Name: 【TED】Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day (How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris)
Uploaded: 2017-10-03T20:20:00.000Z
Duration: 17 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials,

I know because I used to be in one of those control rooms.

where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts?

Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people

working at a handful of technology companies

through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

and they design how this works or what's on the feed,

it's scheduling little blocks of time in our minds.

If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts

it schedules you into spending a little bit of time

that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into.

we tend to talk about it as this blue sky opportunity.

and tell you why it's going in a very specific direction.

There's a hidden goal driving the direction

and that goal is the race for our attention.

And the best way to get people's attention

And there's a whole bunch of persuasive techniques

that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab

YouTube wants to maximize how much time you spend.

They're getting a little bit more of people's time.

Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that and say,

so I'm going to autoplay the next episode.

you say, that's shrinking all of my market share,

so now I have to autoplay all the videos in the newsfeed

So the internet is not evolving at random.

The reason it feels like it's sucking us in the way it is

and it becomes this race to the bottom of the brain stem

If you didn't know, Snapchat is the number one way

that teenagers in the United States communicate.

So if you're like me, and you use text messages to communicate,

and there's, like, a hundred million of them that use it.

And they invented a feature called Snapstreaks,

that two people have communicated with each other.

is they gave two people something they don't want to lose.

Because if you're a teenager, and you have 150 days in a row,

And so think of the little blocks of time that that schedules in kids' minds.

This isn't theoretical: when kids go on vacation,

it's been shown they give their passwords to up to five other friends

and so they have to get through taking photos of just pictures or walls

or ceilings just to get through their day.

So it's not even like they're having real conversations.

the way we used to gossip on the telephone.

Well, what this misses is that in the 1970s,

when you were just gossiping on the telephone,

there wasn't a hundred engineers on the other side of the screen

who knew exactly how your psychology worked

and orchestrated you into a double bind with each other.

Now, if this is making you feel a little bit of outrage,

notice that that thought just comes over you.

Outrage is a really good way also of getting your attention,

【TED】Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day (How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris)

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【TED】Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day (How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris)

recognize

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