In 2014, engineering expert Nir Eyal wrote an essay, Hooked, which explained how to develop products – especially smartphone apps – capable of grabbing and capturing users' attention. The essay was appreciated and Eyal used its success to lecture and work as a consultant for many companies, including LinkedIn, Instagram and the New York Times. Five years later Eyal published a new essay, very different from the previous one: it is called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and says that the time has come to get rid of much of the technology we use, to take back the our life and try to become “indestructible”. Nellie Bowles talked about it in the New York Times and wrote that “while Hooked was a manual on how to do it, Indistractable is a manual on how to go back”.
Before writing Hooked (translated into Italian in 2015), Eyal – who is 41, was born in Israel and raised in Florida – had started a solar panel company, and then a company that sold advertising in games. of Facebook. The second was much more successful than the first and allowed Eyal to learn the techniques used to attract the attention of users, the ones she talked about in her first book. “I wanted to make those tools more democratic,” he told The New York Times.
Hooked said that apps like Facebook and Pinterest were successful for the small and unpredictable gratifications they gave to those who used them, and explained how to “subtly encourage certain attitudes in users” with the aim of always bringing them back to the app, exploiting what became known as the “Hook Model”. The New York Times explains that the book was “hailed by Silicon Valley technocrats,” but also adds that it was 2014: a year in which “making an app that looked like a slot machine was right and even exciting”.
In 2016 Eyal spoke to Atlantic about the book and its success, and thus defended the techniques he proposed: «Telling companies not to use them, is the same as saying 'Stop making your products fun to use', is useless. With each new technology, a generation says that “today's young people use too much of this and too much of this,” and that this thing is melting their brains. But in the end we always find a way to adapt “.
In 2019, Indistractable arrived, which the New York Times describes as “a guide to freeing people from an addiction that Eyal said they never had.” In her new book, in fact, Eyal explains that the problem continues not to be with technologies but with those who use them. The thesis is that if we use smartphones for several hours (and more generally screens of all kinds, often connected to the internet) the responsibility is ours alone, and it is wrong to talk about addiction. “We are not inhaling Facebook,” he said: “We are not injecting Instagram into the mood. These are things we do, but we like to tell ourselves that it is the technology that is making us do them “.
Eyal writes that we must learn to devote time to “tractions” (the actions that move us towards what we really care about) and take away the “distractions”, which only make us waste time. According to him, therefore, it will be increasingly important to try to be indestructible, and he explains that to try not to be distracted, we need to understand why we tend to distract ourselves, rather than think about what distracts us. A bit like understanding why you eat too much is essential to be able to lose weight, even before trying any diet. «The truth» writes Eyal, «is that we use too many video games, cell phones and social networks not only for the pleasure they give us, but also because they free us from certain psychological discomforts». According to him “distraction is an unhealthy way to avoid bad thoughts, such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, tiredness and uncertainty”.
Indistractable is a manual that lists steps, steps and tips to become aware of how and how much we use technology, and to try to use it less and better. The New York Times summarizes some of them: “Keep your phone in silent mode, write emails less often and faster, don't spend time on Slack, make sure there is only one computer on at meetings, put yourself in positions in someone sees your screen, you make deals with yourself and with others to notice when you are distracted “.
Eyal's new book is interesting because it fits into a much larger discourse of mistrust of new technologies, after her previous book rode the enthusiasm for those same technologies very well. The New York Times writes that in this historical moment “former executives of Facebook and WhatsApp have turned into technology critics” and for at least a couple of years there has been more insistence on techniques and tools made to reduce or inhibit the use of certain apps. BJ Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University, where he deals with the Behavior Design Lab, wrote on Twitter a few weeks ago that “in 2020, a 'post-digital' movement will emerge” which will talk about the excessive use of one's smartphone in terms of very different from those with whom we talk about smokers today.
However, even on the front of those who criticize technologies, there are different sides. Someone agrees with Eyal and thinks that the problem lies with people and not with technologies; someone else thinks technology is to blame and argues that Eyal and others are just trying to sell the antidote after they were promoting poison until recently.
