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piqer for: Global finds Technology and society Globalization and politics
Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin, covering art, architecture, urbanism, and technology. She contributes to publications like Frieze, Artforum, e-flux, die Zeit, the Architectural Review, and Metropolis. She's currently a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and Rhizome.
Tech Addiction And Silicon Valley's Conscience
The subject of this profile, Tristan Harris, looks remarkably like the main character of the TV satire “Silicon Valley”, and the two might resemble each other in more than appearance. Harris, who used to be a “product philosopher” at Google, has become a proponent of “digital detox”, aiming to reduce users’ reliance on habit-forming online behavior. Harris is joined by a growing group of Silicon Valley types averse to the addictive effects of handheld technology—especially averse, perhaps, because they helped develop said technology.
Bianca Bosker, the author of the profile, sums up Harris’ position: “we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us”. Others in his camp have compared “the tech industry with Big Tobacco” in its reliance on customers’ addiction for profit. Through various “hijacking techniques” from logo design to likes, which have been proven to generate feelings of reward through dopamine release, a lot of tech-world resources go into researching and exploiting basic human psychology to bind us ever closer to our devices.
This is certainly worrying from the user end. But the methods of reforming tech addiction posed by Harris and others are in large part simply the invention of yet more technology (an ad blocker app called Intently, for instance).
It’s tough to say whether Bosker is being ironic when she says things like “Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. His mission (which he set upon after a trip to Burning Man) is to “persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices”, a goal I find laudatory, but which I don’t believe is the only ethical challenge Silicon Valley faces. What about driving up rents in cities and busting unions across the USA? What about exploitative labor conditions in other countries? I’d suggest these are the substrates of overhauling our relationship with technology, not only how much time we spend scrolling.
That text was one of my favorites last year. Tristan indeed falls into a lot of clicheé traps but he raises awareness for ethics in tech. If that is changing anything but discourse, I'm not sure, but it's relieving that it's at least doing that.
The end of your piq I find puzzling. "Time well spent" isn't about solving all of Silicon Valleys ethical problems and neither is the text. It's like blaming a bottle opener for being bad at grating cheese.
I assume you suspect that initiatives like his are just distractions from the actual issues and that's not unlikely at all, but where does that leave us? Isn't this thinking as paralyzing as sham debates?