Is It Here?

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Natasha: It's never been easier to just get mindlessly turned into a zombie. If Facebook knows that you're lonely, it can show you three or four of your friends who are nearby and less than a mile away. Once we can detect it, then we can ask the zombie detector or this trance state. And I think that's cool because, yeah, we can connect you to other people. We can start slowing everything down. You can have the app stop working. There are so many things you can do.

In part two of our interview with cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, we learn what gamblers are really after a lot of the time — it’s not money. And it’s the same thing we’re looking for when we mindlessly open up Facebook or Twitter. How can we design products so that we’re not taking advantage of these universal urges and vulnerabilities but using them to help us? Tristan, Aza and Natasha explore ways we could shift our thinking about making and using technology.