Tristan Harris Quotes

We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help.

Tristan Harris

I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

Tristan Harris

For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing - a way of measuring success.

Tristan Harris

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.

Tristan Harris

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.

Tristan Harris

Technology 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.

Tristan Harris

I actually worry that we're so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.

Tristan Harris