The guys is totally right but what he says is nothing new since Nir Eyal's Hooked and B.T. Skinner's Skinner-box. Besides, the web itself, yes just simple websites, has been highly addictive for decades. This ecosystem was just transformed to mobile and because the phone is always with you the addiction is even worse. Facebook on desktop was as addictive as on mobile.
He actually outlines a 3 step strategy for regaining control. Also, there's the non-profit he started that aims to make people more mindful on how shitty apps affect our mental states http://www.timewellspent.io/
I briefly went over the site before but haven't seen the 3 steps, guess I missed them, mind to tell them?
Edit: I just went another time to the site and still can't see any '3 steps' in text form. Would be great if you could enlighten us since you know the 3 steps.
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
Is the point supposed to be that his proposed solution is impossible to implement and flies in the face of market and incentive-driven behavior? When I think "three step proposal" I think of something actionable by an individual, not something that would have to be enacted on by basically a totalitarian government.
I miss a solution but he doesn't propose any.