Tristan Harris

“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.”

“Yes, online privacy is a real problem that needs to be addressed. But even the best privacy laws are only as effective as our Paleolithic emotions are resistant to the seductions of technology.”

“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.”

“We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help.”

“Traditional companies have been subject to licensing for many years. Attention utilities should be required to obey limits on data extraction and message amplification practices that drive polarisation, and should be required to protect children. We should ban or limit microtargeting of advertising, recommendations and other behavioural nudges.”

“While you can use muscle-memory to unconsciously move your thumb to open an app without thinking, it's actually impossible to type on a keyboard unconsciously.”

“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.”

“I actually worry that we're so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.”

“We're going to need a new social contract with the tech world one that asks for consent, and one with transparent goals. Right now, the goals of technology are not aligned with our goals as humans. We need technology that empowers us to make the life choices we want to make.”

“With its onslaught of never-ending choices, never-ending supply of relationships and obligations, the attention economy bulldozes the natural shape of our physical and psychological limits and turns impulses into bad habits.”

“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.”

“Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm not against technology.”

“I noticed when I was at Stanford, there was a class called the persuasive technology design class, and it was a whole lab at Stanford that teaches students how to apply persuasive psychology principles into technology to persuade people to use products in a certain way.”

“I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.”

“New technologies always reshape society, and it's always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason.”