Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

Are we building tools for transformation or just digital addiction?

14 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Ashish Kothari argues that most digital tools prioritize engagement over real change, creating addiction instead of transformation. Facebook's model of maximizing user time has become the industry standard, but tools without scientific grounding cause harm. He calls for design based on validated psychology that actually works.

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The problem is that if something does not work, so if the tool you're creating, the actual thing that you're creating in the background is not effective, it's not science-based, there's no theoretical or psychological model underneath it, this, the techniques that provide you is not valid or reliable. You're creating a system then that optimizes for engagement on something that doesn't work, which means you're causing harm because you're creating addiction, dependency, et cetera.
We don't want to run the next 20 years with the same kind of core thinking that we ran the proliferation of social media platforms. The core engine behind Facebook became engagement and about, you know, how can I get more people onto this thing? And what do you do for engagement?