Tristan Harris

Environmental Scientist & Systems Thinker

Harris's critique of the attention economy borrows its deepest frame from Meadows: in a 2022 talk he walked through Thinking in Systems and its twelve leverage points, singling out the topmost — the power to transcend paradigms — as the one the tech conversation actually needs. In his telling, social media is a system faithfully producing what its structure incentivizes, and fixing it means climbing her hierarchy: past features and settings, up to goals and paradigms.

singularityhub.com

Professor of Political Arithmetic, University of Amsterdam

The same diagnosis reached from opposite institutions. Harris built a movement on the claim that engagement-optimised design overrides the intentions of the person using it; Mügge, discussing the Digital Fairness Act then under debate in Brussels, describes teenagers who say plainly that the feed is bad for them and still cannot put it down, and reaches for the tobacco analogy — people need and appreciate a little help keeping a thing at bay. Where Harris made the case in the language of design ethics and public attention, Mügge makes it in the language of statute: limits on autoplay and similar patterns, argued for precisely because individual willpower is the wrong place to put the load.

Cyber Ambassador-at-large, Taiwan

Harris and Aza Raskin brought Tang onto Your Undivided Attention in February 2024, election season, to ask how a democracy stays standing under deepfakes and information warfare. Her answer was Taiwan's method in miniature: she had pre-bunked the threat 'by filming myself being deepfaked,' and 'simply investing in increasing that bit rate so the citizen can speak their mind and build bridges together does wonders.' Harris diagnoses the attention economy from outside the state; Tang is the rare interlocutor who ran the counter-experiment from inside one.

humanetech.com · centerforhumanetechnology.substack.com