Tristan Harris: What if Tech companies start to Think Different: Ethics & Wisdom in Design

Inspired to write this personal commentary after stumbling upon the work of Tristan Harris, formerly Product Philosopher at Google. Tristan is now an apologist for the implementation of ethical and wiser design in consumer technology. Tristan has presented more than a few TED Talks on this subject, as well as an insightful podcast interview with Sam Harris (#71Waking Up with Sam Harris). He is now promoting his organization called TimeWellSpent, raising awareness on how the current digital landscape, focused on user-attention has made us trapped in an ocean of distractions, and how we can, and should, ultimately design our digital platforms with a code of ethics, a designer’s hippocratic oath, that is in harmony with our best interests.

But the real reason behind why I stumbled upon Tristan Harris in the first place, was because I was having a sort-of mental breakdown, partly due to my internet addiction. Lately, I had found myself increasingly glued to my phone and laptop throughout the day. From the moment I wake up (Twitter, News, Instagram) to my afternoons (Youtube, GaiaTV, Netflix), and even when I go out for a walk or to the gym (Podcasts), the phone was my sanctuary.

Scarier still, were the endless, unconscious compulsions, similar to a being that’s been hijacked running on auto-pilot. After a day gone by with no recollection of time well-spent, usually arises a sense of loneliness, anxiety, and deep existantial angst. Thankfully, Luck/HigherSelf/Destiny, or whatever you want to call it, pointed me to become aware of this. And this is how I typed, desperately into my browser: “Tech Mind Hijack” and found Tristan. And here I am writing this rather intimate article/confession.

How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day.

If you haven’t watched the TED Talk above, just do it. I’m not usually a big TED person, but every once in a while, there’s a person that goes bulls-eye on the zeitgeist of our culture and sparks an insightful conversation. But otherwise, here’s a quick recap to the best of my articulation: Imagine the Internet as a city.
This city is shaped by urban planners who create avenues of communications and entertainment, i.e., the platforms we most use (Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Instagram, etc.). The problem however, is that these avenues are not designed to get us where we want to go about in a most efficient way, but rather, on how much time we’ll spend on the platform. Suddenly, everyone’s fighting over to get the most users to stay on their platform. In other words, our attention have become their business. So how does it work? With an army of teams dedicated solely to social-engineer the human mind, we have become products, mere dots in a system that seeks to steer our attention-craving in their directions. And most disturbingly, this happens without explicit knowledge of, much less our consent to the process.

Part of the problem, is the advertising model that feeds on this bait-click model for revenue. However, this siphoning of human attention is obstructed only by one crucial element: Time. To make this short, these urban planners end up having to resort to using the most basal stimuli, which has become ubiquitous in today’s landscape: outrage. And indeed, our amygdala, which is responsible and most sensitive to fear-related experiences and situations, is constantly being stimulated on these platforms.

What’s more, is that for a platform like Facebook, outrage is more likely to get user attention and sharing than something more mundane. And I’m guilty of that, on a daily experience. But the point is, most of us (and me first) are not usually aware of the epistemology involved in the decisions we take. In fact, it’s more than likely that we have been deliberately steered to react/click in a pre-engineered way by a team of behavioural psychologists unbeknownst to us.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that the teams working at Facebook, Google and such, have nefarious intentions to begin with. In fact, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have the best intentions in designing their products. But like the rest of us, their livelihood depend on following the direction of the advertiser’s business model (which in turn, the company’s revenue depend on), which I would argue, is how post-industrial Modern capitalist industries have been engineered to work as. In a way, you could argue that this pyramid-matrix is structured from top-to-bottom in a fractal geometry of slave/master relationships.

So what’s the solution: Empowering users by ethical design.

And this is perhaps where Tristan Harris’ work is most insightful: In advocating for a code of ethics for designers to follow when creating social platforms/apps, akin to the doctor’s Hippocratic Oath (Do No Harm). Ironically, ethics and morality is perhaps the most overlooked aspect in our modern society. I would argue we may be the most cleverest civilization, using our wits to develop nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, but without wisdom to guide our decisions, we are destined to go extinct. And we are desperate for wisdom in the tech industry. And throughout History, you see the constant pattern of humanist figures being deliberately silenced, perhaps the greatest modern example of all being Nikola Tesla. But I digress.

So what is the solution?

One of the things TimeWellSpent advocates, is a set of ethical guidelines for product design that seeks to align features with our values. What do we want in our life? How can we make this app/platform help spend less time on the phone distracted, and doing more of what I want. The beauty of it all is that we already have the tools and capability to radically change our digital interactions in a short-time. Instead of seeing AI (Artificial Intelligence) as mere absent robot, Siri could be designed to get to know us better, and what we want of our daily routine, and help us make smarter decisions throughout the day.
An example illustrated in the podcast with Sam Harris was, the phone asking the user for weekly feedback on the increased social media usage upon waking up, and potentially notifying the user for breaks, or a short meditation session to get us back on track for the day. There are tons of ways that our phone could help us make better decisions. Right now, the situation seems daunting, and the global repercussions of this epidemic should be somewhat concerning: increased sense of outrage, loneliness, endless distractions that keep us from focusing on our values, priorities and human interactions.
Surely I will admit to lacking some self-discipline to keep myself from distraction, but can I really be held responsible for this, when billion-dollar companies are actively co-conspiring on subverting our minds to their benefit?

So where do we begin?

Unfortunately, for these things to really see the light of day, we would need the urban planners on board: that’s the folks at Apple, Google, Facebook and such. Because we would need to completely re-think our eco-systems in relation to the user interactions. Having said that, I am convinced that it all begins with a discussion, acknowledgement and awareness of our current situation first. Sparking this debate, and reflecting on our daily usage of smartphones and Internet, and whether we’re happy or not. These are the first steps, and change will happen bottom-up, not top-down.
For me, I started going to the public library next door (One of the few vestiges of a wise civilization) to take a break from the Web, a jot down my daily habits. Am I happy with those activities? What activities do I lack, that I wish I’d spent more time? Writing, exercising, meeting friends, future planning.

Another thing I did was to disable all types of notifications on my phone, except direct-messaging apps. As well install Moment and RescueTime to track my daily phone and computer habits and usage, respectively.
Last but not least, it gave me a push to start creating content and expressing, instead of passively consuming. You can probably tell I’m not a seasoned writer, but I’d rather give it a try and learn something on the way. For too long I’ve kept my ideas in a effervescent box in the mind, only to fade away. Writing more often might just be the antidote to my existantial angst.
Below is a painting of Claude Monet (Champs d'iris jaunes à Giverny, 1887) I photographed at the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition. It’s a sobering reminder of what our attention is capable of doing when focused.

Recommended Reads/Listen:
How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist

What is Technology Doing to Us?