The Man Who Invented Digital Addiction. And Then Tried to Dismantle It.
✅ This video is brought to you by: #EthicsProfile
Tristan Harris worked at Google. Not just any engineer, he was the “design ethicist.” He studied how buttons, colors, and notifications change our behavior. And he saw the truth: we don’t design tools. We design habits.
Platforms were never neutral. Infinite scroll wasn’t built for convenience. Red notifications don’t exist to inform. Public likes aren’t about connection. Every detail was built to keep us there, staring at the screen. These are not mistakes. They’re choices.
Tristan wrote it all in a memo. He called it “Time Well Spent.” He asked Google to focus on human time, not screen time. They ignored him. So he quit, and for months, he regretted it. He felt lost, like he had walked away from the most admired job in tech. For what? For an idea that seemed too weak, too naïve.
Then he started talking. First at small events, then on big stages, then in the U.S. Senate. He explained how platform design really works. How every tap (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) isn’t random. It’s architecture, built to grab attention and sell it.
He founded the Center for Humane Technology. He appeared in The Social Dilemma on Netflix. And the world listened. He said something brutally simple: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Today’s kids grow up inside these systems. Nobody explains them. They think they’re choosing, but they’re just reacting. Telling them “use your phone less” doesn’t help. What helps is this: understand who built it this way, and why.
The truth is, the people who engineered digital addiction were brilliant. The problem is, they never had to face the consequences.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC
✅ This video is brought to you by: https://www.ethicsprofile.ai
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