Bearing the name of a mythical knight, he is one of the few Don Quixotes still fighting the monster that today’s internet has become.
“The closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”—that is how Tristan Harris is known. His name made headlines with the notorious film The Social Dilemma, which drew plenty of attention but never led to much real change. His work embodies everything that is “broken” in today’s online life. The manipulative practices that have become a threat to our future as a species.
Tristan Harris is not only the most recognizable champion of a free and democratic internet. Not only a thorough researcher who draws attention to the ways we are manipulated. He is also the man who warned a decade ago that the path technology was taking would lead us into a world of mammoth companies more powerful than the largest states. Into a time when we can no longer hold our attention while reading. Into filter bubbles that grotesquely distort the way we get our information.
Does he think we can reverse these trends? Can the internet become a free place without monopolies, where information is delivered democratically, with respect for the personal data and views of every user… What are his ideas for the future of the web?
Between Three Camps
He comes as a natural continuation of Jaron Lanier, Eli Pariser and Cal Newport. Tristan’s path runs through a successful startup of his own and an attempt to change the system from the inside as part of Google’s team. Then comes his real battle—for the time and attention of all of us.
Born in 1985, he started out like many other remarkable figures of Silicon Valley. He fell for programming early, writing his first programs for the Mac as a very young kid. His idol back then was Steve Wozniak; he even sent him letters, which went unanswered.
Besides computers, he was also fascinated by the art of illusionists. He taught himself magic tricks to impress his friends. Later he would return to those days, because they made him think about asymmetric power. When a magician asks you to pick a card from the deck, he seems to give you a choice, but it is only an illusion: he knows in advance which one you will pick, because he has skillfully steered you toward it. Which is exactly what, years later, Tristan would notice the internet giants doing too.
In Shining Armor
As a young man he was definitely on their side. He studied at Stanford, the university that, statistically, has given the world the most successful startups.
One of his classmates was Mike Krieger, the future co-founder of Instagram, and together they took part in a behavioral experiment. They studied how to get a person in a given network to send someone a photo when the weather was bad where that other person was—to cheer them up. The course was in psychology and focused on how to influence users. Our hero was struck by the fact that not a word was said about how that influence could happen ethically, or how to leave those same users the freedom to choose.
While still a student, he fulfilled one of his big dreams: an internship at Apple. Then came the big step—he founded his own startup. Apture was a browser add-on that helped people look up more information on a given site. The app quickly became popular, used by The Economist, the Financial Times and The New York Times. As Harris later recounted, the whole time he was torn between the company’s mission—to spark people’s curiosity—and pressure from clients to keep visitors on their sites for as long as possible.
The startup was bought by Google for $10 million, and Tristan joined the company along with it, working on Gmail. After a year at it, he was convinced he did not want to be part of a manipulative system, and he began his crusade…
Tristan and Isolde
That is the name of one of the most popular medieval tales, dating back to the 12th century and influencing many later literary works. It exists in many versions, spread across all the civilizations of the world at the time. But on the whole it is always about all-consuming love and a brave knight who fights for justice.
Truth be told, we know nothing about the all-consuming loves in Harris’s life; he deliberately keeps any personal information hidden. A kind of symbol of how technology ought to respect private space. But quite a lot is known about the medieval hero’s namesake and his fight for justice, and that is exactly why we are talking about him.
In 2012 he sent his colleagues a 144-page presentation titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” He emailed it to about a dozen people, but within a few days more than 5,000 Google employees had read it, including Larry Page.
The giant supposedly gave him a chance to put his ideas into practice. A year later Tristan took the position of “design ethicist and product philosopher” at the giant company. You know how this industry loves grand, original job titles with rather vague content. Either way, he tried to promote his ideas, even inviting the world-famous Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to give a lecture to the “collective.”
How the Steel Was Tempered
He met with Google’s bosses many times. He got applause, they supposedly told him how important his work was, but… nothing changed. So in December 2015 Tristan gave up trying to change the system from the inside, quit his job and devoted himself to his mission. To talk about the flaws of modern technology and how we can counter them—again, through technology.
It is perfectly understandable why Google could not afford to apply our hero’s ideas. In the wild online world, that would instantly make them uncompetitive against everyone else.
This is the same asymmetric power, the lesson Tristan carries with him from his magical childhood. Only in this case it is not an illusionist’s harmless attempt to impress, but outright manipulation. “The people ‘behind the screen’ hold all the power over those who look at that very screen.”
“Our problem is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology,” says Tristan.
At the Tip of the Spear
All of this is a natural consequence of the most important feature of the modern digital world: the vast sea of information flooding us, and the battle for our attention. Like it or not, to survive, companies do everything they can to turn our gaze toward their product, as often and for as long as possible, because that is what, one way or another, feeds them.
Tristan calls it the “attention economy.” Every app and website—whether for meditation, a news platform or an addictive game—tries to catch your eye so that you open it and spend as much time in it as possible.
And how does that happen? Through all kinds of manipulative techniques. In his email to colleagues, Tristan warned that within a decade these would leave people unable to hold their attention for long, for instance while reading a book. That software products would increasingly bombard us with notifications about anything and everything, and we would react again and again without realizing it, like a hamster on a wheel. That personalized content carries risks that need to be understood and prevented.
Scoundrels, Sir!
Welcome to that future, about which Tristan turned out to be entirely right. Distractions in our daily lives today are a scourge whose rotten fruit we will be eating for years to come. It is getting harder and harder to hold our attention, to stop ourselves from glancing at the phone again to see whether someone has liked our latest post.
But even if they have, so what?
After Google, Tristan took up something he calls “ethical activism.” He created the Time Well Spent movement to get people talking about the issue and to make them aware of the scale of the manipulation. Then, with like-minded people, he founded the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology.
In 2020 he managed to draw attention to these issues by appearing in The Social Dilemma. The film was seen by 100 million people in 190 countries and translated into 30 languages! Harris became quite famous, many countries invited him to consult on possible regulation, and he became a frequent guest in the U.S. Senate.
Yes, the film’s popularity probably led to some changes, such as the introduction of Focus mode on new iPhones. The truth, however, is that the old saying has played out once again: the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
In King Arthur’s Court
According to our hero, one solution is to put an end to free apps. As good old Jaron Lanier keeps repeating, when something is free, you are the product—and the sad examples of the internet giants prove it today. Their fierce battle for our data and our time proves it. Against this, Tristan says, stand “organic technologies”: you pay for them, but that allows their makers to avoid manipulation and advertising tricks.
The first step, in his view, is for states to ban hyper-targeted advertising.
But it is very hard to get used to paying for something you have always received (seemingly) for free. Of course, there is a price here, and in the end it turns out steep, but to realize it you have to stop and think… which you have no time for while the phone in your pocket reminds you yet again that someone on one of your 235 social networks has liked your post.
And here comes Tristan’s next idea, which is simple and logical, and if more people adopted it, they would only gain. Yes, you know whose hands the rescue of the drowning lies in.
The search for a solution to these problems begins with awareness—few people will stop to think and not discover that they have turned into “anonymous Facebookaholics,” opening one platform or another minute after minute.
Excalibur Online
Our hero’s advice is quite similar to that of Cal Newport and his “digital minimalism.” The steps are truly intuitive. Cut down for a while on the apps on your phone, to work out which of them really matter to you. It is a fact that today it is nearly impossible to be an active member of society if you give them up completely—something made even more true by the increasingly flexible work arrangements since the pandemic.
But salvation lies in limiting ourselves to the apps, and the notifications within them, that truly matter. If we really cannot wait to see an email from someone important, we can always set a filter so the phone alerts us only about that, and not about every new piece of spam in the inbox. On average, each of us today checks our phone around 150 times a day!
Among his other ideas is to keep the important apps on a single screen, so that the rest are not constantly in front of your eyes. Because they are all designed so that the moment you look at the screen, they lure you with a red exclamation mark saying there is something new and especially interesting to open them for.
A Matter of Honor
The inability to concentrate is a huge and deepening problem—you can see it in how the character of each new trending social network changes. But there is another big topic tied to the ethics of the giants that Tristan often talks about, and it is no less important for us as a species: democracy and the development of society.
Here, too, social networks matter a great deal. Today, if this very article has reached you, it has very likely done so through one of the internet giants. Long gone are the days when we visited websites to read the news—now it is served to us by search engines, if we need something specific, or by social networks. The latter, however, are not at all fond of showing external links; their main goal is to hold our attention as long as possible. As a result, content creators have to pay for ads so that their words reach anyone at all.
Or the other option: to be loud, provocative, conspiratorial, ambiguous, “begging” you to click on the flashy-sounding link. From all this, logically, came other phenomena Tristan predicted—the polarization of societies, the impossibility of reaching agreement, aggressive communication.
Windmills
Along with this comes direct interference. According to research by psychologist Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, for example, since 2015 Google’s results have shifted the outcome of elections in no fewer than 25 countries.
“All of this leads to the downgrading of people, of humanity—the downgrading of relationships, attention, democracy, of our sense of shame,” says Tristan.
The advance of artificial intelligence opens up new topics. According to the modern knight, the problem there is not that technology will begin to surpass us technically in our strong areas. The danger comes when the computer “realizes” human weaknesses, when it understands where a person is emotionally vulnerable and uses that against them. Aren’t we already seeing the first traces of this problem in social media algorithms?
The Last Argument
At a Senate hearing in the spring of 2021, Tristan put the problem clearly and compellingly: “We are in the middle of the great transition from 20th-century analog society to 21st-century digital society. We face two choices that both look like dystopias: we can head toward the Chinese Orwellian brain implants, with authoritarian control, censorship and mass behavior modification. Or we can choose the American, Western Huxleyan version, where we sink into distraction, outrage, triviality and amusing ourselves to death… Let’s try to find a third way: toward an open, not a closed, digital society!”
And indeed, let’s! This battle is so important, and it depends on each of us… A meaningful digital future surely passes through reflection. And through a fight—but not against people who hold different opinions online. You do remember where freedom lies, Sancho…?
