I decided
to share this interview with Tristan Harris with the class because I thought it
gave a different perspective on the drives of tech industry than The Circle. I thought that the realities
of the attention economy that he describes were equally as troubling as the idea
of a tech company fueled purely by a misguided adherence to extremist ideology.
At this point, it is hard to imagine that we could ever be convinced to give up
our technology, so Harris’s call for design standards which encourage us to spend
time doing things that we find worthwhile is extremely important.
After my presentation,
we talked about the ways in which the prioritization of our time can become
problematic. This is actually something that Harris devotes a lot of time to
later in the interview. In general, humans are not flawless at organizing their
priorities, and this is something which software developers can take advantage
of. One example that Harris gives is from Twitter. After the Twitter app loads,
it takes up to three seconds for the number of notifications to appear at the
bottom of the screen. The app was designed to wait a random amount of time to
display the notifications so that the presentation resembled a slot machine. Designers
also implement things like the auto-play features we discussed in class, which
work so well because we are so easily distracted.
In my
opinion, the things that Harris talks about are just as frightening as the
dystopian future presented in The Circle.
A company being driven by an ideological commitment to the abolition of privacy
seems less likely than a cooperation simply sacrificing the wellbeing of the
consumers for economic gains. Perhaps these huge tech companies worth hundreds
of billions of dollars are even reminiscent of the businesses of the industrial
revolution.
Connecting
this presentation to other relevant class concepts, I think it is also
interesting to think about the direction these companies are taking in the
context of Accelerationism. Although Silicon Valley as a whole is bringing
about rapid, massive technological advances, individual companies are not
always putting these technologies to good use. The general lack of ethics in
tech companies brings up a good argument against Accelerationism: what is the
point of advancing technology if it is not being used to better humanity? Of
course, one could counter that these misuses are just hiccups in an ultimately
positive trend, but it is hard for me to imagine these companies not getting
more and more abusive with persuasive technologies without some sort of
intervention.
Which
brings me to something I really enjoyed about Tristan Harris’s interview: he
brought up a lot of concrete ideas for how to change the technology industry.
For example, he talked a lot about the metrics that advertisers look for. As he
explained in the clip I played in class, the main thing that almost everyone is
concerned with is time on site, which is why so many tech companies use
unethical techniques to try to get users to spend as much time as possible
viewing their content. Harris talks about many other possible solutions in the
interview, which I have posted a link to below.
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