Tristan Harris

There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.

Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.

You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.

Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.

I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.

If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?

With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.

The EU can lead the world toward more humane technology. But doing so requires thinking more broadly about reining in social media platforms to prevent them from degrading our democracies.

We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren't driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.

The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don't speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It's because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.

Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.

If one app or news site or friend gets your attention, that means something or someone else loses it. It comes out of our sleep, our time with family or our reflective time with ourselves.

We're all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.

While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.

YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.

If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.

Most notifications you get are because a machine is trying to get your attention. Those notifications aren't built to help you live your life. They're built to get your attention.

Apps or media who make money on advertising are never satisfied with 'enough' of your attention. They will always fight for more.