A biography for Tristan Harrishasn’t been written yet.
“None of most powerful tech companies answer to what's best for people, only to what's best for them.”
“Our brains are already bad at seeing exponential curves.”
“I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much - I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.”
“Apps or media who make money on advertising are never satisfied with 'enough' of your attention. They will always fight for more.”
“Information that confirms our beliefs makes us feel good; information that challenges our beliefs doesn't.”
“Ergonomics is about designing for failure modes and extremes: how things break under repetition, stress or other limits. And the goal of ergonomic designis to create an alignment between the user's limits, the thing you're designing, and how people will ideally use that thing.”
“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 is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.”
“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.”
“Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?”
“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?”
“Every year, more and more friends, apps, media or news stories want our attention. We need a better way to organize all the kinds of choices we have.”
“Tech companies are distracting, dividing and outraging citizens to the point where there is little basis for common ground. This is a direct threat to democracy.”
“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.”
“The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee.”
“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.”
“For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend.”
“While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.”
“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.”
“For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing - a way of measuring success.”