[j16sdiz]

This just shifts the question to: what counts as attempt to cause an addiction?

Does writing a book aims to make people read addictive? Try to design a gym class that makes you feel good about yourself so you will come again?

You still need to define what is addictive

[saurik]

Ok, fair, so, to try to apply this to my analogous crime: I would agree that attempted murder does need a definition of "murder"; but, the crime does not care whether your specific plan would have led to an act of murder, only whether or not the defendant was trying to murder.

We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?

[card_zero]

The above phrasing, an attempt to "exploit the psychology or physiology of others", works fine. It's a form of fraud, or scamming. Is an attempted scam a crime? I guess probably not, oh well.

I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.

It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.

※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".