Tristan Harris

You live in Austin, Texas.

Austin has, at least my friends, there's a lot of community events happening here.

But you can imagine a world where the default news feeds that govern our world were spending like 30 to 40% of what you saw was other events that your friends and other people that you knew adjacent to you were doing.

You can imagine a world where instead of dating apps profiting off of keeping you in the slot machine loneliness thing where you message someone and never get back to them,

In this new world, all the dating apps would be forced, probably because of some lawsuit against the engagement model, to fund physical events in every city that they operated in, where every single week there was actually a physical venue where lots of people were put in the same room with lots of other people they matched with who were maximally overlapping.

And now, instead of feeling scarcity and loneliness, there's this sense of abundant access to community and soft dating and soft friend-making environments.

Yeah.

So you're dealing with the loneliness crisis.

You're dealing with the dating problem.

When you, when you solve that, then it turns out 30% of the polarization online goes down because it turns out that a lot of polarization was just people being lonely and depressed from not having manufactured.

It's all manufactured because people are caught in the doom swelling loop.

So it's like, again, we can have a better world if we deal with the upstream causes of these problems.

We can also have more innovation.

Peter Thiel was talking about we need more innovation.

We need more scientific development.

We would have stagnation if we didn't have AI.

Well, how about you regulate the brain rot economy that's currently degrading all the innovation, causing people to be not productive and creative and innovative members of our society, and instead incentivize entrepreneurs and, again, social groups and community so people are actually making things?

So the point is, I'm a different kind of technology optimist, which is a humane technology optimist.

If you design technology that is humane to an understanding of the substrates of society upon which everything else depends, you can have a technology environment that is conducive to the things that we want our society to do.

But it requires different design principles, different incentives, different rules, and some coordination.