The "CrackBerry" nickname stuck for a reason — and the variable-reward psychology that hooked early-2000s executives on their BlackBerrys is the exact same machinery now running every push notification on every smartphone in your pocket (opens in new tab)

Twenty-five years ago, the only people sleeping with their email device on the nightstand were lawyers, bankers, and a handful of executives whose firms paid for a BlackBerry Enterprise Server licence. The nickname those users eventually coined for the device — CrackBerry — turned out to describe the next two decades of consumer technology with […]