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How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Former Insider

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

Cal Newport; • Digital Minimalism

Instead, imagine if technology companies empowered you to consciously bound your experience to align with what would be “time well spent” for you. Not just bounding the quantity of time you spend, but the qualities of what would be “time well spent.”

Tristan Harris • How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Former Insider

We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

Tristan Harris • How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Former Insider

Your ideas are a product of the information you consume. Improving your outputs requires actively directing your attention to high-quality information streams and diverting attention from low-quality ones.

The tricky thing is that our information ecosystem is full of talented marketers who masquerade as experts with convincing copywri

Nick deWilde • Becoming an Expert Generalist

Business model shapes outcomes. In a subscription based model, you build tools people use and pay for. In an ad-based model, you build engagement hacks. As Tristan Harris put it: “we've moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based technology environment. That's what's changed.”

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It (Published 2017)

“You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” — Tristan Harris

Bo Burnham (the musician comedian) on the business of social media:

"[Social media firms are] coming for every second of your life...And it's not because anyone is bad, it's not because anybody in this company has evil plans or is trying to do this, they're not even doing it consciously. Their entire model is growth. They’re coming for every second