The result is clickbait rather than substance; life hacks rather than holistic solutions; echo-chambers than generate radicalism rather than understanding,” she said in a talk she gave to Stanford HAI in 2020. “And we are more susceptible than ever to short-term design serving up a stream of addictive content. Like junk food, technology serves up a sugar rush but fails to nourish us.”

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

The problem I had when I wrote The Social Network was that this thing that’s supposed to bring us closer together is pushing us further apart. It gives everyone the impression that everyone else in the world is having a better time, and that if you are not cataloging your life, then you’re not really living it. People are going to show you only pictures of themselves having a great time at the best party with the coolest people eating, for some reason, avocado toast. They’re also not going to experience empathy. When we’re a little kid on a playground and say something mean to another little kid, we see in their face what we did, and we feel bad because of it. On social media, it’s more like yelling at another driver from your car. People are developing a chemical addiction to their phones. A gambling addict feels that rush of dopamine and serotonin not when they win but when the roulette wheel is spinning. When kids stick their hand in their pocket to get their phone and see if someone has commented on the photo they posted, they get that rush of serotonin and dopamine. It’s a big deal. And now, when we talk about our concerns with Facebook, we’re talking about the power that it has to disseminate misinformation and disinformation. We’re never going to put this genie back in the bottle, but surely we can decide that lies are bad.

As Harris argues, these companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least
controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the
growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term
"tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or
motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as
factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible
commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it
allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to
distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a
given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped
social devices than road networks. 5"

What we know at this point,” Shakya told NPR, “is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.

key reason why we are chronically consuming far too much food energy is because of the wide accessibility of ultra-processed, industrially manufactured foods, which impair our body’s self-regulatory satiety mechanisms and directly trigger hunger and cravings. These ultra-processed industrial foods are chemically engineered to be addictive and make up nearly 70 percent of calories that people in the United States consume today.

a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.

As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates. (p298)

the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.”18 This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it.

Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of “likes.” People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior.

Sophisticated foods are bittersweet (wine, beer, coffee, chocolate).

Addictive relationships are cooperative and competitive.

Work becomes flow at the limits of ability.

The flavor of life is on the edge.

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.