A friend responds to my last post, suggesting that Bruckman goes too easy on Zygna: they should be recognized as aggressively trying to colonize our attention, not accidentally creating games that are too much fun to play.

In a way, it seems to me that accounts of the motivations of game designers, social media companies, and other nascent oligarchs of the attention economy fall into two categories: the Walter White category, and the Gustavo Fring category.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, these are two characters in the TV show Breaking Bad, which I recently discovered on Netflix. Walter is a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who starts making crystal meth, and turns out to be really good at it: his love of chemistry, and his desire to create something that’s technically very accomplished, leads him into all kinds of dark places. Notably, it never leads him to wonder what kind of effect he’s having on addicts; he’s too self-absorbed, or fearful for his life, to have any concern for people who buy his product.

Gustavo Fring is the local drug kingpin, the guy who’s concealed a drug network inside a Mexican fried chicken franchise. He’s perfectly aware that he’s making something addictive, and making a lot of money off people’s weakness; he exploits that. He’s very self-controlled, but you definitely get the sense that he enjoys it.

The more benign version of designer and company motivation is that they’re Walter Whites: they’re really into the technical challenge of making games and networks that people like, and get a little dopamine hit out of seeing their numbers go up. If that means tweaking the colors, or manipulating people’s relationships, they’ll do it; it’s all the same.

The more sinister interpretation is that they’re Gustavo Frings: they know exactly what they’re doing, there’s nothing accidental about the mix of “fun” and “addicting” in their product, and they have absolutely no interest in engaging with the larger moral or ethical issues surrounding what they do. As one friend of mine who works at a social media company put it, “Discussion of the ethics of what we do pretty much end with, ‘Just click the link, bitch!'”