PERSON
Tristan Harris
The design ethicist who made the persuasion architecture of Silicon Valley visible—first in a 141-slide deck at Google that changed nothing, then in a decade of testimony, documentary, and advocacy that changed the conversation if not yet the industry.
Tristan Harris is the person most responsible for making the phrase
attention economy a household term. A former design ethicist at Google who circulated an internal presentation in 2013 arguing that the technology industry had organized itself around the extraction of human attention at the expense of human wellbeing, he co-founded the
Center for Humane Technology in 2018, testified before Congress, and reached a hundred million viewers through the Netflix documentary
The Social Dilemma. His diagnosis is structural, not moral: the companies building the most powerful AI systems on Earth are the same companies that built the engagement-optimization machinery of social media, and the design DNA—the variable reward schedules, the frictionless interfaces, the metrics that reward capture over care—does not dissolve when the platform shifts from a newsfeed to a conversational AI. Harris calls the movement from social media to AI “second contact,” warning that the race that drove platforms to the bottom of the brain