You may have heard someone describe a piece of software as being addictive. As in, “I’m so addicted to this balloon-popping game on my phone that I got fired from my job as an air traffic controller”. As the amount of software vying for our attention has exploded in recent years, companies are increasingly hot-wiring our brain’s reward center to make their product successful. It is no longer enough for an application to be enjoyable or useful, it must also provide us with dopamine-inducing moments that reduce us to cocaine-addicted lab rats mashing a button marked ‘Press here for cocaine’. The software in the air-traffic control tower may be good for landing planes safely, but it’s missing the habit-forming hooks that would otherwise send it to number one in the App Store charts.

You may have heard someone describe a piece of software as being addictive. As in, “I’m so addicted to this balloon-popping game on my phone that I got fired from my job as an air traffic controller”. As the amount of software vying for our attention has exploded in recent years, companies are increasingly hot-wiring our brain’s reward center to make their product successful. It is no longer enough for an application to be enjoyable or useful, it must also provide us with dopamine-inducing moments that reduce us to cocaine-addicted lab rats mashing a button marked ‘Press here for cocaine’. The software in the air-traffic control tower may be good for landing planes safely, but it’s missing the habit-forming hooks that would otherwise send it to number one in the App Store charts.