Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist, told the US Senate that the pull-to-refresh gesture on nearly every app works like the lever of a Las Vegas slot machine, and he has long warned that we now reach for our phones around 150 times a day without ever calling it gambling

Tristan Harris sat in front of the US Senate Commerce Committee and told a room of senators that the small downward tug people make on Instagram, Twitter, and Gmail every few minutes was not an accident of interface design. It worked, he said, like the lever of a slot machine, keeping people pulling even when