Sublime

His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.

“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper ask

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I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look bac... See more

Facebook, again, is the extreme example here: the service got started with user-generated content and has continually retrenched over the last few years to have more user-generated content and less professionally produced content; every time they have done so, publishers have cried foul over all of the traffic they were losing. Google, meanwhile, d... See more

In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible prici... See more

Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real

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