How to Make the Perfect Burger at Mac Donald's

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Natasha: I was hoping that people were a sort of packing b f skinners, like behaviorist manual in the side pocket of their office desks. And they weren't. So i think what we have to understand here, which helps us with the ethical argument maybe, is that this is a giant sort of laboratory situation where you've got this key press data flowing off the casino floor or off the market and into all these companies m who can do massive a b testing kind of things.

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.