The Digital Attention Crisis

Search for Tristan Harris

This guy is billed as the conscience of silicon valley - and has some fine things to say, about how the companies who run the Valley, are making money - by exploiting the people who use their products.

He thinks the Valley should reform itself, and notes the many ways in which this can be done - all of which would reduce its profits, but improve the emotional health of its users.

I cannot help but compare this advice to that which might be offered to the Drug Industry - make drugs that are less addictive!

To understand what is going on here, we have to back up to the middle of the 19th Century - when Industrialization (Manufacturing and Transportation) was running the world - and the people in it.

It considered people to be one of the resources it had to manage. And it produced more products, and cheaper products - than ever before. It also produced WWI, that killed more people than ever before. And also produced the masses - who were behaving entirely differently.

There was no lack of ideas, back then - of how things could be improved, and some of them were implemented. I am living now on my Social Security income that was introduced as part of the New Deal, that tried to overcome the Great Depression.

Perhaps the Industrial Economy could have reformed itself, after WWII - but powerful new technologies took over instead - Television and the Computer. That changed everything - without people noticing this.

This lack of awareness was the most important result of this vast change. The screen of the TV, or the Computer - was so fascinating, people were not interested in what was going on around it, in the real world. For them, it ceased to exist!