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The Challenge

One video. Two
bookmarks. Three Friends.

After watching the one video below, browse the collection and bookmark all the cards that interest you for later or now. After, share something specific with three friends which relates to an experience you both shared where social media left a bad taste in your mouth. Use the checkmarks below!

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Video

How Multitasking Is Affecting the Way You Think

Clifford Nass studied task switching for years. It is what most people erroneously call 'multitasking.' Nass presents years of research demonstrating how cognitive biases disguised an objectively unproductive way of thinking as the next 'life hack.'

Social Media is the New Nicotine

Many tech entrepreneurs should be seen as what they actually are, which are Tobacco farmers in T-shirts, selling addictive products to children, making them miserable. Bill Maher lays down his perspective on social media on Real Time.

Mark Zuckerberg Donating Hypocrisy

Zuckerberg donated 300 million to promote safe and secure elections in September of 2021. Great right? But wait, once you do the math and some basic thinking, this is like Pablo Escobar funding parks and playgrounds while running his drug cartel.

Positive Psychology with Martin Seligman

Martin Seligman is the godfather of the field of positive psychology. Can somebody learn to be helpless? Can he or she be conditioned to hope less? These are the questions that shined the light in a new direction. Giving rise to the antithetical: can we help people become happier, fulfilled, and more productive?

Quit social media

Writer of the book Deep Work, Dr Cal Newport describes his personal story of deleting social media and how liberating it was. Did he regret or missed out on anything? Check it out for yourself!

The End of Free Choice

On Real Time with Bill Maher, Tristan Harris explains how technology

How ads follow you around the internet

Hint: It’s why every site asks you to accept cookies. Furthermore, did you know about the Facebook Pixel? It’s a single pixel, loaded into a site's code just so it can secretly track you off Facebook, to sell your eyeballs better.

It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting.

Vox, the insightful news outlet, dives into the psychological practices employed in all smartphones designed to keep us hooked and offers several tips on how to curb them.

How better Tech could Protect us from distraction

Tristan Harris is an expert in ethical design as he previously worked at Google before he quit. Now he shows the industry insights into how addictive slot machine design practices are being smuggled into our everyday toolset.

New Rule: Your Phone is Turning You into an Asshole

Bill Maher talks about the invasion of privacy and the lack of probable cause used in today's world to justify spying on everyone. Maher differentiates between previous massive technological disruptions and the current one: smartphones use.

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness

Psychology has a long history of focusing on the disease model: how to cure the worst of the worst. But in doing so, it has ignored the majority of the population in their endeavour to become happier, fulfilled, and more productive. The ratio between 'normal' psychology vs positive psychology is now at 21/1.

Why our Screens make us less Happy

The strategy of 'dogfooding' is a famous tale of how a CEO of a dog food company would demonstrate the quality of his product by eating it in front of his customers. Interestingly enough, when companies refuse to use their own product, that is very telling. Tech companies don't use their own products like regular customers -- why would that be?

This Panda Is Dancing - Time Well Spent

Poet Max Stossel beautifully tells the story of everyday living in the information-saturated society that we inhabit. As the entire internet is built on the attention economy, Stossel brilliantly demonstrates the dilemma each of us faces each day and every day.

How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views

Facebook just announced 8 billion video views per day. This number is made out of lies, cheating and worst of all: theft. All of this is wildly known but the media giant Facebook is pretending everything is fine, while damaging independent creators in the process. How does this work?

Communities Talking About This

Digital Wellbeing is a spectrum, and we’re all on it. #HalfTheStory is a 501c3 non-profit on a mission to empower the next generation's relationship with technology. As pro-tech pioneers since 2015, we challenge why and how technology impacts our minds. Through cutting-edge science, research, and grassroots organizing, we are leading the movement to make mental health a fundamental right.

#Half

TheStory

#Half

TheStory

As the first generation to grow up in this digital era, we KNOW what we want to see change in digital spaces. Our experiences should be used to help guide the creation of laws that will profoundly impact the way the internet impacts young people.

(Tech)nically

Politics

(Tech)nically

Politics

All Tech Is Human is growing the Responsible Tech ecosystem with multiple stakeholders, disciplines, and perspectives so we can tackle wicked tech & society problems.

All Tech

is Human

All Tech

is Human

The Center for Humane Technology is a nonprofit organization dedicated to radically reimagining the digital infrastructure. Its mission is to drive a comprehensive shift toward humane technology that supports the collective well-being, democracy and shared information environment.

Center For Humane

Technology

Center For Humane

Technology

We advance the theory and practice of protecting the social internet, powered by our community of integrity professionals. We have a lot of work to do. Companies that own social media platforms can use bad design practices or fail to build responsibly, systematically rewarding bad behavior in ways that affect individual well-being, social trust, and the stability of governments and institutions.

Integrity

Institute

Integrity

Institute

When Adults Step Back, Kids Step Up. At Let Grow, we believe today’s kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. Treating them as physically and emotionally fragile is bad for their future — and ours. Let Grow is making it easy, normal and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy adults.

Let

Grow

Let

Grow

LookUp is a woman-led movement which boldly empowers the next generation of leaders to take things in their own hands and improve the digital world in such a way that it enables people to thrive.

Look

Up

Look

Up

The theme of our newest issue is “trust”: the elusive variable that lies within some of the most pressing questions about tech’s role in our lives. Read on for articles about whether blockchain is really “trustless,” how cutting-edge cybersecurity standards can leave out marginalized internet users, what builders of digital platforms can learn from historic queer spaces, and much more.

New

Public

New

Public

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia.

PBS

PBS

TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.

TED

TED

PBS

TIKTOK, BOOM.

Explore the power and complexity of technology through the lens of TikTok and the Gen Z influencers who know it best.

Karan Lala

The Hidden Economy
of Spam

Social Spam is backed by a microcosm of the modern economy. In order to understand this world, I infiltrated one of the largest communities for spammers with my real Facebook account. Here’s what I learned.

Netflix

The Social Dilemma

This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

How-to's

Your First Steps Towards
Digital Well-being

Discover the first out of many small initiatives that you can do today to improve your relationship with technology forever.

Online Courses

Over 13,000 participants from 130+ countries are learning how to build more humane tech. Learn alongside engineers, product managers, researchers, and professionals from top organizations such as Meta, Apple, and the United Nations.

To raise awareness and inspire people to take action to start to develop improved digital habits and raise awareness on digital culture.

Digital exposure has fundamentally changed the way individuals engage with technology. While there are many wonderful benefits of technology, there is also a growing set of unintended consequences from digital overuse.

Quick Actions

Write to your Future-Self

Take a pen and a piece of paper

Give the Key Away

Giving the key away

Agree on a timeline

Setting the clock

Agree on the end

78% of people grab their phone within the first 15 min of waking up. They check WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, news sites or checkup on their email. We live in a world which has no time for reflection. From the moment we wake up, we are already consuming. Not producing. But what if we instead would say "no media in the morning"?

No Media Morning

Deliberating on what would be a fun and meaningful skill to learn is something we almost never do. Yet it can lead to unique skills that can foster flow and offer us unique experiences.People believe they make conscious decisions every day that decide the shape of their life. In actuality, however, what shapes your life most are some big choices that you made along the way. What should I study? Should I move and start fresh? Should I fire a friendship? We never make adequate time to think about these bigger choices that influence everything else.

List 2 skills you want to pick up

Take a pen and a piece of paper

Make a goal for yourself to give 5 sincere compliments during your day. For a society that is all about ‘likes’, we rarely take a brief moment to look in somebody’s eye and tell them did something well. We personally would start by giving compliments to somebody you already know and make it about not something like looks, but rather something they did or said they can be proud of.

Give 5 Compliments

Give 5 compliments over the course of your day

Select a time or place that suits you best

Think about cues to give out the compliments

Make a daily schedule

Download the app! We have the perfect Ritual feature for you

Limit the amount of interruptions you get on a daily basis. By simple doing an experiment for the next week you can find out once and for all if you are missing out on important things, or not. Social media embraces the fact that we are Pavlovian creators. As we receive an intermittent notification that serves as a cue, a big dopamine spike can be recorded before you even attend to it. As a feature; not a bug: sometimes these notifications are nothing important nor urgent. That is even better because it is even more addicting. Now that there is uncertainty because of variability, it is even more effective in getting us hooked than it would be if we were fed a constant stream of rewards.

Become Less Interruptible

Change Vibrations

Dial sound to very low or off

Limit notifications

Select your preferred messenger service and turn of Sound

Examine Your Screen Time

Take a pen and a piece of paper

Make an educated guess

Check Screen time

Do A Walk Around your Neighbourhood

Leave your phone. Optionally, leave your phone at home. We spent approximately our entire life with these devices in reach. Spending some time without them is a good thing.

Decide what should absolutely stay on your desk

Get everything from your desk

Continuous partial attentionand instant gratification. Two traits that have become the signature traits of the 21st Century — and we are all the poorer for it. Correspondingly, self-regulation and sustained focus have become invaluable superpowers, as much research has confirmed. Do you want to hone this skill?

Coping with Instant Gratification

Recognise that most desires are fleeing

Wait for 3 minutes

Notice your feelings, again

Reflect and energize

Clear Your Desk

Decide what should absolutely stay on your desk

Get everything from your desk

Create a list of 5 things you want to do

Take a pen and a piece of paper

Write five things down

Check your Safari's adblocker

Take a pen and a piece of paper

Positive Psychology Exercises

Gratitude Night

Step 1 | Pick a person and invite them

Step 2 | Write it down

Step 3 | Get Ready for Tonight

Red & Green Activities

Prepare notations

Final Reflections

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) describes the phenomena where people's attention spans verifiably increase after spending some time in nature. This is the case for all of us; young and old. Ottosson and Grahn (2005) found people in an aged care facility who were exposed to nature for one hour a week had improved attention compared to the elderly people who remained indoors. In a completely different context, Kuo and Sullivan (2001) found young adult residents who had a view of nature had higher scores on attentional capacity and were also less likely to be aggressive, compared to people who lived in the inner city.

Spending Time in Nature

Choose a natural place to go

Visit a natural place

Keep the mind alert, yet relaxed

Sensate experience

It is very difficult to be grateful and unhappy: Intuitively, we know this. Gratitude is one of the strongest emotions that sweep through you and is relatively straightforward to induce. It has been researched for many years by prominent psychologists like Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough who, together, have even gone so far as to develop a gratitude scale. Increasing gratitude has been proven to significantly improve the quality of one's life. Unfortunately, however, in many cultures, there is no mainstream vehicle for expressing gratitude to loved ones.

Gratitude Journal

Grab a piece of paper

Try subtraction, not just addition

Most of the 400 million bits per second processed by your brain do not break through the barrier of subconsciousness, into consciousness. Bits of information can't be perceived unless the reticular activating system (RAS) filters them out for being deemed important enough. What we selectively filter out can be manipulated through exercise, so we become more mindful of the little things we are grateful for, rendering us happier and fulfilled.‍

Affirmation Sentence

Choose your positive affirmation sentence

Try it & notice it

Psychology Questionnaire

PERMA

Measures Flourishing

Stress & Empathy Questionnaire

Measures Empathy, Stress, and Overall Health

Compassionate Love Scale

Measures your tendency to support, help, and understand other people

Brief Strengths Test

Measures 24 Character Strengths

General Happiness Scale

Assesses Enduring Happiness

New Perspectives

Essential knowledge
in the 21st Century

We inhabit a world of screens, with constant exposure, giving us a false sense of understanding how they decide what and what not to bring forth to our attention.

Psychology Exercises

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"It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us."

Shoshana Zuboff

"It certain times over the last century, the industry has asked too much and offered too little in return, or even been seen to violate the public’s trust outright."

Tim Wu

Facebooks crucial test will come when an engineer invents a new tool that causes people to spend less time buying stuff online and more time in meaningful offline activities with friends.

Yuval noah Harari

"In a humane future, the online world has to care about actually regenerating the connective tissues of the offline world.”

Tristan Harris

Podcasts

The Fake News of Your Mind

When you’re gripped by anxiety, fear, grief or dread, how do you escape? It can happen in the span of a few breaths, according to meditation experts Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman.

How Political Language is Engineerd

Democracy depends on our ability to choose our political views. But the language we use to talk about political issues is deliberately designed to be divisive, and can produce up to a 15-point difference in what we think about those issues.

Joe Rogan in-depth look into The Social Dilemma.

Tristan Harris talks with Joe Rogan in-depth about the hit Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which was co-produced by the Centre for Humane Technology.

Jonatham Zimmerman

Jonatham Zimmerman is Jonathan is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn".

Tristan Harris on Making Sense

Tristan Harris has been called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine. He was the Design Ethicist at Google and left the company to lead Time Well Spent, where he focuses on how better incentives and design practices can create a world that helps us spend our time well.

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for thirty-five years.

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for thirty-five years. He has cofounded successful venture funds including Elevation with U2’s Bono. He was a former mentor to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and helped recruit COO Sheryl Sandberg to the company.

Book Summaries

Alone together

A groundbreaking book by one of the most important thinkers of our time shows how technology is warping our social lives and our inner onesTechnology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Based on hundreds of interviews and with a new introduction taking us to the present day, Alone Together describes changing, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, and families.

Irresistible

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. His book Irresistible demonstrates the alarming grip that our smartphones have on our attention and the negative psychological effects that come with them.

Zucked

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He co-founded successful funds in venture, crossover and private equity. His most recent fund, Elevation, included U2's Bono as a co-founder and has been an early Facebook investor who advised Mark Zuckerberg personally.

Anti-Social Media

Marshall McLuhan declared a long time ago that "the medium was the message." Information technologies are not just extensions of what came before; on the contrary, their form dictates their content and so they can change the entire conversation altogether.

Deep Work

Dr Cal Newport points out in his book Deep Work the fact that as the gap between what technologies and people can do shrinks, a divide is brewing in the workforce. As time progresses, companies will be more inclined to 'hire' new computers over people to fulfill jobs. As more people will lose in an economy where many skills will be automated, the divide in the workforce between those who can perform Shallow Work and Deep Work will intensify.

Addiction by design

An anthropologist looks at the new "crack cocaine" of high-tech gambling. Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

As the volume and velocity of modern-day life accelerates, everything becomes about the present. Things nowadays are criticized for not being published yesterday.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Jonathan Haidt identifies the three common schools of thought that have become rampant in recent years.

Stand out of our light

The definitive book dissecting the moral grounds of the attention economy

Surveillance Capitalism

American author and Harvard professor of social psychology and philosophy Shoshana Zuboff writes about the new breed of companies that dominate in the twenty-first-century with a new philosophy: ‘surveillance capitalism’. She writes that this new predicament imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that individuals should not have to make. Surveillance capitalists perpetuate an unprecedented asymmetry of knowledge and the power that accrues knowledge.

The Attention Merchants

The story of the attention merchant began in 1833 with Benjamin Day and the newspaper The Sun. Day was not a journalist but a self-described businessman. When he founded the sun he wanted to rely on a different business model than selling newspapers at a higher cost of production to readers. He wanted a business model of reselling readers, or advertising.

The Disinformation Age

The mass adoption of new communication technologies that, to their very core, are designed not to inform or guide well, but solely to indiscriminately proliferate any content so as to capture more attention longer has unequivocally backfired. This new technology is called 'social media' and it has effectively become the information diet and GPS of most people's lives, by choice or default.

The Distracted Mind

The Distracted Mind is written by Adam Gazelley, head of one of the best neurology research facilities in the world: Gazelley labs. Together with psychologist Larry D. Rosen, the book is based on the PBS special under a similar name.

Power of Habits

Tweaking even one habit, as long as it's the right one, can have staggering effects. Full of compelling narratives, the breakout bestseller will change the way you think about your behavior.

Collections

3 Must-see Documentaries

December 12, 2022

1.

The Social Dilemma

2.

The Great Hack

3.

The Century of the Self

4.

5.

Top 10 Articles about Social Media

December 12, 2022

1.

Deleting Facebook Won’t Fix the Problem

2.

Did Facebook Learn Anything From the Cambridge Analytica Debacle?

3.

Our Brains are no Match for technology

4.

Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

5.

Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain

Top Podcasts About Social Media

December 12, 2022

1.

Your Undevided Attention

2.

Welcome to the Cult Factory

3.

The Trouble With Facebook

4.

What is Technology Doing to Us?

5.

#1558 - Tristan Harris

Top 10 Videos about Social Media

December 12, 2022

1.

This Panda Is Dancing

2.

Mark Zuckerberg & Robinhood | The Prof G Show

3.

Why our Screens make us less Happy

4.

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness

5.

New Rule: Your Phone is Turning You into an Asshole

Books About The Attention Economy

December 12, 2022

1.

Stand Out of Our Light

2.

The Distracted Mind

3.

The Disinformation Age

4.

The Attention Merchants

5.

Surveillance Capitalism

Articles

Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers.

Ethical Tech Will Require a Grassroots Revolution

The Center for Humane Technology wants to liberate us from tech addiction—and that starts with the people, not companies or Congress.

Take Control of your Social Media use for Well-being

Here are a few important steps you can take right now to increase your digital well-being and regain control. Start with your own devices and invite friends or family to join you.

Why the Past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

Facebook's Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.

Why it feels like everything is going haywire.

Why it feels like everything is going haywire.

Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain

How to think about your relationship with technology.

Our Brains are no Match for technology

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” —— Edward O. Wilson

Did Facebook Learn Anything From the Cambridge Analytica Debacle?

A even bigger data breach suggests it didn’t.

10 Tips to Avoid Leaving Tracks Around the Internet

Google and Facebook collect information about us and then sells that data to advertisers. Websites deposit invisible "cookies" onto our computers and then record where we go online. Even our own government has been known to track us.

Secure Your Digital Life in 7 (Easy) Days

With our “Secure Your Digital Life in 7 (Easy) Days” challenge, we will help you put your online accounts and devices under lock and key.

Behind the curtain on The Social Dilemma

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're going behind the curtain on The Social Dilemma — the Netflix documentary about the dark consequences of the social media business model, which featured the Center for Humane Technology.

Why it feels like everything is going haywire.

Civil war might be the most likely escalation pathway towards disaster for our country. On the flip side, learning how to avoid civil conflict — and more ambitiously, repair our civic fabric — might have the greatest leverage for addressing the challenges we face.

How to think about your relationship with technology

Yaël Eisenstat shares the lessons she learned and her perspective on government’s role in regulating tech, and Aza and Tristan raise questions about our relationships with these companies and the balance of power.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” —— Edward O. Wilson

GPT-3 technology can now write whole paragraphs and other AI's can generate profile pictures out of thin air. Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan Harris explain how new technologies will be indistinguishable from human behaviour online, blurring the lines between real and fake even further.

Google and Facebook collect information about us and then sells that data to advertisers. Websites deposit invisible "cookies" onto our computers and then record where we go online. Even our own government has been known to track us.

Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the ways in which social media is fracturing society. They discuss the rise in teen depression and suicide, political polarization, conspiracy theories, information warfare, and more…

Papers

2022 Edelman Trust Barometer

We have studied trust for more than 20 years and believe that it is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions—business, governments, NGOs and media—build with their stakeholders.

The Common Sense Census

Discover for yourself how much time is now normally spent on screens by the most vulnerable segment of society.

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Flow Ninja

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