an overriding conversation about intent:
‘How should we make sure we’re ethical
about exercising this control over peo-
ple’s brains?’ Instead, it was ‘How can we
make this more engaging?’” The previ-
ous summer, Harris had gone to Burn-
ing Man, where he practiced vulner-
able communication, eye-gazing, and
Russian martial arts. Returning to his
normal life, he experienced a crisis of
conscience. “I’d been living with a nar-
rower view of reality than I had previ-
ously understood,” he said. He considered
leaving Google. Instead, he channelled
his doubts into a slide deck that went
viral. “I’m concerned about how we’re
making the world more distracted,” it
read. “We should feel an enormous re-
sponsibility to get this right.” The latter
sentence was spread across three slides
and superimposed on a stock photo of
a man holding the world in his hands.
If a person, a company, or an idea
threatens Google’s business model, Goo-
gle often tries to acquire it. Within a few
months, Harris had been appointed Goo-
gle’s first “design ethicist,” tasked with
“researching what the problem was and
suggesting ways Google could fix it.” Few
of his ideas were implemented. “Not that
people were twirling their mustaches and
saying, ‘We’d never do that, because we’re
greedy,’” he said. “It was more a sense of,
This is hard, it’s confusing, it’s often at
odds with our bottom line.” Two years
later, he left. “I thought I’d be more effec-
tive on the outside,” he said.
He founded a nonprofit whose name,
Time Well Spent, was also a mission
statement and a meme. He gave a TEDx
talk in Brussels called “How Better Tech
Could Protect Us from Distraction.”
He gave a TED talk in Vancouver called
“How a Handful of Tech Companies
Control Billions of Minds Every Day.”
He gave interviews to “60 Minutes” and
NBC News. (Harris is aware of the cen-
tral irony of his career: in order to cri-
tique the attention economy, he is con-
stantly in pursuit of more attention.)
In January, 2018, the journalist Casey
Newton wrote, on the Verge, “‘Time
well spent’ is shaping up to be tech’s
next big debate.”
Five months later, Newton published
a follow-up piece called “The Time Well
Spent Debate Is Over. (Time Well Spent
Won.)” The tech behemoths had heard
the public outcry and had “reacted with
shocking speed.” Both Apple and Google
were starting to add attentional controls
to their phones’ software, making it eas-
ier for users to tie themselves to various
masts: muting push notifications; limit-
ing how much time they could spend on
certain apps; setting the phone to fade
to gray scale, rendering its candy-col-
ored icons less seductive. Mark Zucker-
berg had written a long Facebook post
that began, “One of our big focus areas
for 2018 is making sure the time we all
spend on Facebook is time well spent.”
Among critics of the attention economy,
Zuckerberg is regarded as the Dark Lord
of the Sith. Once he had co-opted Har-
ris’s mantra, many of Harris’s friends as-
sumed that his work was done.
But Harris considered this only a
small step toward victory. “It’s great that
Zuck was made aware of ‘time well
spent’ and felt it was important enough
to repeat it,” he said. “It’s great that
phones are slightly less addictive than
they were. It is progress. But it’s not
nearly enough.” Perhaps he had framed
the problem too narrowly.
Time Well Spent morphed into the
Center for Humane Technology, and
Harris started grasping for a new meme
that was equal to the scope of the cri-
sis. “In the seventies, you had people
talking about pollution, other peopletalking about acid rain,” Harris said. “It
didn’t become a climate movement until
there was holistic language to show how
it all fit together.” Today, he continued,
“there’s this cacophony of grievances
about tech—polarization, outrageifica-
tion, FOMO, narcissism—but we have
to show how it’s all actually one big
thing.” According to Nick Thompson,
writing in Wired, Harris and a co-
founder of C.H.T., Aza Raskin, “went
down to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California, and covered the walls of their
room with paper.” Harris told me, “It’s
not like this brainstorming work can
only happen in these privileged, New
Agey places. But being in a big natural
space, detached from your normal life,
is a quick way to escape that messy fun-
house mirror that social media creates.”
In April, on the stage at SFJAZZ,
Harris unveiled his new meme: “human
downgrading.” After the presentation,
everyone filed into the lobby, and C.H.T.
staffers passed out slips of white paper
bearing the definition (“Human Down-
grading: A societal reduction of human
capacity caused by technologies that dom-
inate our human sensitivities”). Audience
members nitpicked. Was “downgrading”
specific enough? And, beyond articulat-
ing the problem, wasn’t it time to start
talking about solutions? On Twitter, the“He worked his way up from kicking the vending machine.”