system we don't understand?

Information I have is dated (~10 years) - Facebook had 'top' psychologists team working to design product behaviour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today’s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

And also "The Pleasure Trap" from 2006 by Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, which is mainly about food but much the same idea. They say humans are adapted to eat a certain variety of nutritious foods. But modern industry has made it possible for businesses to sell large quantities of tasty but non-nutritious foods which people get used to. The foods destroy people's health over time in various ways by malnutrition from missing micronutrients and fiber which leads to cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. Getting back to enjoying healthy eating generally requires four to twelve weeks of suffering through "neuroadaptation" to appreciate the more subtle tastes of whole healthy foods. The book is summarized here in detail: http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm...

Here are some other related books emphasizing how children are being harmed by pervasive commercial media and what parents can do (all easier said than done) include:

* "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online"

* "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time"

* "Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids-and How to Break the Trance"

* "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"

* "The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"

Or, as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder.

In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing.

[1] http://www.behaviormodel.org/

[2] https://inboxwhenready.org

I really need to do that again.

Regulation is the only solution, but that’s just tossing the ball to another team and hoping for a magic win.

Even should regulation manage to handle this - it’s only the first step between this and what worse comes next.

We’re moving directly to the worst options of mine control and people are only useful for the neurological reactions you can reliably induce in them.

Any 'higher' purpose comes from within.

That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" I can't help but think how happy the system is to have them; how well they're fulfilling their role. VR glasses will simply close the loop.

But the most interesting part was when we got back. When I jumped onto hacker news I was overwhelmed by all the headlines about totally different things all simultaneously being interpreted by my brain as must reads. It was total overload, and not at all what I was expecting. The Hacker News feed is it’s own kind of brain hack. I wonder how much more pleasant (but less addictive surely) it would be if each page had say 5 headlines with a few paragraphs underneath. Like a newspaper.

Another interesting thing that i’ve Observed since I started observing my Hacker News usage: I read maybe 2 paragraphs of an article then read the top 3 or 4 comments then go to the next thing. I don’t stop until I have some kind of realization about something. Or I see my own views on something validated. Then I put the phone down seemingly satisfied. It seems I come here for the hit of dopamine that comes from “you learnt a thing” or “people agree with your view on a thing”. The addictive part seems to stem from this. I stay here until I get that moment.

You are triggered to come here when you’re bored. Your action is simple loading (or reloading) the page. The variable reward is that you get interesting content and discussions...but you never know what they will be.

Over time this pattern of behaviour becomes habitual. You probably open Hacker News at similar times of the day in similar situations.

This basic pattern applies to all social media products. It’s very well understood and a key part of modern software design.

Facebook and Twitter are notorious for producing disastrous results among individuals careless with their identity. Reddit permits the free creation of pseudonyms, but the material is less engaging and currated with less rigor.

I wouldn’t rate HN as “addictive” since there aren’t any real barriers to ignoring the site, and it lacks the kind of reach other sites have in “finding you.” This is to say that the usage patterns of the other sites you mention, saturate social circles so thoroughly, that it’s hard to not hear them mentioned in daily conversation.

You may prefer HN, and it may fill certain gaps in regular daily activity, alleviating boredom to an extent, but if you find it infectous, that’s merely a reflection of the intellectual personas that get moderated into your attention based on merit.

Is stimulating conversation addictive? Is reading material deleterious? At some point the buck has to stop with the individual’s own judgement.

On the other hand, if I want to be more charitable to HN (or possibly to rationalize my own addiction), I see Hacker News as a kind of social circle , like an English cofeehouse in the 18th century where thoughtful people congregate to discuss what they see as the important issues of the time.

I've completely gotten rid of facebook with the help of News Feed Eradicator, I don't have an Instagram (though I rarely will get caught up recursively stalking people which leads to feelings of envy / contempt / anomie), and I find most of reddit to be utterly banal pop culture TV-for-the-internet.

So, maybe hacker news is an addiction, but the social aspects of being able to connect with all of these brilliant people, that I otherwise wouldn't, and hear their thoughts and experiences is something I find extremely valuable, addiction or not.

1) HN has less content, so it is much easier to run out of things to look at.

2) Its content is less digestible on average, so you don't get nearly as deep into "mindless info consumption" mode.

That being said, it definitely has those characteristics to an extent.

I think we need to be aware of what we are (currently) addicted to. The author of the like button has been able to break free of social media, and like a former smoker, it sounds as if he is on a crusade to help others break free too. I am unsure that democracy/capitalism as the author describes is working/evil -- both are 'like' systems that allow a person to choose and receive a reward, and we can choose not to participate. There are worse systems. And, perhaps we can create better ones.

I wonder if someone could come up with a compulsive trigger for general education. That would be something.

- I have a gmail filter for emails that contain 'unsubscribe'. They skip my inbox so all emails I get are real ones I need to look at. (It's magic)

- I don't have facebook installed. Only messenger.

- Twitter notifications off.

- Snapchat notifications off. (Except direct snaps)

- Instagram notifications off except for comments.

- Slack notification only for direct messages or mentions.

- Installed 'News Feed Eradicator for Facebook' and broke the habit of passively scanning facebook when bored: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

I get basically no notifications except for IMs, important emails, and direct slack mentions. I occasionally scan facebook on my phone but I only do it like once a day.

I have a couple of dollars and can afford lots of luxuries. Yet, it's the things I don't do that seem the most luxurious.

I spent years tethered to my phone. I was on call, at all hours of the day and in pretty much any location. To not be beholden to a cell phone is true luxury.

And, if you can get away with it, don’t install work “productivity” apps like Slack and Asana on your personal phone.

Laptops seem just as bad now so I usually don not disturb my MBP as soon as I start my day.

It most definitely gets co-opted... karma whoring, reposting, marketing campaigns posing as that goodwill to the kid in the children's hospital with cancer amateur picture... but that's exactly what this article is about: the forces of maximizing shareholder value find what works and wiggle their way in.

The resistant subreddits appear to be the ones that look at it as a human problem, not something needing a technical fix. That is, they create community rules around what is acceptable content and what isn't welcome, they encourage the content that furthers the subreddit's mission, they moderate away content that seems to break the rules, etc. Some communities are even organized around recognizing these things (eg r/hailcorporate)

Again, all of that can be (and does get!) co-opted for evil, but there are methods that can make groups in social media more resistant.

Problem is at the end of the day, those things don't pay the bills. Ultimately you need to find a way to align profits with good habits. Until we find that, go hit the donate link on the Guardian article. And I think Wikipedia was doing a fundraising campaign recently too.

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

The problem is training your brain to capture and monopolize that brief moment of boredom and inactivity.

A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909:

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

There’s lack of reading, albeit not necessarily due to television (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec...)

There’s a direct link between television and obesity (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807)

And more general health dangers (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-tel...)

Etcetera

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimi...

I think you're right, Dan. It seems like a pretty existential problem at this point.

What is the alternative here? Is there such a thing as an ethical "news feed", and how would I make one ethical?

(PS: HN: Beeminder is awesome and you should try it).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will

I realise that the balance of this particular equation is different for everyone, but I also think many people are convinced they will be missing out when in reality they won't be.

For example if you're a user interface designer or wearables programmer, then you'd benefit from the recent papers from these PhD students more than you'd benefit from spending hours trying to find meaningful content on reddit or twitter https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/phd-students

I found it to be a pretty well researched look into the way heavy internet use can change our brains.

Although the book was good on its own, I also found its references section helpful as a launching point to discover other interesting books and academic papers on related topics.

I must say that emotional blackmail lost whatever power it had rather quickly.

That anyone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. has witnessed and used telephones plugged into walls is implied.

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock also has several quite striking observations.