The attention economy demands a certain kind of human being sitting on the other side of the screen. We don't get to choose this about us. It's like being a chimpanzee and saying, hey, i'm going to be attracted to bananas like sorry. You've got a million years of evolution working against you in the way that you will intrinsically feel an attraction towards things. And there's something very attractive and seductive about that level of detail.
Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, has spent years studying how slot machines hold gamblers spellbound, in an endless loop of play. She never imagined the addictive designs which she had first witnessed in Las Vegas would go bounding into Silicon Valley and reappear on virtually every smartphone screen worldwide. In the first segment of this two-part interview, Natasha Dow Schüll offers a prescient warning to users and designers alike: How far can the attention economy go toward stealing another moment of your time? Farther than you might imagine.