Balance of Power

How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day: 

• People working at tech companies are constantly steering people's thoughts through their choices whether we notice or not
• There's a hidden goal driving the direction of all the technology we make: the race for our attention
  - This something that everyone is fighting for because there's only so much of it
  
  
• The best way to get someone's attention is to know how someone's mind works
  - E.g. YouTube wants to maximise how much time you spend on it = autoplay (this is also seen on Netflix, Facebook etc.
  - Snapchat gave two people something that they don't' want to lose by creating snapstreaks
  - Outrage gets people's attention, e.g. people tweet/post "Can you believe this thing they said?"
  
  
• "You can precisely target a lie directly to the people who are most susceptible" 
• It's not just taking away our agency to spend our attention and live the lives that we want, it's changing the way that we have our conversations, our democracy, and our ability to have the conversations and relationships we want with each other
• This affects everyone because a billion people (6.648) either have or have access to a phone or other smart device
  
  

We need to make 3 radical changes to technology and our society:

1. We need to acknowledge that we are persuadable
   - We can be persuaded and there might be something that we want to protect
2. We need new models and accountability systems
   - As the world gets better and more persuasive, the people in these control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want
   - The only forms of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee - and this involves questioning big things like the business model of advertising
3. We need a design renaissance
   - Once you have this view of human nature that you can steer the timelines of a billion people, people can try orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen
   - This would involve two things:
      - Protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing and the thoughts we             don't want happening
      - Empowering us to live out the timeline we want

The most complex challenges in the world require not just us to use our attention individually. They require us to use our attention and coordinate it together, e.g., climate change

We need to figure out what our boundaries are, e.g., you would want Youtube to know something about say, sleep. (As a result of maximising screen time, people are staying up later)

"Our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep" 

- CEO of Netflix