Tristan Harris

Tristan Harris is the technology industry's most prominent internal critic—a designer who spent years inside Google building the very persuasion systems he would later spend a decade warning the world about. His 2013 internal presentation 'A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention' went viral inside the company, changed nothing about its operations, and launched his career as a public advocate for what he calls 'humane technology.' Through testimony before Congress, the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, and his ongoing work at the Center for Humane Technology, Harris has made the invisible machinery of the attention economy visible to millions. His framework—the race to the bottom of the brain stem, the wisdom gap, the asymmetry of understanding—provides the diagnostic vocabulary for understanding how AI inherits the persuasive architecture of social media.