
Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones - johnny313
https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/?src=longreads
======
nessup
I've been following Tristan Harris's work since he released Time Well Spent. I
think he has a legitimate complaint, but his proposed solutions are terrible.
For example, he suggests to Facebook:

> Imagine we replace the Comment button with a Let’s Meet button. When we want
> to post something controversial, we can have the choice to say, “Hey let’s
> talk about this” in person, not online.

Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that
matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had
suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose
business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been
a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform
design." Which consumers should become self-aware? Why would entrenched
companies change their design? The idealism is nice and all, but so far I
think this has been a wasted opportunity to fix a real problem. The messaging
could be far more specific and realistic. But at least we're talking about it.

~~~
closeparen
FWIW, Facebook and messaging have not hijacked my mind anywhere near as
thoroughly as HN and Reddit have. It's always fascinating to see such moral
outrage about addictive internet companies on these _far_ more addictive
platforms.

What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing,
probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained
out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides
noprocrast.

~~~
losteric
> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one
> thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we
> get trained out of refreshing them all the time.

This is exactly what I do.

I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss
sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before
being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my
"personal Google").

Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized
based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated
by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for
each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally
click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.

Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I _will_ take action.
Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I _will_ reference
them in the future.

It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the
environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf.
Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused
on doing things instead of reading things.

(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of
news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)

~~~
rayuela
This sounds pretty great actually. Do you have this up on github or anywhere I
might be able to grab this from you?

~~~
losteric
Not yet, but I'm actively working on it... my employer's FOSS policy is that
all personal projects must receive corporate sign-off before they published.

~~~
silentguy
Care to post here once it is ready. Many people would benefit from this kind
of setup. I was thinking of having this setup for myself too.

~~~
losteric
Absolutely. HN doesn't have direct messaging, so just keep an eye out I guess
:)

------
japhyr
I did something interesting this week. I teach high school, and this was our
first week back at school. No students yet, just beginning of the year prep
work.

I was checking my phone every 5-10 minutes half out of restlessness at sitting
inside all day, and also to keep up with rapidly evolving events in the world.
But I wanted to focus more, without turning my phone off. So I put my phone in
my left pocket instead of my right pocket.

It worked. Every time I reached for my phone, I had to think consciously how
to get it out. That interrupted the cycle of just pulling it out enough to
make me only pull it out once in a while. It went back to being a tool I use
to do lots of things, rather than something I use to fill time when there's
nothing to do for 30 seconds. The first step he mentions, simply being aware
of these habits and breaking the cycles, can go a long way in keeping these
habits from becoming too entrenched.

~~~
ssivark
I think that putting in just a bit of friction ("activation barrier") is a
generally useful technique to make one's actions more conscious and
deliberate. Some more examples, off the top of my head:

1\. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.

2\. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.

3\. Creating a separate browsing profile for a certain category of browsing.
Eg: work profile -vs- fun profile

4\. Leave the TV remote inside a drawer/shelf rather than just lying around on
the couch.

I'm interested in hearing more suggestions!

PS: The counterpoint to this technique is to reduce friction for the things
you would like to do more often.

~~~
gtdawg
> 1\. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.

> 2\. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.

Yes! I do both of these for facebook and I rarely use it now. It's been great.
The only downside is the friends who insist on group facebook messenger
conversations (mbasic) which I won't see for a couple of days, and then need
to repeatedly log in to keep up on an active topic or coordination/meet-up.

------
Chiba-City
Do we confuse efficiency engineers (purpose, work, routing, training,
outcomes) with inefficiency engineers(distraction, entertainment, inputs)? I
cut some teeth on early laser printed govt report generation where every page
has a minutes-to-read constraint for decision makers. That is efficiency.

Couchsurfing And Meetup make in-person local group formation and related
discussions possible. DC here is a town where people talk for money, but many
communities of Americans are very shy about meeting any strangers.

Masses of people burdened by kids and long commutes or old age mostly seek
distraction. Those are yesterday's TV ad audiences ordering more pizza cheese.

I ignore my phone. Some nerdier people have "auditory agoraphobia" and tune in
to music, podcasts or books on tape in lieu of chewing cud. I think that is
good compared to listening to Howard Stern in a car.

Other people are just remarkably bored. I bothered to spend a few weeks asking
people what they were they doing on their phones outside offices. I was
surprised to learn how most women I asked were constantly catalog shopping. I
was surprised because I use Amazon like preppies used LL Bean to avoid wasting
time in retail shopping. Visually obsessed shoppers are problems few will pay
engineers to solve.

------
jakobegger
I've ignored people around me while reading books as a kid, I've ignored
people by sitting in front of a PC as a teenager, and now I ignore people
while looking at a mobile phone. Whenever I try to spend less time looking at
my phone, I just spend more time reading the newspaper or whatever else I can
find.

Maybe technology has made the problem worse, but at least in my case the
problem is me, not whatever distracts me.

~~~
thinbeige
> I just spend more time reading the newspaper

There so many great things you can do when being offline. But it's definitely
not reading a physical newspaper in 2017. This doesn't make sense (for me at
least) and this is not about liking or hating technology. It's like using a
phone booth for making phone calls. A newspaper is just an inferior medium for
that use case.

The actual message of your post is good though.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

~~~
jacobolus
As far as I can tell his point is that he suffers from a kind of “information
addiction” and it prevents him from engaging with the people around him as
much as he would like or accomplishing other goals, and that he switches
reading a newspaper (still a form of compulsive solitary procrastination) if
for whatever reason the internet isn’t available.

Your comment is a non sequitur.

------
thinbeige
The guys is totally right but what he says is nothing new since Nir Eyal's
Hooked and B.T. Skinner's Skinner-box. Besides, the web itself, yes just
simple websites, has been highly addictive for decades. This ecosystem was
just transformed to mobile and because the phone is always with you the
addiction is even worse. Facebook on desktop was as addictive as on mobile.

I miss a solution but he doesn't propose any.

~~~
arkitaip
He actually outlines a 3 step strategy for regaining control. Also, there's
the non-profit he started that aims to make people more mindful on how shitty
apps affect our mental states
[http://www.timewellspent.io/](http://www.timewellspent.io/)

~~~
thinbeige
I briefly went over the site before but haven't seen the 3 steps, guess I
missed them, mind to tell them?

Edit: I just went another time to the site and still can't see any '3 steps'
in text form. Would be great if you could enlighten us since you know the 3
steps.

~~~
peterhartree
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:

> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology
> and to our society.

> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. 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? I think we need
> to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period
> of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware
> Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we
> want to protect.

> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the
> world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's
> only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms
> are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical
> persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with
> the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like
> the business model of advertising.

> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of
> human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just
> imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and
> what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they
> want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions.
> And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different
> directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to
> orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those
> timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be
> protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the
> thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding
> happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be
> empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...](https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention/transcript#t-580659)

~~~
icelancer
Is the point supposed to be that his proposed solution is impossible to
implement and flies in the face of market and incentive-driven behavior? When
I think "three step proposal" I think of something actionable by an
individual, not something that would have to be enacted on by basically a
totalitarian government.

------
StanislavPetrov
This is most relevant (and troubling) among younger people. While its just as
possible for older people to get wrapped up with their smart phones and social
media sites, at least they weren't completely absorbed their formative years
when their brains were developing. We are in the midst of a massive social
experiment with a generation of children being raised with these devices,
social media, and all the many things that are entailed. How it is going to
turn out anyone's guess.

------
binaryapparatus
I am bit older than average and completely disconnected with my phone. Did you
know that if you don't unlock iPhone for 24 hours you have to enter code to
unlock? Did you know that iPhone battery can last for a week if you don't use
it?

I am happy not to have phone addiction.

~~~
KGIII
I was a slave to my phone, for many years. It was needed for business. Today,
I do have a smartphone, but I think it is in the car. I'm not actually sure
where it is.

I have no apps, other than what came with it. In fact, that's one of the
reason I picked a Windows phone. Nobody makes apps for it. Really, it does all
I want.

I make calls, text, email, take pictures, and browse the web when I am bored
and not home. I sometimes tether it and use a laptop. That's pretty much it.

It gets lost, the battery runs out, and I don't care. I'm okay with that.
There are already a bunch of ways to communicate with me. I even have a
landline.

It's not that bad, compared to what I witness others doing. I see people, out
with others, and many of them remain glued to their phones. A friend recently
informed me that people will use their phones, not as cameras, while having
sex at those live cam sites.

I'm not actually sure how I'd feel if the missus pulled out her phone and was
posting to Facebook during sex.

Speaking of Facebook, I don't have anything like that.

Anyway, it seems that we have all these outlets to communicate, but the
majority of activities barely seems to meet that definition. But, I digress.

I guess I'm trying to say that I am also happy to not have a phone addiction.
I don't even answer either of my phones, unless I have a reason to do so.

It has been about ten years that I haven't needed to give a phone permission
to interrupt me. It feels pretty good.

------
jdnier
A great quote from the article: "Advertising is the new coal. It was wonderful
for propping up the internet economy. It got us to a certain level of economic
prosperity, and that’s fantastic. And it also polluted the inner environment
and the cultural environment and the political environment because it enabled
anyone to basically pay to get access to your mind.

------
KirinDave
I typically summarize this to fellow professionals shipping mobile apps as:

"We optimize for measurable engagment as a proxy for customer satisfaction,
which is itself often suggested as a proxy for product value. This is a
terrible mistake and it makes us optimize for novel forms of addiction."

------
_nalply
I think the end user should be given the power to customise their experiences.
For example I wrote an user script for Youtube to hide recommendations and to
redirect to a blank page when a video ends. It was for my kids but I realise
it's also good for me.

~~~
ColanR
any chance you can share that script?

~~~
_nalply
Sure, but no guarantee given.

[https://gist.github.com/nalply/6bcb91154df56b58974a65ebb3f0b...](https://gist.github.com/nalply/6bcb91154df56b58974a65ebb3f0b492)

------
amelius
I'd like to read some more compelling arguments. Or for example, a story about
how someone's life is influenced by social media and how it could have been
better.

It's not that _I_ cannot understand this, and see where things can go wrong.
It's that I can't seem to convince others of it.

The same holds for privacy issues. The arguments are all true, but just not
compelling enough.

------
mjevans
Am I the only one that sees much danger in the 'meetup IRL' button mentioned
in the middle of this?

While I very much agree that something needs to be done to encourage making
real friends in real life (possibly some kind of sonar app based on short
range peer to peer?), I think trying to get opposing sides in a heated debate
together is less than wise.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yes, let's separate people who disagree and avoid letting them talk about
their disagreements in person. It's much safer to avoid anyone you disagree
with, and minimizes hurt feelings.

------
pmoriarty
_" an interview on the Sam Harris podcast about all the different ways
technology is persuading millions of people in ways they don’t see"_

Tristan Harris is only mentioning some very recent manifestations and
variations of a critique that has been around for a very long time.

The history of this critique is a complex and not easily summarized one,[1]
but, to take just one example, in _The Technological Society_ [2] Jacques
Ellul[3] argued that it was the efficiency improvements in what Ellul called
"technique" (which can be thought of as technology in a broader sense) were
effectively irresistible and inevitable to society as a whole, as the adopters
of less efficient techniques were inevitably out-competed by users of more
efficient ones. For Ellul this was important because it meant the loss of
humanity's freedom, as they are inevitably following where efficient technique
leads them.

This was presaged by Heidegger[4] most famously in _The Question Concerning
Technology_ [5], and a whole field of Philosophy of Technology followed.[6]

A more recent and popular exploration of technology's influence can be found
in the documentaries of Adam Curtis.[7]

[1] - For one easily accessible but analytically-flavored attempt at a
summary, see:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/)

[2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-
Ellul/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-
Ellul/dp/0394703901/)

[3] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul)

[4] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger)

[5] - [https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-
Other-...](https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-Other-
Essays/dp/0061319694/)

[6] -
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/)

[7] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis)

~~~
gshubert17
In addition, Timothy Wu has written a book, The Attention Merchants: How Our
Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold, which describes the interaction of
advertising and technology, especially the "three screens" (movies,
television, and computer).

[https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Tim-
Wu/dp/1782394...](https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Tim-
Wu/dp/1782394826)

------
dcow
It really kinda sounds like this guy woke up one day, decided he didn't like
_technology_ , and began a crusade. I'm struggling to find anything novel in
what's being argued unless you didn't already know that the incentives are not
stacked in your favor as a user. The interview does make one good point: who
_does_ say what is best for me as a user and why is _time spent on a given
platform_ a bad metric (even if it's not originally born of a user-centric
mindset--which is also arguable since many product teams _are_ user-centric)?
Perhaps I'm enjoying that time.

~~~
bitexploder
This is ignoring our finite attention and decision reservoir and something Cal
Newport refers to as attention residue -- the time it takes to transition
wholly to another task. It can be jarring to realize how fully these devices
and distractions integrate into one's existence.

------
calvinbhai
I wish I could get something like the Self Control app (that's on my mac) for
iPhone. If tweetbot adds this to the app, it'll be very useful!

------
pcmaffey
No one can hijack your mind without your consent. \- Eleanor Roosevelt

~~~
etiam
Oh, if only.

------
blubb-fish
today i deleted my Facebook account ... true story!

~~~
harryf
well done

------
cerealbad
selling targeted advertising in front of curated information is not the
cyberpunk future i was promised.

information needs to become transparent so addicts look through it rather than
at it, with an augmented reality horizon. current mobile computing is
incapable of providing immersive or useful experiences, the success of games
shows the potential and inbuilt demand in connected movement devices. a mask
is far more useful than a pair of glasses: identity tag, atmospheric filter,
audio visual screen, trauma drug delivery system, human net, fashion and
status symbol.

ideally you should wear your net/node like a second skin, after all it's the
clothing of the 21st century. before we get there we need flexible integrated
circuits, paper thin devices that are powered by light or heat. decades and
decades away from mom and dad slipping on their iVide's.

