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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We have a deep-seated need for social acceptance that is increasingly controlled by technology companies.
In this quote, Tristan Harris highlights the significance of social approval in human behavior, emphasizing that our intrinsic need to belong and feel appreciated has been fundamentally altered by the influence of technology. The observation reveals a critical concern about how tech companies have the power to shape our social interactions and sense of worth, suggesting that our yearning for validation is no longer entirely within our personal control, but rather dictated by external platforms and algorithms.
Themes
Social ApprovalTechnologyBelongingMotivationInfluence
In practice
Example use cases
In a corporate presentation about the impact of social media on mental health, this quote could exemplify how tech affects our self-esteem.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes →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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
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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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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?
Tristan HarrisRead
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