Living better

Paige Stampatori for NPR

In two landmark cases, courts found Meta and Google liable for endangering children with their products. The social media companies are appealing the verdicts, disputing the claim that they are addictive. During the California trial, an attorney accused Meta and Google of creating apps that function like "digital casinos." The comparison is supported by cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll's research on what makes video slot machines so addictive. Through her research, she discovered four key features that, when combined, helped to hold people on the gambling devices. These features trigger a trancelike or dissociative state in which people lose track of time and place. On social media apps, these features can create a kind of superglue that keeps you scrolling:

📱 Solitude: Schüll says that when the relationship is just between the person and the machine, it eliminates the social cues needed for stopping. Studies have found that children who regularly use screens alone in their bedrooms have a higher risk of developing what psychologists call problematic usage.
📱 Bottomlessness: Apps provide endless content that plays automatically, leaving you wanting more. 
📱 Speed: The faster people play slots, the longer they gamble. Speed has a similar effect on social media. The rapid scrolling and easy access to "new" content make it difficult for people to disengage. Technological advancements such as infinite scroll have accelerated the discovery of more content.
📱 Teasing: Apps typically select content for you by using artificial intelligence to decipher your interests. But they withhold that content and give you something close to what you want. This entices you with the promise that you will find what you are looking for soon.

Behind the story

Nick Schönfeld for NPR 

Few people have ever heard of Tristan da Cunha. Even fewer have been there. But describe it to someone as the world's most remote inhabited island in the middle of the wild South Atlantic Ocean, and it tends to conjure a fantasy, a feeling, an idea of what a place like that must be. Julia Gunther, the photographer on this piece, and I were no exception.

We tend to project our fantasies onto extreme remoteness because it is so different from the lives most of us live. Remote islands have long served as canvases onto which we project our dissatisfactions and desires. Tristan is more remote than most, which makes the projection more powerful.

For many, the island promises freedom from the grind, commutes and social media algorithms. Others imagine it as a haven for nature, where food comes from the ground and sea, unsullied by hormones or pesticides. Still more are drawn to its windswept history of shipwrecked mariners and two centuries of isolation at the edge of the world.

All of those ideas contain an element of truth. None of them, however, capture what it is actually like to live there. None contain much substance about the islanders who do.

Tristan is a community in near-constant motion. Fishermen are out before dawn. Families cut up meat in a refrigerated locker. Road crews clear landslide debris. Pensioners clock into the lobster factory for the night shift. Across the sixteen months we spent on Tristan, none of this felt exceptional to anyone involved. It was just life.

Julia and I hope that this immersive multimedia feature will give readers a real sense of Tristan — its history, its isolation, the cooperative spirit it runs on — and an equally real sense of the people who reside there and what their lives actually demand. Tristan is not an isolated fantasia. It is a society where people work very hard to keep their way of life alive.

3 things to know before you go

Katie Cole/WBUR

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This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen