Your Undivided Attention - Launching June 10: Your Undivided Attention

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Technology has shredded our attention. We can do better.

I want to convince you that technology is its own force that's pushing our culture in a very specific direction. I'm on Instagram. I'm just not present. I could probably spend half an hour just looking at the same stuff. And we can predict what that direction is. It's like we're living fake lives. It's like mindless. It starts to make your head. Pretending. We're constant pretenders.

And we can steer it in a different direction. before it's too late. I'm Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. And I'm Isiraskin. I helped build the open web at Mozilla and invented the Infinite Scroll. As former tech insiders, we've seen and designed technology that hijacks our attention. But the problems go deeper than that. Technology can shape our thoughts.

It can stoke feelings of envy, hatred, and social isolation. It can sow division. It can tear apart our shared sense of reality. These are all aspects of human downgrading when technology dominates increasingly different parts of human nature. Human downgrading is the climate change of culture, solely pulling our thoughts, emotions,

and what we think and believe on a daily basis in a more divisive direction. And like climate change, the result will be catastrophic. Except unlike climate change, only a thousand people in Silicon Valley have to change what we're doing. In fact, we have yet to meet a single person in Silicon Valley who wants these outcomes, which means we're all actually on the same team.

As co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, we've met with the industry's leading executives, designers, programmers, and we've discovered in each of these meetings a pent-up desire to not just talk about these problems, but to solve them. That's why, on June 10th, we're launching a new podcast called Your Undivided Attention. On Your Undivided Attention, we'll radically reimagine. in our technology ecosystem. We'll spark a conversation about how we can flip this

from a race to the bottom to a race to the top. And to get there, we'll invite leading experts on human nature, the people that are most sophisticated about how we work. We'll talk to magicians, hypnotists, evolutionary biologists, the founder of the human potential movement of the 1960s. We'll talk to people who study the dynamics of cults, to experts on children's development, conflict mediators, experts on election hacking around the world.

There's no question whether Silicon Valley is sophisticated about technology. But what's been missing isn't more tech or better tech. The thing that's been missing is sophistication about human nature. E.O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, said, the real problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We need to embrace our palolithic emotions, uplift our medieval institutions, and give us the wisdom to wield our godlike,

technology, and that's what we'll be exploring on your undivided attention. Our podcast premieres on June 10th. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you may listen.