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    Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain--and How to Fight Back
    Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain--and How to Fight Back
    Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain--and How to Fight Back
    Audiobook5 hours

    Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain--and How to Fight Back

    Written by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever

    Narrated by Alex Salkever

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Do you feel in control of your life or enslaved by your devices? Have you risked your life texting and driving? Do you sympathize with a test group of students who endured painful shocks rather than be separated from their phones?

    Digital technology is wonderful, but it's making us miserable, say former tech executives Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever. There's a reason Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Guardian he won't let his nephew on social networks. We've become a nation of tech addicts—although it's not entirely our fault, and it is possible to enjoy the benefits of technology while taking our happiness back from the bots.

    Wadhwa and Salkever describe the applied neuroscience techniques developers are using to make their products so insidiously habit-forming and, drawing on the latest research, detail the negative impact of technology in four key areas: love, work, play, and life. There are dozens of vivid examples. Online dating apps like Tinder encourage users to evaluate people like products, leading to superficial, unsatisfying relationships. Workers check their email an average of seventy-seven times a day, wreaking havoc on productivity. Children now spend nearly twice as much time playing inside with their screens as they do outside in the natural world—it is any wonder childhood obesity is a problem? The light from the devices so many of us look at right before we go to sleep suppresses the production of melatonin, a hormone vital for sleep and healthy organ functioning.

    But there's a way out. Wadhwa and Salkever lay out simple, common-sense ways to disrupt developers' efforts to get you hooked, including six simple questions to help you decide what role any given technology should play in your life. Ironically, they even describe some emerging technologies designed to give users more control. Get back to making technology serve you, not the other way around!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerrett-Koehler Publishers
    Release dateJun 26, 2018
    ISBN9781523095889
    Author

    Vivek Wadhwa

    VIVEK WADHWA is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering at Silicon Valley. He is the co-author of Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain - and How to Fight Back; The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent; and Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology. He has held appointments at Duke University, Stanford Law School, Emory University, and Singularity University. ALEX SALKEVER is a writer, futurist, and technology leader. He has served as a senior executive at a number of Silicon Valley startups and as a senior leader at respected brands in technology, most recently at Mozilla, where he served as a vice president.

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    • 5/5
      This book is absolutely incredible and life changing. I'm grateful to have stumbled upon it because technology is a serious issue in my life. It's reassuring to know that there's very good reasons behind why people become addicted to technology and that it's been intentionally created to have this effect. This book has helped me feel more hopeful as a human and as a mother, in a screen driven world. Highly recommend!