in use, this would suggest Google value our search activity at about
$12 per device.[84]
Given that our attention is so valuable, tech companies have a big
incentive to keep us online. The more time we spend using their
products, the more information they can collect, and the better they
can tailor their content and adverts. Sean Parker, the founding
president of Facebook, has previously spoken about the mindset of
those who’d built early social media applications. ‘That thought
process was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time
and conscious attention as possible?”’ he said in 2016.[85] Other
companies have since followed suit. ‘We’re competing with sleep,’
joked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in 2017.[86]
One way to keep us hooked on an app is through design. Tristan
Harris, who specialises in the ethics of design, has compared the
process to a magic trick. He notes that businesses will often try and
guide our choices towards a specific outcome. ‘Magicians do the
same thing,’ he once wrote. ‘You make it easier for a spectator to pick
the thing you want them to pick, and harder to pick the thing you
don’t.’[87] Magic tricks work by controlling our perception of the world;
user interfaces can do the same.
Notifications are a particularly powerful way of keeping us
engaged. The average iPhone user unlocks their phone over eighty
times a day.[88] According to Harris, this behaviour is similar to the
psychological effects of gambling addiction: ‘When we pull our phone
out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what
notifications we got,’ he suggested. Casinos capture players’
attention by including payoffs that are infrequent and highly variable.
Sometimes people get a reward; sometimes they get nothing. In
many apps, the sender can also see if we’ve read their message,
which encourages us to respond quicker. The more we interact with
the app, the more we need to keep interacting. ‘It’s a social-validation
feedback loop,’ as Sean Parker put it. ‘It’s exactly the kind of thing
that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re
exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.’[89]
There are several other design features that keep us viewing and
sharing content. In 2010, Facebook introduced ‘infinite scrolling’,