Your Happiness was Hacked

Technology promises to help us achieve our dreams, connect us to everyone, and free up time--so why are we more miserable then ever? Wadhwa and Salkever show that our unhappiness can be traced to a concerted effort by tech companies to mold our thoughts and behavior to accomplish their goals.For all its considerable benefits, many argue that technology has been instrumental in eroding security, privacy, and community. But Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever argue that the truth is far more insidious: technology is actively robbing us of our happiness by making us so reliant on it that it becomes an addiction. Tech companies have all the weapons--sophisticated tracking bots, GPS coordinates, and algorithms that determine the optimal ways to distract us to their products and apps--even secret coding that defeats government monitoring and supervision--but Vivek and Salkever now provide us with insights and techniques to fight back. They focus on four key areas: Love, Work, Self, and Society. In each case, they document how the promise of technology has mutated into addiction and despair, and they lay out strategies to take back control by understanding the addictive mechanisms at the root of technology overload.