dark pattern

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Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Influence models like those we’ve been discussing in the past two sections can also be dark patterns when they are used to manipulate you for someone else’s benefit (like at the casino). The name comes from websites that organize their sites to keep you in the dark through using disguised ads, burying information on hidden costs, or making it really difficult to cancel a subscription or reach support. In short, they use these types of patterns to manipulate and confuse you. However, this concept is also applicable to everyday life offline as well. And knowing a few specific dark patterns can be helpful in adversarial situations. You’re probably familiar with the mythical tale of the Trojan horse, a large wooden horse made by the Greeks to win a war against the Trojans.

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In any conflict situation, you should be on the lookout for dark patterns. While many influence models, such as the ones in this section, are commonly thought of as malicious and are therefore easier to look out for (e.g., bait and switch), others from the previous two sections are subtler. Many are considered more innocuous (e.g., scarcity), but they too can all be used to manipulate you. For example, are the common nonprofit uses of reciprocity techniques (free address labels) or social proof (celebrity endorsements) also dark patterns? In one sense, they might lead you to donate more than you would otherwise.

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Builders similarly attract buyers to new-construction homes with low list prices that correspond to so-called “builder-grade” finishes that no one really wants. They then proceed to show buyers a model home with more expensive finishes—all upgrades—which in aggregate can easily push the bounds of a buyer’s budget. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Spectacular examples of dark patterns can be found in business. Enron, a now bankrupt energy company, once built a fake trading floor at its Houston headquarters to trick Wall Street analysts into believing that Enron was trading much more than it actually was. When the analysts came to Houston for Enron’s annual meeting, the Enron executives pretended that there was all this action going on, when in fact it was all a ruse that they had been rehearsing, including having an elaborate array of TVs and computers assembled into a “war room.”

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

But they’re close enough for most purposes. And the norms are taken from the real world as much as possible. “Dark patterns” is a term given to subversive user-design tricks that co-opt common designs to nudge users towards certain ends. Normally, standardized design guides us through our interactions online; it’s a visual language that we trust. In habitual behaviors like driving, for example, green means go, and red means stop. Those same colors are similarly used as guides in user experience design all the time. They become a dark pattern when a series of green “continue” buttons is suddenly subverted to sell an in-app purchase, as in the mobile game “Two Dots.”

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A banner ad from a company called Chatmost has what looks like a speck of dust on a touchscreen, tricking users into clicking on the ad as they try to swipe away the dirty spot. In 2019, US senators Mark Warner and Deb Fischer introduced legislation banning dark patterns. It didn’t pass. But if a future version does, the sponsors had better get their definition right, because that definition itself will be subject to all sorts of hacks, as programmers and apps that use dark patterns to hack us try to get around the rules. 46 Trust and Authority On March 19, 2016, John Podesta, then chair of Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, received an email purporting to come from Google.

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For example, consider the various webpage interface design tricks that the Trump campaign used to trick people into donating far more money than they had intended, and for purposes other than political campaigning: pre-checked boxes authorizing recurring weekly withdrawals from a donor’s checking or credit card account, donation amounts hidden in small print, more small print stating that the donation could be used for the candidate’s personal expenses, and the like. These are clearly hacks: they’re examples of a “dark pattern” that we’ll talk about later. But are they hacks of our perceptual, emotional, or executive decision-making systems? The answer is, kind of all three. I’m okay with this ambiguity. Humans are complicated. Cognitive systems are messy. Any discussion of them will be messy as well. 44 Attention and Addiction Everyone hates pop-up ads.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Most lunar swirls share their locations with powerful, localized magnetic fields, so they appear to be related to magnetism, but the cause of those magnetic fields and the swirls themselves is still in question. Observations of these strange features from Earth and via Moon orbiters have led to theories about how lunar swirls form. The bright and dark patterns may result when those magnetic fields deflect particles from the solar wind and cause some parts of the lunar surface to weather more slowly. Or, because particles (electrons and ions) in the solar wind are electrically charged, perhaps those particles respond to magnetic fields and land in particular patterns on the Moon, suggesting that the magnetic field shields the surface from weathering.

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Perhaps these swirls could have formed from plumes of material ejected by comet impacts. Another theory purports that when micrometeorite impacts loft fine lunar dust particles, an existing magnetic field at those locations sorts them according to their susceptibility to magnetism, forming light and dark patterns with different compositions. A joint study on lunar swirls was issued in July 2018, led by researchers at Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, and suggesting that the swirls may have resulted from ancient magnetic lava just below the lunar surface that is tied to long, narrow lava tubes or lava dikes, or vertical sheets of magma in the lunar crust.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Platforms like Facebook would have you believe that the user is always in control, but as I have said before, user control is an illusion. Maintaining that illusion is central to every platform’s success, but with Facebook, it is especially disingenuous. Menu choices limit user actions to things that serve Facebook’s interests. In addition, Facebook’s design teams exploit what are known as “dark patterns” in order to produce desired outcomes. Wikipedia defines a dark pattern as “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things.” The company tests every pixel to ensure it produces the desired response. Which shade of red best leads people to check their notifications? For how many milliseconds should notifications bubbles appear in the bottom left before fading away, to most effectively keep users on site?

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Accel Partners, 54, 58 Acxiom, 226 addiction, 100–101, 106–7, 162, 206, 240, 246, 250, 253, 254, 257, 268, 269, 281 advertising, 17, 47, 68–69, 85–86, 105, 120, 125, 257, 283–84 Facebook and, 11–12, 47, 59–61, 63, 68–77, 85, 103, 119, 128–29, 130, 132, 143, 148, 173, 184, 185, 202, 207–9, 211, 217–19, 237–38, 258, 265, 270, 281 Google and, 47, 67–69, 86, 104, 173, 283–86 political, microtargeting in, 237–38 YouTube and, 103, 283–84 Albright, Jonathan, 125 Alcorn, Al, 34 algorithms, 66, 94, 98, 122, 128, 129, 169, 264 extreme views and, 92 of Facebook, 4, 9, 11, 66, 74, 76, 81, 87, 91, 128–29, 143, 166, 232, 235, 243, 270, 274, 277, 281 of Google, 66, 235 of YouTube, 92–93, 139, 274 Allen, Paul, 25 Altair, 34 Altavista, 42 Alter, Adam, 272 Amanpour, Christiane, 147 Amazon, 16, 27, 36, 38, 68, 137, 224, 262, 283 Alexa, 137, 262, 268, 271, 281 Echo, 236 market power of, 46 monopoly power and antitrust issues, 47–48, 136–40, 225–26, 246, 247, 261, 262, 284 Web Services, 40, 41, 137, 138 words associated with, 231 American Academy of Pediatrics, 273 Anderson, Chris, 109 Anderson, Fred, 14 Andreessen, Marc, 27, 36, 37, 43, 58 Android, 138, 204, 271, 282 angel investors, 48 anonymity, 37, 55, 92, 101, 123 antitrust and monopoly issues, 46–48, 136–41, 162, 220, 223, 224, 227, 234, 238, 246, 247, 250, 261–63, 277, 279, 281–83, 285–87 Amazon and, 47–48, 136–40, 225–26, 246, 247, 261, 262, 284 AT&T and, 224–25 Facebook and, 47–48, 100, 136–41, 162, 225–26, 234, 246, 247, 261, 263, 284 Google and, 47–48, 136–40, 162, 225–26, 234, 246, 247, 261–63, 282, 284 Microsoft and, 46–47, 154–55, 286 Apache, 40 Apple, 14, 25, 29–30, 34, 35, 38, 49, 50, 83, 118, 249 iPhone, 38, 84, 100, 105–6, 271 Jones and Infowars and, 228–29 market power of, 46 Onavo and, 140 privacy and, 38, 158, 271 Silver Lake and, 29–30 words associated with, 231 approval, need for, 98 Apture, 107 Arab Spring, 64, 243 ARPANET, 34–35 artificial intelligence (AI), 69, 84–85, 88, 98, 128, 151, 158, 219–20, 223, 236, 252, 260, 261, 263, 264, 267–69, 272 of Facebook, 10, 11, 69, 85, 87, 91, 95, 108, 203, 219–20, 230, 261 of Google, 108, 219–20, 253, 261 Associated Press, 124 AT&T, 224–25 Atari, 34 Atlantic, 195, 231 Attention Merchants, The (Wu), 120 attorneys general, 120, 172, 227 authoritarianism, 278, 279 automobiles, 158, 223 banks, 231–32 Bannon, Steve, 181, 182, 197, 199 Bast, Andy, 109 Belgium, 247 Bell Labs, 225 Berners-Lee, Tim, 36, 161 Bezos, Jeff, 27 Black Lives Matter, 8, 243, 250, 275 Blacktivist, 131 Bloomberg, 50 Blumenthal, Richard, 128 Bodnick, Marc, 14, 18, 59 Bogost, Ian, 195–96 Bolton, Tamiko, 161–62 Bono, 13, 18, 28–29, 30, 59–61, 159 Booker, Cory, 128 Bosworth, Andrew “Boz,” 160, 165 memo of, 204–6 bots, 90, 116, 124, 126, 174, 177, 227 bottomless bowl, 97 Box, 41 brain, 88 brain hacking, 81–82, 118, 141, 148 Brand, Stewart, 177 Brazil, 280 Brexit, 8–9, 96, 180, 196, 198, 244 Breyer, Jim, 58 Bricklin, Dan, 34 Brin, Sergey, 27 bro and hipster cultures, 49–50 Brotopia (Chang), 50 bullying, 87, 101–2, 205, 253, 269, 273, 280, 281 Bushnell, Nolan, 34 Business Insider, 141 BuzzFeed, 204 California, 227–28 environmental regulations in, 201 secession movement, 114, 115 Cambodia, 215, 246 Cambridge Analytica, 78, 180–98, 199, 202–4, 207, 208, 210, 213, 216–18, 251, 259 Cambridge University, 181 Candy Crush, 191, 269 capitalism, 200, 201, 220, 238, 262 Castor, Kathy, 210–11 cell phones, 36, 225 see also smartphones censorship, 252 Center for Humane Technology (CHT), 157, 166–67, 173, 188, 272 Chancellor, Joseph, 181, 186 Chang, Emily, 50 Chaos Monkeys (García Martínez), 71, 72, 73 Chaslot, Guillaume, 92 Chicago School antitrust philosophy, 137–39, 285, 286 children, 214, 240, 253–54 technology and, 106, 156, 166, 237, 255, 268, 269, 272–73, 279–80 China, 162, 205, 215–16 Cisco, 46 CityVille, 191 Clayton Act, 136 Clinton, Bill, 60 Clinton, Chelsea, 167 Clinton, Hillary, 5, 11, 117, 121, 124, 125, 130, 166 Facebook Groups and, 7–8 Clinton Foundation, 130 cloud, 38, 40, 41, 104, 249, 250 Amazon Web Services, 40, 41, 137, 138 CNBC, 118, 161 CNN, 130–31, 147, 161, 193, 229, 231 Coca-Cola, 141 Cohen, Michael, 209–10 Cold War, 32 Columbia University, 54 Common Sense Media, 119, 156–57, 167, 227, 272 Compaq Computer, 27, 35, 152 competition: lack of alteratives to Facebook and Google, 92, 100, 141, 223, 280 see also antitrust and monopoly issues computers, computing, 22, 25, 31–36, 108, 225 in classrooms, 273 cloud, see cloud minicomputers, 33, 46 PCs, 17, 22, 25, 29, 33–36, 40, 42, 45, 46, 273 Congress, 121–33, 135–36, 152, 154, 163, 200, 208, 222, 226, 238 House Energy and Commerce Committee, 209–10, 227 House Intelligence Committee, 123, 127–28, 132, 133, 167, 227 Senate Commerce Committee, 209 Senate Intelligence Committee, 12, 111–12, 127, 132 Senate Judiciary Committee, 128, 131, 132, 136, 209 Zuckerberg’s testimony before, 209–12, 216, 217 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), 174 conspiracy theories, 92–95, 115, 119, 121, 214, 228, 229, 234, 242, 243, 274 Pizzagate, 124–26, 130 Constitution, 12, 259 Fourth Amendment to, 201 content vendors, 283 Conway, Ron, 48 Cooper, Anderson, 81 copyrights, 281 Cosgrave, Paddy, 108–9 Cow Clicker, 195–96 Cox, Chris, 144 Cox, Joseph, 229–30 Cruz, Ted, 185 Currier, James, 47 Cyprus, 125 Czech Republic, 125 Dalai Lama, 31 dark patterns, 96 data and data privacy, 155, 158, 159, 203, 217, 220, 234–36, 238, 253, 258–59, 263–65, 269, 271–72, 277–84 Apple and, 38, 158, 271 Big Data, 158 browsing history, 218–19 Cambridge Analytica and, 78, 180–98, 199, 202–4, 207, 208, 210, 213, 216–18, 251, 259 combined sets of, 68, 285–86 and data as currency, 285 data ownership, 222, 237, 247, 259, 264 data portability, 247 Facebook’s banning of data brokers, 208 Facebook’s continuing threat to, 246 Facebook user data, 4–5, 9, 62, 72, 75–76, 78, 87, 131–32, 141–42, 174, 180–98, 202–4, 210–11, 216–19, 223, 258–59 Facebook user privacy settings, 97 fiduciary rule and, 226–27, 247, 260–61 Global Data Protection Regulation, 221, 222, 224, 259–60 and Internet of Things, 262, 268, 271 and internet as barter transaction, 285 internet privacy bill of rights, 221–24, 226–27 metadata, 68–69, 211, 217–20, 264 passwords and log-ins, 249–50, 271 “price” of data, 285–86 regulations and, 201 and value of data vs. services, 286 Zuckerberg’s attitudes regarding, 4–5, 55–56, 60, 141–42 Data for Democracy, 90, 122, 127 Dead & Company, 74 Defense, U.S.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

But if your payload is low, you’re likely going to need a more compelling incentive, for both parties, to drive up your conversion rate and frequency.18 A common trap companies fall into when trying to optimize a loop is to engineer ways to ratchet up the number of people being sent referrals to the point that users, and those they’ve made referrals to, are annoyed. Anyone who has accidentally sent an invite to download an app to their phone’s entire contact list can appreciate how enraging this can be. User experience experts call tricks to get users to take an action they normally would not take dark patterns, and while some of these dark patterns may work in the short term, the backlash from users is a long-term drag on growth. The negative press and bad feelings these kinds of tricks stir up can even be enough to torpedo the best products—we’ve seen it happen. Here are a number of best practices for experimenting with creating loops that will help you avoid such pitfalls.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The most common job titles in most Silicon Valley companies are engineer and architect, not service manager or client relations. But unlike engineering in other sectors, tech companies do not have to perform safety tests to conform to any building codes before releasing their products. Instead, platforms are allowed to adopt dark pattern designs that deliberately mislead users into continual use and giving up more data. Tech engineers intentionally design confounding mazes on their platforms that keep people moving deeper and deeper into these architectures, without any clear exit. And when people keep clicking their way through their maze, these architects delight in the increase in “engagement.”

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In following the Canadian and European approach of treating privacy as an engineering and design issue—a framework called “privacy by design”—we should extend this principle to create an entire engineering code: a building code for the Internet. This would include new principles beyond privacy, to include respect for the agency and integrity of end users. Such a code would create a new principle—agency by design—to require that platforms use choice-enhancing design. This principle would also ban dark pattern designs, which are common design patterns that deliberately confuse, deceive, or manipulate users into agreeing to a feature or behaving in a certain way. Agency by design would also require proportionality of effects, wherein the effect of the technology on the user is proportional to the purpose and benefit to the user.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

For example, it is hard to top PayPal’s viral success of the late 1990s.5 PayPal knew that once account holders started sending other users money online they would realize the tremendous value of the service. The allure that someone just sent you money was a huge incentive to open an account, and PayPal’s growth spread because it was both viral and useful. Unfortunately, some companies utilize viral loops and relationship triggers in unethical ways: by deploying so-called dark patterns. When designers intentionally trick users into inviting friends or blasting a message to their social networks, they may see some initial growth, but it comes at the expense of users’ goodwill and trust. When people discover they’ve been duped, they vent their frustration and stop using the product.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But controlling the market of human attention, as their business models had fated them to attempt, was beyond anything a man-made program could accomplish. The companies, to survive this environment of their own creation, would need to entrust their business, and therefore their users, to machines. 4. Dark Patterns IN 2014, WOJCICKI, the Google executive who had guided its acquisition of YouTube, took over the service as CEO. Though her leadership would be just as ruthlessly growth-obsessed as Mark Zuckerberg’s or Jack Dorsey’s, she would only ever attract a fraction of the scrutiny. Even at the height of the backlash against social media, when her service would be credibly accused of harms beyond even Facebook’s, she was rarely hauled before Congress, rarely castigated by cable-news hosts, rarely mentioned at all.

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Facebook engineers were automatically “paged,” a former news-feed team leader recounted, if likes or shares slid, so that they could tweak the system to boost them again. “If your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways,” a former Facebook operations manager has said. “You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’” The companies learned to downplay the degree to which robots shaped reality for billions of people. But hints of the machines’ power have occasionally slipped through. TikTok, a Chinese-made app, shows each user a stream of videos selected almost entirely by algorithms.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

dark pattern, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, ocean acidification, publish or perish, Rodney Brooks

Dark colors and the Nosferatu pose, on the other hand, seem to be displays that convey the seriousness of an aggressive move. I commissioned an artist to do a drawing that shows these differences in pattern more clearly. In the next picture, drawn from a video frame, the octopus on the left is bearing down, in a very dark pattern, on the octopus on the right. The one on the right, which is much paler and has just half of its body in the “deimatic” display, is beginning to flee. ~ Origins of Octopolis Matt suspected this was an unusual place when he discovered it, but he did not realize quite how unusual it was. The most similar report was a controversial one from the tropical waters of Panama, nearly thirty years earlier.

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

dark pattern, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, telepresence

"Then he came back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty soon he was out here." "Here," he says, "I'll show you something." Opening a cabinet. 160 Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with copper abstracts. Draws it from the waxed brown saddle leather. Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns. The knife of Chevette's memories, its grip scaled with belt-ground segments of phenolic circuit board. "I saw that made," she says, leaning forward. "Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent 'Black Lightning,' 1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty years old too, then. Said there wasn't ever a bike to match it.

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

We monitor which route the photons take using two sensitive photon detectors DA and DB. They confirm that half of the photons pass along A, and half along B, at random. Now we place another half-silvered mirror (M2) at the crossing point of the two beams. This induces interference between the two beams, creating a light-and-dark pattern of interference fringes – and we lose the ability to say if the photons went along path A or path B. We can arrange for the two detectors, while still positioned in the lines of paths A and B, to be just at the points where the interference pattern has a bright and a dark band respectively. Then when photons pass singly through the apparatus, DA will register the arrival of a photon 100% of the time, while DB will register none.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel by Gail Honeyman

call centre, dark pattern, Schrödinger's Cat

What a rare privilege, to be permitted to eavesdrop on the very moment of creation! He sang of nature, my handsome Orpheus. His voice. His voice! I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. I pictured a sky. It was blue black, soft and dense as fur. Across and over the expanse of night, into the velvet depths of it, light was scattered, enough for a thousand darknesses. Patterns revealed themselves; the eye, exquisitely dazzled, sought out snail-shell whorls and shattered pearls, gods and beasts and planets. As we stood still, yet we rotated, and, whilst turning, moved in a larger circle, round and round the sun, and oh, the dizzying momentum of it . . . The music stopped and there was a sudden, blurry movement.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Adrian Hon, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, dark pattern, false flag, Internet Archive, megacity

Are we really saying that Alison M-T killed her dad and then jacked a car, crossed state lines, set up as a high priestess of a new religion and was delivering sermons ten days later? I don’t buy it. Coincidence of facial recognition software picked this one up, conspiracy theorists on Reddit went crazy for it, there’s nothing there. Do I believe there’s something weird about Eve? Sure. There are the same dark patterns as Scientology, as early Mormonism. Double-speak, bending old stuff to suit new ways of thinking, creating a new underclass. But murder? There’s no evidence for that. Riseup Wake up. Her people doctored the dates on those sermons to make them seem to go back earlier than they really do. There’s no video of those early sermons, nothing on YouTube.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

California governor Gavin Newsom’s Data Dividend Law, which has been introduced and is being debated, recognizes that people from whom personal data has been collected should be compensated for its use. Senator Mark Warner’s DETOUR Act and associated bills that aim to regulate big tech by providing transparency into the value of consumers’ data, and to block manipulative “dark patterns” in the use of algorithms. The state of Wyoming’s Digital Asset Legislation, which includes thirteen new laws already passed, and has many more in consideration during the upcoming legislative cycle. The benefits include definitions of your digital assets as intangible personal property, thereby ascribing rights to, and legal recourse for, their use.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Madrigal, “The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook,” The Atlantic, July 31, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-machine-zone-this-is-where-you-go-when-you-just-cant-stop-looking-at-pictures-on-facebook/278185. 17. For a more detailed look at how interfaces use not only variable rewards but also “dark patterns” such as social reciprocity and fear of missing out, see Tristan Harris’s essay “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist” (Medium, May 18, 2016), which kicked off much of the debate in the UX community about tech addiction. 18. Sally Andrews et al., “Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use,” PLoS ONE (October 18, 2015), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?

Startide rising by David Brin

air gap, dark pattern, gravity well, haute cuisine

“I’m going to ask Creideiki to send me to Hikahi’s island. The abos are important. After escape itself, I’d guess they’re the most important thing:” “A normal, moral view from the Galactic standpoint, and therefore of little interest to me.” The Niss sounded bored already. The dazzling display coalesced into dark patterns of spinning lines. They whirled and converged, fell together into a tiny point, and disappeared. Gillian imagined she heard a faint pop as the Niss departed. When she reached Creideiki on the comm line the captain blinked at her. “Gillian, is your psi working overtime? I was just calling you!..

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

If we could check that the candidate landing site was not covered with sifting, drifting dust, we would have at least a fair chance of guaranteeing that the winds were not intolerably high. This was one reason that each Viking lander was carried into Mars orbit with its orbiter, and descent delayed until the orbiter surveyed the landing site. We had discovered with Mariner 9 that characteristic changes in the bright and dark patterns on the Martian surface occur during times of high winds. We certainly would not have certified a Viking landing site as safe if orbital photographs had shown such shifting patterns. But our guarantees could not be 100 percent reliable. For example, we could imagine a landing site at which the winds were so strong that all mobile dust had already been blown away.

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

By then what he said didn’t seem so bizarre, but one got the impression that he was always ready to see Bigfoot—not an unusual trait among the faithful. For example, he took as “signs” an apple in an orchard with a single tooth impression (a starling?) and a cherry tree completely stripped that had been full a week before (a bunch of starlings?). He spoke of a far-off dark pattern that he admitted “could be shadows” and of stones that he took for knives and scrapers, reminding me of Ray Wallace’s concretions that he took to be missiles for killing deer. “I’ve been hoping I could make a breakthrough and talk at them,” he said. “Maybe build a fire and whittle on something to put them at their ease, and they’d say something . . .

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

They want my autograph. They’ll say, ‘There goes Amanda’s dad.’ ” He chuckled. Amanda was waiting for her father to finish talking. She wore a curling smile. She was a slender girl with shiny, shoulder-length dark hair and pale blue eyes. She wore short black shorts, a black crop top, and a dark, patterned kimono, like butterfly wings. Her nails were long and cobalt blue. She had creamy white skin (“Here’s How to Get Flawless Skin Like Amanda Steele,” said a post on MTV.com) and was wearing a lot of makeup. She had none of the bounciness seen in her YouTube videos; she seemed preternaturally poised.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

dark pattern, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, the market place

Again we felt how Rumm inhibited excitement by its serene beauty. Such whelming greatness dwarfed us, stripped off the cloak of laughter in which we had ridden over the jocund flats. Night came down, and the valley became a mind-landscape. The invisible cliffs boded as presences; imagination tried to piece out the plan of their battlements by tracing the dark pattern they cut in the canopy of stars. The blackness in the depth was very real — it was a night to despair of movement. We felt only our camels’ labour, as hour after hour monotonously and smoothly they shouldered their puny way along the unfenced level, with the wall in front no nearer and the wall behind no further than at first.

Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

MIDRANGE Hotel James Joyce ( 040 31 10 23; www.hoteljamesjoyce.com; Via dei Cavazzeni 7; s/d €85/130; ) This place is less about Ulysses and more about sparkling modern rooms, great central location and ultra-smooth service – all in a historic 18th-century old town building, no less. Hotel Milano ( 040 36 96 80; www.hotel-milano.com; Via Carlo Ghega 17; s €95-118, d €130; ) The dark patterned carpets and heavy drapes give the Milano a melancholy Triestine feel, but there’s a lighter mood to be found in the welcoming staff, ample (for Italy) breakfasts, and huge sparkling bathrooms. The Milano is handily located 400m from the train station and within shouting distance of the Zampolli ice-cream store.