Tristan Harris

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.

If after the social dilemma and everyone saw the problem, everyone saw, oh my God, this business model is tearing society apart.

But we, frankly, at that time, just speaking personally, we weren't ready to sort of channel the impact of that movie into here's all these very concrete things we can do.

And I will say, for as much as many of the things I described have not happened, a bunch of them are underway.

We are seeing that there are, I think, 40 attorneys general in the United States that have sued Meta and Instagram for intentionally addicting children.

This is just like the big tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s that led to the comprehensive changes in how cigarettes were labeled, in age restrictions, in the $100 million a year that still to this day goes to advertising to tell people about the dangers of, you know, smoking kills people.

And imagine that if we have $100 million a year going to inoculating the population about cigarettes because of how much harm that caused.

we would have at least an order of magnitude more public funding coming out of this trillion-dollar lawsuit going into inoculating people from the effects of social media.

And we're seeing the success of people like Jonathan Haidt and his book The Anxious Generation.

We're seeing schools go phone-free.

We're seeing laughter return to the hallways.

We're seeing Australia ban social media use for kids under 16.

So this can go in a different direction if people are clear about the problem that we're trying to solve.