Top 33 Tristan Harris Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Tristan Harris Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

With its onslaught of never-ending choices, never-endin

With its onslaught of never-ending choices, never-ending supply of relationships and obligations, the attention economy bulldozes the natural shape of our physical and psychological limits and turns impulses into bad habits.
Tristan Harris
We’re going to need a new social contract with the tech world one that asks for consent, and one with transparent goals. Right now, the goals of technology are not aligned with our goals as humans. We need technology that empowers us to make the life choices we want to make.
Tristan Harris
Most notifications you get are because a machine is trying to get your attention. Those notifications aren’t built to help you live your life. They’re built to get your attention.
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
Ergonomics is about designing for failure modes and extremes: how things break under repetition, stress or other limits. And the goal of ergonomic designis to create an alignment between the user’s limits, the thing you’re designing, and how people will ideally use that thing.
Tristan Harris
We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren’t driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.
Tristan Harris
YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.
Tristan Harris
If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.
Tristan Harris
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
Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane.
Tristan Harris
New technologies always reshape society, and it’s always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason.
Tristan Harris
Every year, more and more friends, apps, media or news stories want our attention. We need a better way to organize all the kinds of choices we have.
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
While you can use muscle-memory to unconsciously move your thumb to open an app without thinking, it’s actually impossible to type on a keyboard unconsciously.
Tristan Harris
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 Harris
While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.
Tristan Harris
With our Paleolithic instincts, we’re simply unable to resist technology’s gifts. But this doesn’t just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.
Tristan Harris
We’re all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.
Tristan Harris
Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn’t choose, wouldn’t we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?
Tristan Harris
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?
Tristan Harris
Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
Tristan Harris
Yes, online privacy is a real problem that needs to be addressed. But even the best privacy laws are only as effective as our Paleolithic emotions are resistant to the seductions of technology.
Tristan Harris
Apps or media who make money on advertising are never satisfied with ‘enough’ of your attention. They will always fight for more.
Tristan Harris
The EU can lead the world toward more humane technology. But doing so requires thinking more broadly about reining in social media platforms to prevent them from degrading our democracies.
Tristan Harris
The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don’t speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It’s because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.
Tristan Harris
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.
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
For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend.
Tristan Harris
None of most powerful tech companies answer to what’s best for people, only to what’s best for them.
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
I’m not against technology.
Tristan Harris
Our brains are already bad at seeing exponential curves

Our brains are already bad at seeing exponential curves.
Tristan Harris
Information that confirms our beliefs makes us feel good; information that challenges our beliefs doesn’t.
Tristan Harris