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thereforalmostayear,hesays,“Because
I saw the situation getting worse and I
didn’t see the key product, Gmail, suffi-
ciently attack the problem.”
In 2013 he wrote a slide presentation
setting out his thoughts on the “enor-
mousresponsibility”bornebydesigners
like him at Google, Facebook and Apple
for how “millions of people around the
worldspendtheirattention”.Hesentthe
manifesto to 10 friends. It went viral
within Google, and Harris ended up dis-
cussing the slide deck with Larry Page,
then the chief executive.
Google gave him a new role, “design
ethicist”,butultimatelyhebecamefrus-
trated with the company’s failure to re-
form and in 2016 he left to run a non-
profit advocacy group focused on
addressing his concerns. He called it
Time Well Spent, to crystallise what he
thought a user’s experience of technolo-
gy should be.
In April 2017, technology investor
Roger McNamee, an early backer of Face-
book and former mentor of Mark Zuck-
erberg, heard Harris on the TV news pro-
gramme 60 Minutes. He was talking
about how app design features madeLtorically unprecedented power
smartphones addictive in the same way
that slot machines are. McNamee, who
suspected that Facebook was “a clear
and present danger to democracy”, was
intrigued.
The two men joined forces and added
Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense
Media, the largest charity in the United
States focused on children and media.
They briefed members of the US Con-
GALLO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES, GALLO IMAGES/AFP cussed privacy violations with lawyers Harris says.
gress investigating possible Russian in-
terference in the 2016 election and dis-
and politicians.
Within months, as nearly 40 American
states opened investigations into Face-
book, a Wall Street Journal profile depict-
ed the trio in cowboy garb as “the New
Tech Avengers”.
InJanuary2018,MarkZuckerbergout-
lininghiscompany’sgoalsfortheyearin
a Facebook post, began, “One of our big
focus areas is making sure the time we
allspendonFacebookistimewellspent.”
A few months later, both Google and
Apple announced initiatives to help us-
ers monitor and reduce screen time.
Not everyone has been won over,
though. Andrew Przybylski, an experi-
mental psychologist and director of re-
searchattheOxfordInternetInstituteat
the University of Oxford, believes Harris
lacks scientific evidence for his claims,
which he compares to previous moral
panics over video games and comic
books in the Nineties and Fifties.
DeanEckles,asocialscientistandpro-
fessor of communications and technol-
ogy at MIT, also questions the evidence
for the theory of human downgrading.
But he stresses “Harris has done good”
byincreasingscrutinyonhowtechcom-
panies’ business models affect society.
That scrutiny is paying off. Fogg, the
Stanford behavioural psychologist, re-
cently renamed the Persuasive Technol-
ogy Lab. It’s now the Behaviour Design
Lab,withafocusonfostering“goodhab-
its”. A few months ago, he made a fore-
castforthenewyear.“Amovementtobe
‘post-digital’ will emerge in 2020,” he
tweeted.“We’llstarttorealisethatbeing
chained to your mobile phone is a low-
status behaviour, similar to smoking.”
AST year Chris Hughes, a co-
founderofFacebookandanad-
viser to CHT, called for Face-
book to be broken up. His chief
concern was Zuckerberg’s his-
“to monitor, organise and even censor
the conversations of two billion people”.
In July, the US federal trade commis-
sionfinedFacebook$5billionforviolat-
ing users’ privacy. In September, it gave
Googlea$170millionpenaltyforcollect-
ingchildren’spersonalinformationwith-
out parental consent via YouTube.
InOctober,Zuckerbergwashauledbe-
fore US lawmakers for a second time in
18months,adevelopmentthatwould’ve
seemed “crazy” only a few years ago,
Soonafterwards,itemergedthatmore
than 250 Facebook employees had writ-
ten a letter to the company’s top team
protesting at its refusal to fact-check
political adverts.
Harris sees these developments as
proof he’s on the right path. The chal-
lenge is to press on.
“We’re something like eight people in
an office in San Francisco with every
government, thousands of engineers and
media knocking at our door,” he says,
looking suddenly weary. “You can im-
agine how overwhelmed we are and how
little of a personal life any of us has, be-
cause of how much is at stake and how
quickly it needs to change.” S
© BEN HOYLE,THETIMES MAGAZINE, NEWS LICENSING
HOW TO MAKE YOUR
PHONE LESS ADDICTIVE
S Turn off all notifications except those
from people Most notifications are gener-
ated by machines, not real people. They
keep our phones vibrating to lure us back
into apps we don’t really need to be in.
Visit settings > notifications and turn
off all notifications, banners and badges,
apart from apps where real people want
your attention, such as messaging apps
WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and so on.
Or, better still, turn off all your notifica-
tions altogether.
S Go greyscale Colourful icons give our
brains shiny rewards every time we look at
our phone. Set your phone to greyscale to
remove those positive reinforcements. It
helps many people check their phone less.
In iOS, type in “colour filters” in spot-
light search. Enabling this setting allows
you quickly to triple-tap the home button
to toggle greyscale on and off, so you keep
colour when you need it. For Android, go to
settings > digital wellbeing & parental
control > wind down.
S Charge your device outside the bed-
room Get a separate alarm clock and
charge your phone in a different room
(or on the other side of the bedroom).
This way you can wake up without getting
sucked into your phone before you even
get out of bed.
S Keep your home screen for tools only
Do you open apps mindlessly because they
are the first thing you see when you unlock
your phone? Limit your first page of apps
just to tools – the apps you use for quick
in-and-out tasks such as Maps, Camera,
Calendar, Notes. Move the rest of your
apps, especially mindless choices, off the
first page and into folders.
S Remove social media from your phone
the easiest way to cut back, because these SOURCE: HUMANETECH.COM
If you really want to use your phone less,
remove all the major social media apps. It’s
apps can easily gobble up so much of our
time. Train yourself to use them from your
computer only (if at all).
S Send audio notes or call instead of tex-
ting Recording a quick voice note is often
faster and less stressful than typing out
an entire message.
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