Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

By Matthew T. Hunter, J. Morganstein. 2021

For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games, and navigate thousands of apps. He believed everyone should own an iPad. But he refused to let his kids use the device. It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. Greg Hochmuth, one of Instagram’s founding engineers, realized he was building an engine for addiction. “There’s always another hashtag to click on,” Hochmuth said. “Then it takes on its own life, like an organism, and people can become obsessive.” Instagram, like so many other social media platforms, is bottomless. Facebook has an endless feed; Netflix automatically moves on to the next episode in a series; Tinder encourages users to keep swiping in search of a better option. Users benefit from these apps and websites, but also struggle to use them in moderation. According to Tristan Harris, a “design ethicist,” the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.” In many respects, substance addictions and behavioral addictions are very similar. They activate the same brain regions, and they’re fueled by some of the same basic human needs: social engagement and social support, mental stimulation, and a sense of effectiveness. Strip people of these needs and they’re more likely to develop addictions to both substances and behaviors. Behavioral addiction consists of six ingredients: compelling goals that are just beyond reach; irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social connections. Part 1: What Is Behavioral Addiction and Where Did It Come From?

Citations in the corpus

• Addictive Features of Social Media/Messenger Platforms and Freemium Games against the Background of Psychological and Economic Theories (2019, unknown): “Consequently, app developers have a keen interest in designing their online platforms with the goal to keep users occupied as long as possible [30].”
• The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online (2019, unknown): “Sustained attention leads to greater engagement, which leads to greater profits for the social-media companies (Alter, 2017).”
• Habits and the electronic herd: The psychology behind social media’s successes and failures (2020, unknown): “Overuse of social media can be a self-regulatory failure reflected in an obsessive pattern of seeking and using social media that infringes on normal functioning (Alter, 2017; LaRose et al., 2010; Turel & Serenko, 2012).”
• The Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology (2020, unknown): “Perhaps the most common account of this relationship is that it resembles a behavioral addiction (Alter 2017; Bernroider, Krumay, and Margiol 2014; De-Sola Guti (cid:2) errez, Rodr (cid:2) ıguez de Fonseca, and Rubio 2016; Grant et al. 2010; Roberts, Pullig, and Manolis 2015)—a compulsive desire to…”
• The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition (2019, unknown): “…systems, and potentially even internal memory processes; c) the online social world paralleling “real world” cognitive processes, and becoming meshed with our offline sociality, introducing the possibility for the special properties social media to impact on “real life” in unforeseen ways.”