'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
Loren Brichter, the designer who created the pull-to-refresh mechanism, first used to update Twitter feeds.
by Paul Lewis in San Francisco
Fri 6 Oct 2017 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Tue 12 Dec 2017 17.18 EST
Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.
Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.
He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likesâ€, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure†that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like†button in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
