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📱 Bond — The Social Media App That Wants To Cure Your Doom-Scrolling — TechCrunch

• Bond launched this week as a social media platform explicitly designed to get you off your phone — no infinite feed, no algorithmic scroll, just a spatial view of what your friends are up to and activity recommendations based on your interests
• The core bet: remove the vertical feed and you remove the addictive pattern — the app gives you ideas for real-world activities, you go live them, you get off the app
• I haven't tested it, but I have a lot of thoughts
• First: using an app to get off your phone is paradoxical — your phone is still your phone, and everything else addictive is still on it
• Second: removing the feed doesn't remove social comparison — seeing what friends are up to, peeking at their memories, knowing they got a promotion — that's still there, and social comparison is one of the more reliably damaging patterns in existing platforms
• Third — and this one I can't let go: end-to-end encryption is described as "a priority for us in the near future after launch" — meaning right now, the team can see your data — storing data securely is not the same as private data
• The monetisation path is also unresolved — licensing user data to AI companies and product recommendations with merchant commissions are both on the table
• My honest read: the intent seems genuine, but the medium is still a phone, the social comparison patterns are still present, and the privacy foundations aren't there yet

🧠 Concerns Grow That AI Is Damaging Users' Cognitive Abilities — Futurism

• MIT researchers split 54 participants into three groups — ChatGPT, Google search, and own knowledge only — and measured brain activity via EEG during essay writing tasks
• Students using ChatGPT consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels — and got lazier with each consecutive essay
• Brain activation in areas corresponding to creativity and information processing was significantly lower — and participants struggled to recall or quote their own AI-written essays
• This connects directly to cognitive surrender — the University of Pennsylvania finding I covered in an earlier episode — where people predominantly chose to use the chatbot even when they didn't need to
• My take: there are always trade-offs, and if you don't know them, you're still making them — taking the car everywhere instead of walking has a physical cost; outsourcing your thinking has a cognitive cost
• The question isn't whether to use AI — it's which tasks should stay yours: framing a research problem, deciding what questions to ask, writing the first draft of your own ideas — these are the muscles that atrophy fastest
• The concept from UX that keeps coming to mind: learned helplessness — users who stop trying because they've been trained to feel that the tool, or in this case they themselves, can't do it without help
• The constant I'd advocate for regardless of how AI evolves: keep thinking, keep practising critical judgment, keep owning the reasoning — the human brain is shaped to do this, and it needs the exercise

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