“Because of the race to hijack human attention, the race to the bottom of the brain stem, it’s designed to get basically lower and lower into what will get your attention.” Tristan Harris, interview on NPR’s It’s Been a Minute (May 2019).
I sat down to play one game of chess. Twelve hours later, I deleted the app.
I play slow chess online. Each side gets fifteen minutes or more, the patient version. Months passed since I last opened the app. One game became thirty.
Something about it felt deliberate.
The pull felt stronger than I remembered. I don’t know what changed. They run constant split tests.
Win or lose, the next game might be the good one, so I played it. That last part is the oldest trick there is. B.F. Skinner found that a reward you can’t predict pulls harder than a reward you can. A pigeon pecks longer for a treat that arrives at random than for one that arrives on schedule. So does a person.
Then the anger turned into something closer to understanding. The chess app competes with TikTok, YouTube and every other app on the phone. They’re all fighting for the same fixed pool of hours. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said it in 2017: “Netflix is competing with sleep on the margin.” An app that fights hard for that attention keeps the hours. An app that opts out hands them to one that fights.
This is what I call engineered addiction: compulsion designed into a product on purpose, because the product can’t survive without it. Tristan Harris, who studies how products capture attention, calls it “the race to the bottom of the brain stem.”
Each product reaches a little lower into the nervous system to grab attention, which forces the next product to reach lower still. The builders know they’re doing it. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, later said the engagement loop was built “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” My anger was aimed at the wrong target. The chess app is one player in a game it didn’t invent.
When the product is engineered to hook you, elimination is easier than moderation.
🎣
What would you do with the hours engineered addiction consumes?
