43 Quotes by Tristan Harris

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.

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.

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.

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.