Tristan Harris

And we obviously changed the ownership structure of these companies from being maximizing shareholder value to instead more like public benefit corporations that were about maximizing some kind of benefit because they had taken over the societal commons.

We realized that when software was eating the world, we were also eating core life support systems of society.

So when software ate children's development, we needed to mandate that you had to care and protect children's development.

When you ate the information environment, you had to care for and protect the information environment.

We removed the reply button so you couldn't re-quote and then dunk on people so that dunking on people wasn't a core feature of social media.

That reduced a lot of the polarization.

We had the ability to disconnect comprehensively throughout all these platforms.

So you could say, I wanna go offline for a week.

And all of your services were all about respecting that and making it easy for you to disconnect for a while.

And when you came back, summarized all the news that you missed and told people that you were away for a little while and out of office messages and all this stuff.

So now you're using your phone,

You don't feel dysregulated by dopamine hijacks.

You use dating apps, and you feel an abundant sense of connectivity and possibility.

You use children's applications for children, and it's all built by people who have their own children use it for eight hours a day.

You use social media, and instead of seeing all these examples of pessimism and conflict, you see optimism and shared values over and over and over again.

And that started to change the whole psychology of the world from being pessimistic about the world to feeling agency and possibility about the world.

And so there's all these little changes that if you have, if you change the economic structures and incentives, if you put harms on balance sheets with the litigation, if you change the design choices that gave us the world that we're living in, you can live in a very different world with technology and social media that is actually about protecting the social fabric.

None of those things are impossible.

How do they become likely?

Clarity.