How Online Advertising Is Tricking Your Thoughts, Attitudes, and Beliefs | Tristan Harris| Big Think

How Online Advertising Is Tricking Your Thoughts, Attitudes, and Beliefs

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In what Tristan Harris calls a "race to the bottom of the brain stem," media companies and advertisers will do almost anything to keep your eyes locked where they want them.Attention is a limited resource. There's just 24 hours per human per day, and every advertiser wants it. The attention economy has always existed—penny papers competed with each other the same way streaming services do now—but today we feel it so much more because our devices are no longer plugged into walls; we can take them with us, to have entertainment and knowledge wherever we go. But if only it were just those two things. Tristan Harris, a design thinker and former ethicist at Google, explains how advertising has become increasingly persuasive and tailored in the age of big data. Companies sell users' attention and personal information to the highest bidder, who uses it to manipulate thoughts and beliefs—be it about products or politics—with very little transparency. This critically undermines our free will and democracy. "So many of our institutions depend on us having sovereign minds and sovereign ideas," Harris says. It's time to start rigorously questioning advertising's business model, and reorganize the attention economy to align with public wellbeing. To find out more about Tristan Harris, head to tristanharris.com.

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TRISTAN HARRIS:

Tristan Harris is a design thinker, philosopher and entrepreneur.

Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan Harris was a Design Ethicist at Google and is now a leader in Time Well Spent, a movement to align technology with our humanity. Time Well Spent aims to heighten consumer awareness about how technology shapes our minds, empower consumers with better ways to use technology and change business incentives and design practices to align with humanity’s best interest.

Tristan is an avid researcher of what influences human behavior, beliefs and interpersonal dynamics, drawing on insights from sleight of hand magic and hypnosis to cults and behavioral economics. Currently he is developing a framework for ethical influence, especially as it relates to the moral responsibility of technology companies.

His work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, The Atlantic Magazine, ReCode, TED, 1843 Economist Magazine, Wired, NYTimes, Der Spiegel, NY Review of Books, Rue89 and more.

Previously, Tristan was CEO of Apture, which Google acquired in 2011. Apture enabled millions of users to get instant, on-the-fly explanations across a publisher network of a billion page views per month.

Tristan holds several patents from his work at Apple, Wikia, Apture and Google. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Computer Science, focused on Human Computer Interaction, while dabbling in behavioral economics, social psychology, behavior change and habit formation in Professor BJ Fogg’s Stanford Persuasive Technology lab. He was rated #16 in Inc Magazine’s Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 in 2009.

You can read his most popular essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds – from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Tristan Harris: So we always had an attention economy, whether it was on radio or television there's always been a race for our attention and it's a zero sum game. If one TV station gets more of your attention the other TV station gets less.

But now because we're spending more and more time on screens and there's so many things competing for our attention we really feel it. And in the attention economy with social media and with the Internet and our screens, everything needs your attention. So a meditation app, the New York Times, Big Think or Facebook—they're still all competing for the same currency, which is attention.

And if one guy gets more attention someone else gets less. As an example, the CEO of Netflix recently said that the biggest competitors to Netflix weren't other video sites, he said the biggest competitors to Netflix were Facebook, YouTube and sleep, because at the end of the day it all comes from this limited supply of attention that we get.

And part of that is because of advertising. Because the business model of advertising says I don't just want some of your attention, I actually make more money the more attention I get from you. So I have an unbounded appetite for more of your attention.

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