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.
While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the disparity between how nations secure their physical boundaries and how tech platforms neglect to safeguard digital spaces.
Tristan Harris is emphasizing the importance of recognizing and addressing vulnerabilities in the digital realm, which are often overlooked compared to the measures taken to protect physical borders by nations. The statement suggests that while countries are vigilant about their sovereignty and territorial integrity, the digital landscape remains largely unregulated and unprotected, leading to risks and challenges that can affect individuals and societies alike.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a tech conference discussing cybersecurity, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of digital security.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes βTechnology 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?
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'
We make the best phone, we don't make the most phones.