Top: The Duke and
Duchess of Sussex;
bottom, from left:
Tristan Harris,
Safiya U. Noble
and Alexis Ohaniantype company, who have so much
more perspective than I did ... And
I’m excited because at the end of the
day, there is a strong capitalist reason
to want this, aside from the obvious
societal one. And as more and more
companies realize that and are able
to show that this is not just the right
thing to do from a societal standpoint,
but the right thing to do from a busi-
ness standpoint, I think it really starts
to get momentum.
the Duchess of sussex: The good
outweighs the bad [online], but my
goodness, the loud can be so loud.
I think you’ve talked about and you
tweeted recently that we haven’t
yet begun to realize the legacy and the effects that all of these
platforms and what social media and what the online space is
doing to all of us on a deeper level.
ohANIAN: I do think there’s gonna be some work that will need to be
done to deradicalize a generation, especially here in the United States,
who, you know, predominantly white, predominantly male, feeling
very disaffected and sort of left behind and frustrated by a lot of things,
and who’ve found solace, who’ve found community, who’ve found kin-
ship in dark corners that normalized really socially toxic behavior ...
But I think that is gonna be a lot of the important work of the next de-
cade or so, to try to find ways not just to curb the abuse going forward,
but also to sort of reintegrate folks who, you know, have used these
platforms to find community around some of the most vile things.the Duke of sussex: What are the tech algorithms, what are
they incentivized to do for us, and what is the actual price that
we’re paying for that?
Noble: I would say that one of the things that is highly incentiv-
ized is the virality; that means the speed through which some of the
worst types of content can flow through platforms. So we know that,
for example, racism and sexism are very big business in technology
platforms. Not just social media but also the other kinds of search-
and ad-driven kinds of platforms... Those things don’t necessarily
start in Silicon Valley, but I think there’s really little regard for when
companies are looking at maximizing the bottom line through en-
gagement at all costs, it actually has a disproportionate kind of harm
and cost to, again, vulnerable people.
hArrIs: We often ask, How much have you paid for your Facebook
account recently? Zero. But they’re worth more than $725 billion. So
how are they worth so much? Well, they monetize something. It’s not
just our data. They need our attention. And obviously, because there’s
only so much attention—just like with the planet, there’s only so
many resources, and you have an infinite growth economy on a finite
amount of the planet surface area—we have an infinite growth atten-
tion economy on a finite amount of human attention at the base ...
And they’re competing to seduce us with that promise of virality.
If you go to TikTok today, they’ll show you on a list of hashtags
you can post against, that if you post a video for a hashtag in Doritos
Dance you’ll reach a billion people, and that’s very enticing to each
of us. But of course that doesn’t reward what’s true, what’s credible
or what’s really good for society. And that’s really the core problem.the Duke of sussex: How do we really make progress know-
ing that we have this platform, this global platform to really ef-
fect change for good?
hArrIs: These are big questions... The tech companies have kind
of hollowed out many of the institutions that we would derive what
are the values that are important to us. I mean publicly funded media.
Well-funded local newspapers. These are the other entities that have
gone bankrupt as a result of the extractive sort of clickbait practices.
The way that the Big Tech giants sort of reformat what it means to be
a local newspaper, which is increasingly about that race to the bot-
tom of the brain stem to get those clicks. Which also makes them less
profitable over time, which also decreases the quality of journalism,
which means that we have a less educated citizenry. What is actually
important to us? What are we paying attention to? That is the thing
that we’re losing control over. □