Tristan Harris

He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by a single mother. Later on, he studied computer science at Stanford University while interning at Apple Inc., then embarked on a master's degree at Stanford, where he took a class from B. J. Fogg, who runs Persuasive Technology Lab; Harris was not a member of this lab, though he claimed to be so in The Social Dilemma.[6] Harris studied the psychology of behavior change.[1] Tristan was classmates with one of Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom, and helped create a demo app with the other founder, Mike Krieger.[7] In 2007, Harris dropped out of the master's program at Stanford.[1]

He launched a startup called Apture, which was focused on bringing instantaneous search to content on the web.[8][9] Google acquired Harris’s company Apture in 2011 and he ended up working on Google Inbox.[1]

At Google, Harris authored “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” and shared the presentation with a handful of his coworkers in February 2013. In that presentation, Harris suggested that Google, Apple and Facebook should “feel an enormous responsibility” to make sure humanity doesn't spend its days buried in a smartphone.[10] The 141-slide deck was eventually viewed by tens of thousands of Google employees and sparked conversations about the company's responsibilities long after he left the company.[10][11] Harris holds several patents from his previous work at Apple, Wikia, Apture, and Google.[12]

Harris left Google in December 2015 to co-found a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, now called the Center for Humane Technology.[1][13] Through the Center, Harris hoped to mobilize support for an alternative built around core values at tech corporations, chief of which is helping us spend our time well, instead of demanding more of it. Harris asserts that all human minds can be hijacked and the choices they make are not as free as they think they are.[14] The Atlantic stated in their November 2016 issue that “Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.”[1]

At the Center, Harris has been a vocal proponent of understanding and minimizing the negative impacts of digital technologies. In 2017, he spoke on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper about the "brain hacking" of smartphone apps, comparing them to the addictiveness of a slot machine.[15] At a 2019 presentation in San Francisco, he coined the phrase "human downgrading" to describe the interconnected system of mutually reinforcing harms—addiction, distraction, isolation, polarization, fake news—that weakens human capacity, caused by technology platforms with the extractive business model to capture human attention.[7]

Harris' most prominent activism to date was starring in the film The Social Dilemma, distributed by Netflix. Harris joined other activists to describe the incentives of social media companies and their impacts on society. He said, "Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people."[16]

• Official website
• Tristan Harris on Twitter