There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Tristan HarrisRead
Apps or media who make money on advertising are never satisfied with 'enough' of your attention. They will always fight for more.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how advertising-driven media are constantly seeking to capture as much of our attention as possible.
Tristan Harris points out the insatiable nature of companies that profit from advertising, emphasizing that they will continually strive for more of our attention. This relentless pursuit can lead to a culture of distraction and overwhelm, where user engagement is prioritized over the well-being of individuals.
Themes
AttentionAdvertisingMediaDistractionTechnology
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar on digital well-being, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of managing our attention online.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes βTechnology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.
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You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
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Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
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I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
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If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
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