Since the 1950s with the rise of alcohol, cigarettes, and junk food, society has been exposed to a series of new consumer-facing products engineered to exploit our physiology and addict people in the name of record profits. History has proven that businesses like these will stop at nothing to not only keep the status quo intact but also aggressively expand. As an example of this, look no further than Big Tobacco introducing at one point in time glass particles into their cigarettes to have the nicotine really kick in.
‍
Fast forward to today, technology companies have spent two decades engineering the next frontier: our psychology. Now our relationships, identity, volition, and attention are for the first time in history being commercialized. Only a handful of tech companies monopolized the free and open web against its original promise of decentralization to become the trillion-dollar enterprises that they are today. These multinationals have become not just advertisement companies but what Shoshana Zuboff terms "surveillance capitalists." This new breed of capitalism made capturing human attention and reselling it at all costs the new economic imperative of the 21st Century. Each day TikTok alone is commanding 1 billion hours of attention, which accumulates to 114.000 years with each passing day.
‍
More and more people live life increasingly inside a digital phantom world detached from the real one. In this new realm 'these platforms hold a mirror to society,' Tristan Harris remarks, 'however, they are a funhouse mirror.' As such all over the world materially wealthy societies now find themselves suddenly amid widespread erosion of trusts, polarization, misinformation, and meaninglessness, as individual citizens suffer from continuous partial attention, increased rates of suicidality, drug abuse, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Especially among its heavy users, teenagers, social media fatigue and other negative psychological externalities are skyrocketing. 40% of students report feeling “too depressed to function.” Another 48% agree or strongly agrees “they are addicted to social media.” In the same report, +61% report feeling “overwhelming anxiety’. 47% of teens wish there was an easier way to switch off social media. 36% deleted their social media app at least once annually to curb it. 32% of teenage girls in the UK report Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. There is a +78% increase in ‘serious psychological distress’ episodes by 20-year-olds. There is a +189% increase in 10-14-year-old girls being hospitalized for self-harm, as well a +58% increase in teen suicides ages 14-18. The majority of these figures are compared to the pre-social media era and are growing double-digits annually.

At the end of their days, the social media generation will look back and realize social media has been their #1 life-activity, totaling a devastating amount throughout their lives which equals 12 years and 8 months, all the while experiencing significantly higher levels of loneliness than previous generations.'Our life experiences equal what we have paid attention to,' William James remarked, 'whether by choice or default.' They will ask how technology was ever allowed to capture and resell theirs from cradle to cradle, as if it wasn’t the lifeblood of their very existence. Looking back, how many will conclude that the story of their life has been co-opted and irreparably harmed by algorithms which so clearly never were on their team—but somone else's?

What was termed in 2020 as The Social Dilemma has today escalated into a full-blown Social Catastrophe poised to wreck the lives of an entire generation. This future cannot be allowed to unfold, and thus, Telos was born.
Sources on Dilemma Page

The emerging field of responsible technology is to social media what clean tech is to the fossil fuel industry. Just as the environmental damage caused by burning hydrocarbons went unaddressed for years, the attention economy underpinning social media has led to significant negative externalities in the form of psychological harms that we are only now beginning to understand. These include polarization, fake news, information overload, addictive use, isolation, and influencer culture. Given the unprecedented reach of social media today, those working in these companies are no longer merely designing products; they are designing people and society as a whole.
‍
The faster we collectively move away from the attention economy, the better. However, consumers are unlikely to switch because tracking and ads are eliminated. A viable alternative needs to wholeheartedly embrace the new paradigm and be better in every way. To better understand how that might be achieved, it is useful to see the sphinx-like technology that we call 'social media' through the lenses of information, personal communication, and entertainment technology. As such, entertainment can be fun at times, yet life is short, and amusing ourselves to death while scrolling life away is a devastating tragedy. Regarding the former two, as a technology to inform or bond, social media has proven itself to be worse than useless—it is counterproductive. Through this lens, the status quo still leaves abundant opportunity here for anyone to deliver breakthrough improvements to the lives of countless consumers.
‍
At Telos, we are not playing by the rules set by the attention economy, nor are we competing in the race to the bottom of the brainstem by exploiting human weaknesses to addict users. We believe that what will inevitably displace social media in the future is a technology that converts users into customers. Instead of propagating confusion and disinformation, it will be a reliable source of trusted insight. Instead of shallow connections, it will foster life-long companionships. Instead of fighting for our attention, it will, for the first time, be a framework that supports our intentions.