
There's a moment in Netflix's new documentary, The Social Dilemma, which made me want to throw my phone across the room.
The documentary, which dropped on the streaming service over the weekend, features interviews with some of the people who were instrumental in the creation of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Google and every other app we check several times an hour, seven days a week.
About 24 minutes into the documentary, Tristan Harris, who was once employed as Google's Design Ethicist, compared our phones to tiny pokie machines we carry with us everywhere.
"We want them to take this action, we want them to keep doing this with their finger," he explained, demonstrating how we drag down the screen on our phone to refresh social media and email apps.
WATCH: The trailer for Netflix's eye-opening documentary The Social Dilemma. Post continues below.
"You pull down and you refresh, it's gonna be a new thing at the top. Pull down and refresh again, it's new. Every single time. Which in psychology we call a positive intermittent reinforcement," added Joe Toscano, a former Experience Design Consultant at Google.
"So you don't know when you're going to get it and you don't know if you're going to get it. Which operates just like the slot machines in Vegas," further explained Harris.
"It's not enough that you use the product consciously, I want to dig deep down into the brain stem and plant inside of you an unconscious habit, so you are being programmed at a deeper level. You don't even realise it.
"Every time you see it there on the counter and you know if you look over it might just have something for you, so you play that slot machine to see what you got. That's not by accident, that's a design technique."
I was mid-scroll when they said this. Disgusted with myself; I put my phone down and tried to hide it between the cushions in my couch.
I sat on my hands.
I tried to concentrate on the documentary in front of me and attempted to ignore the pull of my iPhone.
Within five minutes, I had picked it up again and refreshed Instagram.
Even as the people who created Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Google, told me that what I was doing was an addiction and that they had intentionally created this addiction, I reached for my phone over and over again.