There is a long-standing tradition in Silicon Valley of treating the user like a laboratory rat, and I’ve said before that the Internet is the greatest psychological experiment ever created. If we A/B split test a website, and tweak the variables - a red notification dot here, an infinite scroll there, you can effectively hack the black box of human behaviour, bypass the human prefrontal cortex and go straight for the dopamine receptors. We’ve called this "engagement" for a decade. A Los Angeles jury, however, has just given it a much older, more expensive name: Product Liability.

The recent ruling in favour of a young woman suing Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction is a watershed moment, but not for the reasons the "think of the children" lobby might suggest, because it isn’t about the content, it’s about the plumbing.

For years, social media giants have argued they are merely platforms - digital town squares where people happen to talk. But a town square doesn't actively try to trap you so you’ll stay in it longer. These apps aren't meeting places; they are highly pressurised delivery systems for social validation.

What’s interesting about this case is the legal shift - a move from Free Speech (what is being said) to Product Design (how something is being created and used). When a car manufacturer designs a dashboard that's slightly too distracting, they get sued. When a toy maker uses lead paint because it’s cheaper, they get sued. For the first time, a jury has looked at the Variable Reward mechanics of the social feed - the same mechanics used in Las Vegas slot machines - and decided that if you design a product to be intentionally habit-forming for a twelve-year-old, you are responsible for the wreckage that follows.

Meta’s share price didn't crash because of a potential payout. It crashed because legal externalities are finally being priced into tech stocks. For years, Big Tech has enjoyed the profits of addiction while outsourcing the cost of the resulting mental health side effects to parents, teenagers, and schools. The tech bros will complain that regulation stifles innovation, but the car lobby said the same thing about seatbelts in cars.

Innovation is wonderful, but perhaps it’s time we stopped building digital environments that require our children to have the willpower of a Jesuit monk just to put their phones down for dinner.

There is a particular kind of madness in modern retail that only an Excel-obsessed management consultant could love. It’s the self-checkout: a piece of efficiency that is to customer service what a treadmill is to a stroll in the Cotswolds.

From a spreadsheet perspective, the self-checkout is a miracle. It replaces a human salary with a one-off capital expenditure. It doesn’t need lunch breaks, it doesn’t get flu, and it doesn’t form unions. But as anyone who has ever wrestled with a bunch of loose bananas knows, it also doesn't possess a shred of common sense.

The doorman fallacy has been the undoing of many a great business. When you replace a hotel doorman with an automatic sliding door, you save a salary, but you lose a security guard, a concierge, and a status symbol. Similarly, when you replace a cashier with a plastic kiosk that shrieks about "unexpected items in the bagging area," you aren't just automating a transaction; you are offloading shadow work onto the customer. In the old world, the cashier was your social interface. They provided a brief moment of human contact and, crucially, took the responsibility of not failing off your shoulders. If the barcode didn't scan, it was their problem. Today, the supermarket has turned us all into unpaid, untrained, and remarkably incompetent junior checkout clerks.

The psychological cost of this is immense. We don't just value speed; we value the absence of anxiety. A human cashier represents low-friction certainty. A self-checkout represents high-variance frustration. We’ve traded a 10% increase in throughput for a 90% increase in cortisol. Moreover, by removing the human element, retailers have accidentally destroyed the social contract. People who would never dream of pocketing a chocolate bar under the gaze of a friendly cashier find themselves remarkably creative with the "onions" button when faced with an impersonal machine.

True tech nnovation isn't about making things efficient for the company; it's about making things delightful for the human. Until a machine can ask how my day is going or handle a squashed loaf of bread with a sympathetic wink, the self-checkout remains a masterpiece of logical stupidity.

The reading list in Chrome is a psychological masterstroke - It is a curated gallery of our own aspirational intelligence.

In behavioural economics, we often talk about the gap between our "wanting self" and our "doing self." The wanting self sees a 5,000-word deep dive into the socio-political implications of 14th-century Estonian pottery and thinks, “I must consume this to become the person I wish to be.” The doing self, however, usually just wants to watch a video of a seagull stealing a tourist’s dinner.

The genius of the Reading List is that it allows us to bridge this gap through a process of Cognitive Placebo. When you click that little star or the Add to Reading List button, your brain releases a tiny, illicit hit of dopamine. For a fleeting second, the act of saving the information feels indistinguishable from the act of acquiring it. You haven't read the article, but you have successfully "indexed" yourself as the kind of person who would read it. It’s a great psychological hack - we are solving for the feeling of being informed without the high cost of actually thinking.

In the old world, we had coffee table books. Huge, unread doorstops like A Brief History of Time that sat there primarily to signal to guests (and ourselves) that we were intellectually formidable. The Reading List is the digital version of this, but it’s even more efficient because it’s private. We aren't signaling to others; we are signaling to our own egos.

We are effectively outsourcing our intelligence to the browser. As long as the tab is open, or the link is saved, we feel as though we possess the knowledge contained within it. It’s a form of transactive memory where Google Chrome is the partner that knows all the smart stuff, so we don't have to. The danger, of course, is the "Tab Debt." Eventually, the list grows so long that it becomes a source of ambient anxiety - a digital pile of unwashed laundry. But until that breaking point, enjoy the bliss. You didn't read that article on the future of decentralised finance, but you saved it. And in the economy of the self, that’s almost the same thing.

We used to collect encyclopedias we never opened, now we collect URLs we’ll never click. The medium changes, but the human desire to look smart to ourselves remains gloriously intact.

Have you ever walked into a supermarket, pharmacy, or department store looking to buy a specific item, only to find the layout confusing? Perhaps you ended up aimlessly strolling around, purchasing other items? This is deliberate, and known as the Gruen Transfer.

The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout, lose track of your original intentions.

We've all experienced it, and now it's starting to consume the internet. It first appeared on Facebook, with the introduction of the feed. Originally intended as a way to simplify updates from your friends, and hold your attention captive for longer. However somewhere along the line, the feed became more than that. Facebook now feels more confusing than my local department store, and my original reason for visiting (keeping up to date with friends & family) is quickly forgotten. The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. The rest was a combination of ads, memes, and influencer marketing videos, leaving me doom scrolling endlessly.

This isn't relegated to Facebook though, or even social media. So many websites are now designed to disorient you upon visiting, so that you start acting impulsively. This can even happen in a relatively benign way - who hasn't looked up something on Wikipedia and fell down a rabbit hole that ended looking at a list of animals awarded human credentials?

It pops up in other areas as well, closely associated with several UX dark patterns. If you've tried to permanently delete your account from any major social network, you’ll know what I mean. It is utterly confusing to find and navigate to the page you need, and the site will desperately conjole you into doing something other than deleting your account. It's the same for trying to alter your insurance policy, cancel subscriptions, spend frequent flyer miles, and so on...

I wonder where all this will end? There must be a point at which the friction generated by needless complexity has a detrimental effect. A kind of Laffer Curve of web design.

In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.

I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation. Now if only they could apply the same thing to my local Boots when I'm trying to buy toothpaste.

Phones have displaced paper money and credit cards as the preferred way to pay for a bill at the end of a meal. The trouble is, how does the waiter know when you're ready to pay?

The meal was delicious. The service, excellent. The waiter asks if you want dessert, but you decline... and feeling somewhat guilty you hurriedly justify this rebuke by explaining how you over-ordered one too many sides, are ready to burst, and couldn't possibly have room for sticky toffee pudding, but honestly, the food was delicious. The waiter brings over the bill, in a black rectangular wallet, and walks away.

We're now faced with a dilemma. How does the waiter know when we're ready to pay? For generations, the accepted signal was a banknote, and then a credit card, poking out of that said rectangular black wallet. In the age of Apple Pay, this vital signal has been lost. I've tried laying my phone over the receipt, but it just doesn't work.

This mutually agreed upon non-verbal signal is for the waiter's benefit as much as our own. People can be funny about restaurant bills - everyone has their own way of doing it, and it can be awkward to walk up to a table when Dave is still arguing with Sally & Val over whether that bottle of Pinot Noir should be split equally when Dave only drank a pint of Guiness.

So how do we solve the problem? I propose the most low-tech solution possible (please save us from another app or QR code). The bill should arrive with a card, red on one side, green on the other. The bill arrives with red facing upwards. When you want to signal that you're ready to pay, you turn it over. A solution so simple it almost guarantees that it won't be implemented. So for now I will resort to rather limply trying to catch a passing waiter's eye.

Navigating modernity can be tough. Luckily philosophers, poets, and great thinkers over the centuries has developed a number of mental shortcuts, in the form of heuristics, razors, guillotines, and other aphorisms. We’ve collected the most important ones here in a ‘cheat sheet’ of sorts. Memorize these, and you may never look at the world in the same way again…

Alder’s Razor

If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.

Chesterton’s Fence

Reforms should not be made until the reasons behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

Duck Test

The duck test is a form of abductive reasoning, usually expressed as “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

Grice’s razor (also known as Giume’s razor)

As a principle of parsimony, conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations. AKA Address what the speaker actually meant, instead of addressing the literal meaning of what they actually said

Hanlon’s Razor

Never Attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hitchen’s Razor

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Hobson’s Choice

A free choice where only one choice is offered

Hume’s Guillotine

If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect.

Occam’s Razor

When confronted with competing explanations, often the explanation with the fewest assumptions is the correct explanation.

Maslow’s Hammer

To treat everything as if it were a nail, If the only tool you have is a hammer.

Popper’s Falsifiability Principle

For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.

Sagan Standard

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Shirky Principle

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.