In 2013, Tristan Harris, who worked for Google as a Design Ethicist—a relatively odd term for a tech company—was seated at a workstation when he created a slide show that he had no intention of sharing widely. It was made up of 144 slides and presented an argument that most of his colleagues probably understood in theory but hadn’t seen put together quite so clearly: the products they were developing were made at every level of the interface to draw and hold users’ attention in ways that they hadn’t selected and might not want if they fully understood what was happening. He forwarded it to other individuals he trusted. Five thousand Google employes had viewed it in a matter of days.
Harris had the personal experience to support his claim. He had studied under B.J. Fogg at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, one of the few university programs specifically focused on comprehending how software may alter human behavior. The majority of significant social products now incorporate Fogg’s framework for persuasive technology, not because businesses directly imitated his work but rather because many of his students went on to create the features that define how those products feel, such as the pull-to-refresh gesture, the social feed’s variable reward, and the notification badge that remains hidden on an app icon until you open it. These weren’t mishaps. They were design decisions, and Harris was the only person who truly understood what those decisions were and why they worked.
The institutional shift Harris had hoped for was not achieved by the presentation. Google admitted it. Senior leaders interacted with the concepts. To reflect a wider scope, his title was changed. However, a 144-slide internal document was not going to change the business model that made every minute of extra engagement valuable to the organization. Harris had departed by 2016. He was thirty-two years old. He had witnessed his presentation gain traction at one of the world’s most powerful corporations while virtually no structural changes were made. He came to the conclusion that the issue isn’t individual designers making poor decisions, but rather a system where manipulation is the logical result due to incentives. This is what he has argued for the most of the time since.
Harris, together with Aza Raskin and Randima Fernando, co-founded the Center for Humane Technology in 2018. The organization’s stance is that individual corporations cannot be persuaded to be more responsible in order to address the attention economy. Above all, the financial structure rewards engagement, and the most reliable way to generate engagement is to take advantage of the psychological weaknesses that humans have developed over tens of thousands of years. Examples of these vulnerabilities include the intermittent reward system that powers slot machines, the social anxiety that makes a notification feel urgent, and the status monitoring that makes tracking likes an engaging activity. With sufficient computer knowledge, people cannot easily overcome these shortcomings. They are deep, old, and just what the items were designed to cater to.
In September 2020, the Social Dilemma came at a time when such arguments were more palatable than they had been when Harris initially attempted to articulate them at Google. In its first month, around 100 million accounts viewed the Netflix documentary, which had Harris at its center along with interviews with executives and designers who had created the goods in question. The figure’s size and what it implies about the audience’s need to comprehend what was happening to their attention make it visually captivating. After its publication, policy discussions began in at least thirty nations. The discrepancy between what they had created and what it was doing caused real distress for a number of interviewees.
It’s important to be open about what Harris gave up and how much it cost. Google purchased Apture, the business he started, in 2011. If he had wanted to continue down the traditional tech career route, his Google title, Google income, and Google stock package might have opened nearly any door in Silicon Valley. There was a strong financial argument for staying. After years of observing the internal reaction to his presentation, he came to the conclusion that the money was not compensation for doing something beneficial, but rather for keeping silent about something he knew was actually detrimental. It’s worthwhile to leave open the question of whether such framing is totally accurate. However, there is a continuity in the sequence of events—the presentation, the minimal institutional response, the departure, and the advocacy—that at least lends credibility to the personal narrative.
His work raises the more general question of whether the problem is open to the kinds of remedies he’s proposing, a question that hasn’t been fully addressed by seeing this argument unfold over the course of ten years. The Center for Humane Technology uses design standards, public awareness, and legislative attention as tools. The industry hasn’t yet thoroughly evaluated whether any of these can significantly alter a business model that brings in billions of dollars by grabbing attention.
