Page 84 - You - South Africa (February 2020)
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(From previous page)
where people around you
mightberadicalisedbyYou-
Tubevideosorchoosenotto
vaccinate their children be-
cause of misinformation
spread on Twitter. Tech-
influenced crises are erupt- OVE LEFT: Mark Zuckerberg faces increasing scrutiny about the news that
ing everywhere, but taking a ebook disseminates. ABOVE RIGHT and RIGHT: Tech investor Roger
whack-a-mole stick for each Namee and child advocate Jim Steyer have joined Harris in his campaign
problem misses the point. T: The Russian FaceApp – 150 million people downloaded it last year.
Harris often quotes Ed-
ward Wilson, the Harvard a Raskin, interview many of those people.”
professor and evolutionary perts who can help de- To persuade them to act, he expects
biologist, who said, “The real ystify human down- that he must reframe the way that thou-
problem of humanity is the ading, including au- sands, if not millions, of people think
following:wehavePalaeolith- orities on cults, casino about technology.
ic emotions,medievalinstitu- sign, addiction, elec- The main offenders are obvious.
tionsandgodliketechnology.” on hacking and meth- “It’s hard not to look at this and say,
Essentially,Harrissays,“We . essentially, we have at least two of the
are chimps with nukes,” and the chimps In one episode, Gloria Mark, a profes- biggest companies – Facebook (includ-
are becoming more primitive just as sor at the department of informatics at ing Instagram and WhatsApp) and
the nukes get more sophisticated and the University of California, talks about Google (including YouTube) incentivised
deadly. the “science of interruptions”. She’s to create this digital Dark Age, where dis-
But the real tragedy is that belief in found that when people are working on information outcompetes information.”
truth and facts is slipping away at a time computers, their attention breaks every YouTube has two billion unique month-
“when it’s never been more urgent to 40 seconds.Lessthantwodecadesagoit ly users, giving it a psychological foot-
know how many years we have until the was every three minutes – and people print roughly the same size as Christian-
permafrost melts”, Harris says, in an era were shocked then. ity. Facebook is bigger.
when “we need the whole world to see “We’re stillintheWildWestoftechde-
our world’s problems the same way very velopment,” she told the hosts. Tech “is ARRIS grew up in San Fran-
quickly”. being developed without really thinking cisco’s Bay Area and was
I can feel myself recoiling, pressing into about how it fits with human beings”. raised by his mother, who
the back of my chair to get away from the That’s whatHarrisandRaskinwantto worked as a lawyer for in-
dystopian forecast on the phone. Harris change. Theirapproachisapincermove- jured workers. As a shy
grins. “That’s why we lose sleep. That’s ment: they lobby tech leaders discreetlyHseven-year-old he learnt
why we work so hard.” and hold workshops inside technology about the power of persuasion when he
CHT’s goal is to change how technolo- companies,whilealsomountingapublic became obsessed with magic. It never
gy is built. This summer, it launched a campaign to increase external pressure. ceased to amaze him how he could ma-
podcastcalledYourUndividedAttention Last year in April they gathered sever- nipulate his audience with tricks that
ch heavy-hitters in a San seemed obvious.
ancisco amphitheatre to He studied computer science at Stan-
As a boy Harris troduce the concept of ford, where as well as Instagram found-
was astonished man downgrading. The ers Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, his
at how easily he dience included cofound- contemporaries included Chris Cox, the
could fool people s of Apple, Craigslist and future head of product at Facebook, and
with his magic interest, vice-presidents at Ed Baker, later head of growth at both
tricks. acebook and Google, ven- Facebook and Uber. Evan Spiegel, chief
re capitalists and actor executive of Snap, was just behind them.
nd technology entrepre- During his master’s, Harris joined the
eur Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Persuasive Technology Lab run by be-
t a dinner for a select havioural psychologist BJ Fogg. The class
roup of attendees, Harris has since attained quasi-mythical status
agged a silver lining to the for training a generation of entrepre-
ery dark clouds he’d spent neurs to use psychological insights to in-
he day depicting. fluence users’ actions.
“Unlike climate change, Harris cofounded a company of his
t takes only about 1 000 own,Apture,whichwasboughtbyGoog-
eople to reverse human le in 2011, and he joined the search
owngrading,” he said. “In engine’s email service. Anxieties about
this room, right now, are attention capitalism boiled inside him
