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The Current Transcript for July 8, 2016

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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[Sound: gunshots, sirens]

MIKE FINNERTY: Dallas. A sniper turns what was a peaceful demonstration against police violence into a backdrop where the police themselves are the targets, shot and killed for wearing the uniform. 12 Dallas police officers hit; five are now dead. Police say the sniper told them the end is coming, but we know nothing so far about the shooter's identity or even his race. In a moment, the latest from the ground, reaction from the president of the United States, and the danger it all presents for race relations. Also today, turning the volume down on modern technology, our smartphones and social media accounts.

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McDonalds didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there; Walmart didn't have organic food, until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology.

MF: The new wave of so-called calm tech that promises to make our digital lives a little less harried. I'm Mike Finnerty, welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

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'We are at a crossroads': Police targeted at Dallas protest, 5 killed

Guests: Carol Anderson, Michael Wood

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[Sound: multiple sirens]

They're shooting right now, and uh, there's an officer down. It's coming from the right over there, from around these buildings, I don't know where. Um, Main Street and Lamar. There's an officer down.

[Sound: multiple sirens wail]

They're moving in on somebody, I think they might have got somebody.

MIKE FINNERTY: That was the scene just as a peaceful demonstration in Dallas was wrapping up. It was one of many held across the United States last night to protest against the police shooting deaths earlier this week of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the shocking videos that came with them. One of the protest organizers in Dallas reports their march was just wrapping up. He says it was the members of the police advance squad preparing the marchers' way who were gunned down first. It took hours to get the situation under control as Dallas Police Chief David Brown explained at a morning news conference.

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We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours. Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect. We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. The suspect is deceased.

MF: And as for that suspect's motivation?

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The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. The suspect stated he was not affiliated with any groups, and he stated that he did this alone.

MF: Dallas Police Chief David Brown, speaking at a morning news conference. Other suspects are reported arrested, though it is not clear what their involvement was. Speaking from Warsaw, U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the attacks on the police and urged caution, referring to the shooter's motivation as twisted.

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There has been a vicious, calculated, and despicable attack on law enforcement. Police in Dallas were on duty, doing their jobs, keeping people safe during peaceful protests. These law enforcement officers were targeted and nearly a dozen officers were shot, five were killed. We are horrified over these events, and we stand united with people and the police department in Dallas.

MF: U.S. President Barack Obama. Carol Anderson has been watching it all unfold, she's the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Carol Anderson is in Atlanta, hello.

CAROL ANDERSON: Hello, how are you?

MF: I'm well, thanks very much. But I wonder how you are, having spent the night watching, like the rest of us, the events that have unfolded in Dallas?

CAROL ANDERSON: It is shocking, it's numbing, it's depressing, and it's this kind of reaffirmation of this reach to violence that does not solve the underlying issue.

MF: Look, we know nothing about the shooter's motivation. President Obama called it twisted. We don't know anything, for the moment, anyway, about the shooter's race, background. But what impact do you think this might have on race relations in the United States, just by the very fact that it came after a protest in Dallas against the police, and that police were targeted?

CAROL ANDERSON: Yes, and so you already saw some rush to judgment, just crazy rush to judgment. So you had one of the New York dailies going, "Civil war!" as its headline. You had a former congressman tweeting the real Americans are coming after you, Obama and Black Lives Matter. And again, that is-- and so what that does is it takes our eyes off of the major issue here. You had a peaceful protest. I mean, that's what, this is a peaceful protest where you had the Dallas police in fact protecting the protesters, who were protesting against the deaths in Minnesota and in Louisiana. This rush to judgment reminds me so much of what happened after the Oklahoma City bombing where a federal building was blown up, and immediately, you had these speculations that the Muslims did it, the Arabs did it. And then it was Tim McVeigh, a homegrown young white man. And so we need to be really careful, and so that rush to judgment is telling you more about the kinds of underlying prejudices and stereotypes in American society.

MF: And there were a lot of people, and still are, out there on social media, who were blaming President Obama for having made that statement last night where he expressed sympathy to the families of the two black men who were shot and killed by police this week.

CAROL ANDERSON: Right, right. And then, so you begin to think, what kind of society do we have where we in fact have the killing of black people on film, and on digital media, and to express sympathy for the death of someone who was driving in his car, or someone who was selling CD's by the okay of the store owner, somehow that makes him responsible for this. I mean, it tells you, again, more about the deep embedded hatred in certain sectors of the society against President Obama, regardless of what he does or what he says.

MF: You wrote a book called White Rage, and I think it'd be useful if you could explain, remind people who, and those who haven't read your book, what it is that you've been studying. What is white rage?

CAROL ANDERSON: White rage is the use of policies and laws to undercut the advancement of African-Americans. And we see that rising up in these key critical moments when black people have advanced, when they have gained access to their citizenship rights. One of those moments that I lay out is in fact the election of President Obama. And we saw that with the rise of voter suppression laws, we saw that in the kinds of vitriolic hatred that that he was inundated with on his Twitter site. So this is the kind of what we're dealing with now, and I would say that another part of what we're dealing with, I deal with the civil rights movement and those gains, those African-Americans gains, greater access to their citizenship rights. One of the pieces that we're looking at in terms of policing is that coming out of the civil rights movement, you had an array of laws and theories coming up called the broken windows theory, that led to the type of hyper policing in black communities that led to the shooting of Michael Brown, that led to the chokehold of Eric Garner, that led to the rise of Black Lives Matter, basically saying this is about the struggle for life. And so part of the twistedness that you see here, is trying to transform this movement to affirm the value of life into some kind of hate-filled, this is about death.

MF: Even before the shootings in Dallas, there were people in the United States this week saying that we have come to a turning point. Do you think that's the case?

CAROL ANDERSON: I think we are at a crossroads. We are at a critical moment in American society. The rise of Donald Trump, and the hatred that spews out from a large base of his supporters towards immigrants, towards people of colour, towards people. And I think that that begins to radiate, to suggest how deeply imbedded the U.S. is at this crossroads, about the kind of nation that it's going to be. I saw a piece that I think that said it so beautifully: that in the protest against the killing of Alton Sterling in…

MF: Louisiana.

CAROL ANDERSON: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, yes and Philando Castile in Minnesota. You had blacks and whites marching together. In the killing of the police officers, you have the protesters and African-Americans in fact embracing the police. Most of us want peace.

MF: And yet, we've had this event in Dallas last night. Five police dead.

CAROL ANDERSON: Oh, my gosh.

MF: How dangerous is this moment?

CAROL ANDERSON: This is a dangerous moment. This is a dangerous moment, and this is a moment where, when you have just like right after the shootings at Pulse in Orlando, where you had this kind of, you know, all we need are more guns. All we need are more guns. We need to get people greater access to guns. If they had guns in the club, then all of those people would-- and it's like, what? When in fact, what we really need to do, and I've been reading through the reports, and they talk about one of the things is that the shooters had a high powered weapons. Weaponry that that, in Kevlar vests. I mean, they had, sometimes it almost sounded like better equipment than the police. How is that possible? I mean, that's what we really need-- that's part of what we really need to get to, is sane, logical, gun control here.

MF: How do you diffuse a moment like this?

CAROL ANDERSON: And that is where-- I mean, I'm seeing it on social media, were where people, when the hatred spews up, people are saying no. Love conquers hate; we are in this together. It is that sense of not allowing divide and conquer to be the reigning leitmotif, right? It is a sense of the we, that we have the power to stop this violence. We have the power to bring dignity into policing. We have the power to respect lives in the United States. And it's going to be that language and that activism toward the we and the respect of life that is going to be how we conquer this. The deep dive into the hatred, that is a dark, dark place and we have to fight against going there.

MF: Carol Anderson, thank you very much for speaking to us.

CAROL ANDERSON: Thank you so much.

MF: Carol Anderson is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, and we reached her in Atlanta. Well, for a police perspective now, to Baltimore where Michael Wood is a former sergeant with the Baltimore Police Department. He joins us from Shrewsbury, which is just north of Baltimore. Michael Wood, hello.

MICHAEL WOOD: Hello, thanks for having me.

MF: As a man who's worn the uniform yourself for so many years, what was it like to see officers targeted just for being in that uniform?

MICHAEL WOOD: I don't know, this is such a bigger issue. My surprise level on this is absolutely zero, I can't believe it didn't happen earlier when we as a policing institution aren't seeking justice and we're not protecting black lives. Like, this is where we're going to end up, in a state of confrontation, because we've created this us versus them, and whether that then ends up being somebody that feels oppressed, or of colour, or it's a white supremacist who wants to start something, this is the logical result that should have been anticipated.

MF: I wonder why do you think there is so little information that's coming out about him, including things like his race and background?

MICHAEL WOOD: Gosh, I mean, if we just go by history, I mean, don't we know why they're doing this? We don't know yet, but if it's a white shooter, then they don't release the pictures. They put pictures up in the media of them being at their family cookout. But when it's a victim that's completely innocent, they put up the worst picture of them possible. Or if they got arrested 16 years ago, they use that mugshot. So I mean, this is just the way our media and our-- we have this deep implicit bias in us, and I don't think our country even realizes when they do those kind of things.

MF: There is a lot of rush to judgment, and you're seeing it play out on social media, but in the mainstream media, as well. And I'm going to ask you the same question I asked Carol Anderson a moment ago, how dangerous do you think this moment is?

MICHAEL WOOD: I mean, again, I don't-- I mean, what would history tell us? History would pretty much tell us that we'll talk about this for three or four days, and then something new will come up, and no one will really give a shit, and it will happen again as there's more protesting because the police haven't changed. This has been building since the country began, and we're still going to sit here in the media and everything else and push our Second Amendment rights. Well, the Second Amendment right is specifically designed for the purpose of civilians having weapons like that to kill cops. Why the hell are we surprised? I'm befuddled and angry that we continue to treat our citizens this way, and we act surprised when our country exercises its Second Amendment rights, which are [unintelligible]

MF: I mean, you say that we will just move on, and yet, I was listening to a former Dallas police officer earlier this morning saying he can't remember ever seeing this many police officers shot and killed. I mean, can you think of another incident in the United States in recent history where something like this has happened?

MICHAEL WOOD: No, not off the top of my head, but I mean, we've had school bombings from the 60s, we've had tons of mass shootings on the other side, as well, and we have like Orlando, where we have the record setting single shooter case. With the path we're going on we can say, oh, that's a huge case, but it's only going to be beaten, and we know it's going to beaten. It's just a matter of time.

[indistinct crosstalk]

MF: But is targeting police something that is just that much different, that much-- because of the special place they hold in society?

MICHAEL WOOD: Yeah, I mean, that's why it affects us more, right? That's why we see it that way, because we look at policing in a general concept as being that you don't go there, because we've all supported this person to have that power, that's where police power comes from. It comes from the people, and it being granted to them. So it's a higher offense because we feel like that's an attack on all of us, but a significant portion of this community in America rightly believe that the police are attacking them So there's going to be divided nuance in so many different avenues.

MF: And do you think that there is a relationship, a change that has come since the events of Ferguson, Missouri, and the violence that was sparked there?

MICHAEL WOOD: Well see, again, we see things like this, like the violence that was sparked there; but is that where the violence was sparked? So if in Baltimore, for instance, we have the uprising, and people say look, this violence was sparked. And like-- that's not the violence and that's not where it was sparked. The violence started beforehand when there were state-sanctioned murder or police brutality in some other way where it's a response, and when we put that on people like that, the violence.

MF: Okay, so you're saying it's just an ingrained part of the way the country is working, now? The relationship between the people, African-Americans, and the police force?

MICHAEL WOOD: It's not African-Americans anymore. I mean, it used to be that way, but the police are getting more and more and more into this us versus them mentality, which is a situation like this will only entrench. That's why I don't see it making a difference, because now we see white guys like Zachary Hammond and [unintelligible] getting shot down by police with absolutely no reason. We see brown people, we see women, we see what happened with Sandra Bland, we see Rekia Boyd, we see this everywhere, and it continues to escalate. So yeah, we're going to have to come to some kind of resolution, the resolution that matters is whether this is violent or nonviolent. We have a political system that's supposed to respect these issues and allow the people to make change without violence, but they're not.

MF: But how does it deescalate, because it doesn't seem to be going in that direction right now.

MICHAEL WOOD: Yeah, the politicians and the police are completely responsible for deescalating this. All this tone that goes on is because of our actions that we do to our citizens. So even if it's a white supremacist shooter, he feels oppressed for some reason. He feels like his rights are taken away, or that he has to protect something. They're all feeling this, so the police and politicians should be uniting and not continuing to sell this us versus them, which comes even in the legal standard.

MF: And what are the early signals that you're seeing today in the wake of what happened last night?

MICHAEL WOOD: Well I mean, so maybe I'm more deeply involved in activism now, but it's kind of just like-- the general feeling is like just hands up. Like, we know this. I mean, I don't understand-- I just simply don't understand why anyone is surprised. This is the system, this is the path. Just understand when the next time it happens or the next escalation, the surprise level should be zero because if we don't step in now and make reform efforts like civilian-led policing, which is what I push, for which means civilians actually tell the police what they do, and our model here is the police tell the people what they're going to do. So under those type of models, you just can't have change.

MF: Michael Wood, thank you very much for your time.

MICHAEL WOOD: Thank you.

MF: Bye bye. Michael Woods, former sergeant with the Baltimore Police Department. He spoke to us from Shrewsbury, just north of Baltimore. You're listening to the current on CBC Radio One across Canada. I'm Mike Finnerty.

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ENCORE: How 'calm technology' pulls attention from online temptation

Guests: Fred Stutzman, Tristan Harris, Peter Reiner

MF: Hello. I’m Mike Finnerty. You’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MF: Coming up, programming some peace and calm into our high tech lives.

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Camp Grounded is a summer camp for adults. We're going to unplug, get away, be kids again. No digital technologies, no networking, no work talk and four days of just endless fun. With the advent of Twitter and Facebook, and all these other social sites, each one of us has become a personal brand. We're all our own, like, a private corporation and so we become defined by what we do.

MF: Yes, if you’ve ever considered going on a full on digital detox, there is a camp for that and perhaps that really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Every day, we seem more and more to our smartphones, even if they can leave us feeling like unhappy campers. Linda Stone left her job as a high tech executive to study what she calls ‘continuous partial attention.’ She says our divided attention contributes to rising stress levels, but she does understand why it can be so hard to look away from our screens.

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LINDA STONE: We feel busy and valued and needed and like we're making a dent in the universe because there are all these demands on us. So, we feel useful and as if we've got a place; as if we'd be missed if we weren't an active node on the network, so it makes us feel like we're an active part of something.

MF: Well, when it comes to the problem of scattered attention and rising screen-time stress, taking a digital detox may not be a practical solution for many. Earlier this season, Anna Maria Tremonti looked at whether technology can come to the rescue and save us from technology, because there is a new generation of technology pioneers working to put us back in control of our own time and attention. Anna Maria’s first guest was Fred Stutzman, the CEO of Freedom, an app designed to keep its users off the internet. Here’s the conversation.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: So, people essentially will pay you to block them from their own technology which they're also paying for?

FRED STUTZMAN: [laughs] That’s right. It sounds silly but it is the truth. People will pay to block themselves off of the things that distract them so that they can focus and get their work done. It's something that they value.

AMT: What do they do? They block themselves off for a pre-determined length of time?

FRED STUTZMAN: That's right, yes. We make products that work across desktop, tablets, phones, that allow them to voluntarily say this is the time that I want to be offline or away from the apps that distract me and you know, you can do it either by setting a period of time or a schedule so you can do it every morning, something like that.

AMT: And so no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, nothing sort of popping up?

FRED STUTZMAN: Exactly. It's reducing the interruptions but also reducing the temptation to be pulled in those directions.

AMT: Who uses the Freedom app?

FRED STUTZMAN: It's mostly people who understand the value of their time, so it's professionals, it's writers, it's creative, it's people who need to focus to get their work done. A lot of remote workers, people who work from home, people who may not have the environmental reinforcements to keep them on task, they're the big users of Freedom.

AMT: Now, you also teach at a university. Do your students need the Freedom app or are they able to handle distractions of digital technology better than people who might not have grown up with it?

FRED STUTZMAN: Oh it's a huge issue. I mean, when all of our lives are mediated online in one way or another, it's this constant draw. So absolutely, students use this kind of technology. We really grew as a student technology and so I think it's something that schools are now starting to think about and address. As we look at the way our business has shifted over the past couple years, we get a lot more calls from schools and the way they're thinking about it is different as well. A couple of years ago it would be you know, let's put a big firewall at the school that keeps kids off of all these technologies and I think they're realizing that that's not the way we act in reality. Kids should be given some degree of a digital literacy around when are the right and wrong times to use these technologies. We're hearing from schools, can you give us tools that will enable the students to develop literacies around how you segment your time; how do you have your offline and online time?

AMT: What, in your own experience, led you to develop the idea of an app that blocks certain technologies?

FRED STUTZMAN: I was studying social media, Spending a lot of time on social media and needed to get my dissertation done, so I ended up using Freedom pretty extensively and really saw that the quality of my work improved. When you don't have all these things competing for your attention, it's just a very different way of working and one that I think we've almost forgotten. When you're able to enter that mode of single focus of mono-tasking, it's just this very powerful state for people.

AMT: How serious are people's problems with attention, or focus, or managing their time then if it's necessary?

FRED STUTZMAN: When you go to work on your computer or you pick up your tablet to get some things done, I kind of liken it to trying to get work done on your television. So there are all these technologies that are co-located inside the device that are designed to distract you. I mean that's the reason Facebook, Twitter, they are great services, but they want your attention so they're competing for your attention and it's up to us, basically pure self-regulation, to find a way and strategies to deal with that. I think it's a huge problem. I think it's one that is if we resort to pure willpower, it's quite challenging and so there's a real interesting area for where technology can come in and solve that problem, so that's where we are.

AMT: At the same time, is an app like yours complicit in feeding the idea that users cannot disconnect from technology in any other way through their own willpower?

FRED STUTZMAN: I think our app harnesses that will power. You know, that’s a great question, it’s one that I wrestle with. What we see in the data, is that when people use an enabling technology like Freedom or any other app out there, it's working with them. It's not replacing will power. There still is some will power and getting it set up and deciding you want to use it. It's basically translating that intention into action.

AMT: Okay, Fred Stutzman, thanks for talking to me today.

FRED STUTZMAN: My pleasure.

AMT: Fred Stutzman is the CEO of Freedom which is an app that lets users block themselves from accessing the internet. He joins us from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Well, apps such as Freedom may help us manage our time online today, but my next guest hopes that future technologies will have that built in. Tristan Harris spent the last three years as a product philosopher at Google. He left in December to take on the full time role as co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign. Tristan Harris joins us from San Francisco, hello.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Hi, thank you for having me.

AMT: From a big picture level, what are you trying to change about tech design?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, we live in a unique time in history where a handful of people working at three tech companies, I would say Apple, Google, and Facebook, go to work every morning and the choices that they make dictate what a billion people see when they wake up in the morning and it kind of programs their mind to think about their life, their obligations, their attention, in a very particular way. So there's this massive asymmetry where a small number of people in California, trained mostly in engineering or design, are basically making decisions about how to steer the thoughts and behaviours of a billion people, actually multiple billion people, and what is the ethical or moral responsibility they have to be incredibly thoughtful about how they're doing that because they can't not do it? So then, the question becomes how do you consciously, carefully do that?

AMT: Okay, that's interesting. We were looking at it from that side so how would you describe our relationship with technology and social media at this point?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, I completely agree with Fred. I mean, I think that the whole system is pretty broken right now. The reason, just to amplify something that he was saying, is that there is this attention economy where everyone has to escalate their persuasive tactics in order to get more of people's attention. To get you to use it means tapping into the psychological triggers which kind of activate you to come back, spend some time, invest and then get hooked so that they can bring you back the next time and that results in this increasingly persuasive internet. If you imagine, there's this door between you and this internet app, Economy Ecosystem, and behind that door there's this almost invisible new physical force which is how persuasive that environment is, how persuasive is social media, how persuasive is the internet at getting you to keep reading, scrolling, clicking, watching the next thing? Over time, the persuasive force behind that door is only going to go up. And as persuasion goes up, agency, or the ability to self-direct our thoughts and our behavior, goes down. Luckily, there is this situation where a handful of companies, really Apple and Google, who make the two dominant smartphone platforms, mediate our relationship to that force behind that door and they can do more to help us navigate within that environment so that we have more agency.

AMT: Let's go back to the getting hooked there. How much work goes into getting users hooked?

TRISTAN HARRIS: I actually studied at a lab at Stanford called the persuasive technology lab which was part of a whole cohort of young engineering students from Stanford who were all taught, essentially, how to you know, train people in these techniques of building, engaging successful products. And you know, in my class were the founders of Instagram and early executives at Facebook, and no one had any evil intention, but there are whole conferences and loads of books where you can learn the art of kind of tapping into people's psychology.

AMT: Okay, so in order to fight some of that, give us a concrete example of the type of feature you'd like to see incorporated into something like instant messaging?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Sure. Well, so right now we kind of have this all or nothing choice with our phone. What if we could have choice while we're using the screen with things like Freedom and other great tools that would let you be connected, but not get interrupted. So let's say you could, while working on a document, say I want to be focused for one hour so that if anyone messages me, the message will be held until I go unfocused, and that will be fully communicated to them. So, imagine that you open up a chat window and you say I want to send Tristan a message, hey when are you done with your interview? When you open up the chat message, you'll see before you even hit send that Tristan is focused for the next hour and this message will be delivered after he goes unfocused. And if it's really important, you can escalate it with a conscious choice with this by hitting this button or something like that. That way, you can still get the thought off your mind in the moment when you have that need, but you're not accidentally or mindlessly interrupting people by default, you can only consciously interrupt people by default.

AMT: So, you've raised actually another point here, and that is not only do we get distracted by messages coming in or something, but when we send something, when we want to connect with someone, we expect them to connect back with us instantaneously.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Absolutely, and we're all kind of miscalibrated about expectations because when we expect a response that quickly, that leaves us to also feel intense social obligation when we receive a message and don't respond. If you look at that as kind of psychological vulnerability, that's like a button that you can push in someone's brain, right? It's called actually social reciprocity. And you can imagine how if a company wanted to they could manipulate that instinct.

AMT: I want to pick up on all of this. We spoke with Jacob Bank, one of your former Google colleagues, who is a product manager at Google Apps. He's working on a project called Goals in Google Calendar which is aimed at helping users more easily schedule personal life priorities like fitness, times with friends, or even me time. Listen to him describe their design process.

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We have a responsibility to help people follow through on these bigger objectives rather than just helping them get going even more quickly or send emails more quickly. If Goals works effectively, people are interacting with the calendar in a very light way and what they're really doing is accomplishing the real world thing that is likely outside of the digital world that they said they want to accomplish.

AMT: Tristan Harris, what advantages do you see for tech companies in moving toward the goals you're advocating?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, just like Jacob is saying, I think this will become a new area of consumer demand just like organic food became something that people solely demanded more of and realized they didn't want the regular food. I think we're at the start of something like that for technology. And what Jacob is talking about is really, you know, calendars that help you make life choices as opposed to making technology choices or app choices that. That alignment with life, with Freedom, with the way that we want to live our lives, just the idea that every technology company and app that is trying to truly help you make the life choices that you want to make, as opposed to making the app choices that you want to make to get as much screen time as possible. That has to be something that consumers value and demand and they will want to choose the things that are truly helping them do that. So, I think we're at the start of hopefully on a much longer road where that's the direction of the tech industry.

AMT: So, if the goal is to allow us to do things we really want to do in real life, why don't we just leave our smartphones at home and go for a walk?

TRISTAN HARRIS: I think people should absolutely do that, too. It's just that we live in this reality where your smartphone is kind of like an exoskeleton for your mind, and it's one that we're increasingly, increasingly dependent on. The number one way that we connect with other people now is with our smartphone, even with just a phone call. So, like it or not, this thing is with us all the time. Unlike in situations where other prosthetics where you have the FDA certify what it means for it to truly be safe to be strapped on all the time, we don't have some accountability loop like that for technology where these things are safe to strap on, to use, to have on you and have it truly be supportive of the life that you want to live.

AMT: You want tech designers to change their goals, their aims, their business model as part of what you're doing. Talk to me a little bit about that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: So long as the core business model of the internet is advertising, specifically engagement based advertising, that if I can get eyeballs staring at rectangles for long periods of space and time, that's how I make money. That's the business model of the internet and that becomes a problem.

AMT: So how does Time Well Spent, your project, how do you try and fight that? How do you try to change that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, I think that we need supplemental sources of revenue or other options, almost like the organic food option, which might cost a little bit more money, but whose incentives are more deeply aligned. It's deepening the alignment between what's good for farmers and what's good for people and there might be a slightly higher cost for that, but if you could imagine, would you pay even ten dollars a month for a version of Facebook that was completely on your team to help you spend your time well? That's kind of what we're trying to do with Time Well Spent, which is there should be a whole class of organizations, including something like Freedom, what Fred's doing, where the software that is really designed and aligned to help people truly live their lives, can be rewarded for that. And it's marked out and understood by consumers so that they know what they're paying for. They're paying for a deeper alignment between what they want for their life and what the company wants.

AMT: Okay, well thank you for talking to me today. Interesting.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Absolutely. Thank you.

AMT: Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign. He joined us from San Francisco. When it comes to the way we live with our devices it is not solely wearable inventions such as Google glass that can make us seem like cyborgs. The smartphone has become such a ubiquitous accessory that my next guest says we are all essentially proto-cyborgs today. But again, he does say there's reason to be optimistic. The Google glass, as you might say, is half full. As long as we can assure that our devices are actually working for us and not the other way around. Peter Reiner is a professor at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia and he joins us from Vancouver, hello.

PETER REINER: Good morning.

AMT: In what sense are we already cyborgs?

PETER REINER: Well, the notion of a cyborg is really just a marriage of biology and technology and we have so intimately integrated our smartphones and, actually the entire universe of devices on which we interact on a day to day basis, that they have become part of what we call our extended mind. If you were at dinner yesterday evening with a group of friends and people started talking about some movies and let's say the movie Amelie came up and people were talking about how wonderful it was, and then somebody says well, what was the name of that actress and nobody at the table is a movie buff and so nobody remembers, how likely do you think it is that the very next words out of somebody's mouth would be, well I'll just Google that? And what's so remarkable about that little story is how unremarkable it is; that it has become a seamless part of the way that we navigate the world today; that we rely on these information appliances that are always at our fingertips to extend our minds in ways that really never happened before.

AMT: So when you say that they can be used, smartphones and digital technologies are our best chance of becoming smarter, are you talking about that? Or do you go beyond that?

PETER REINER: I am talking about exactly that. When I say that, what I'm pointing to is the universal desire for people to be smarter, everybody wants to know more, to be smarter, to be cognitively enhanced, really where our brains are already working very, very effectively and we may be bumping up against the hard realities of neurobiology. Rather than trying to make our brains intrinsically work more, what may be the better strategy is to use these tools that we have with us all the time to enhance our cognitive abilities by offloading tasks that they do better than we do and freeing up our brains to do the things that our brains do better than they do. Fortunately, there are still some of those.

AMT: So if you look at the ways we use digital technology today, are we actually headed toward improving our lives or is it the opposite?

PETER REINER: Well, we're doing both at the same time and it's hard to know on balance which direction it's going. We do have certainly some metrics. Recently there was a paper that came out from the Federal Reserve, of all places, which looks at the economy and what they noticed was that the productivity of workers was rising for quite a number of years and with the introduction of computers, it continued to rise until social media showed up on the scene, and it has been flat. Since social media became so popular, they attribute it directly to the use of social media by people and its effect on their working environment and its effect on their attention span. We need a real solution because it's affecting us in important ways.

AMT: You say it's affecting our autonomy.

PETER REINER: So, I do suggest that there is a real threat to autonomy and autonomy is one of the wonderful values that we have fought hard for through the enlightenment, it’s an important value, it's the ability to decide for yourself, by yourself to navigate the world as you wish. But, the persuasiveness of these technologies is really quite remarkable and it's a bit of a worry again, when we have so much power within a few companies. There are a few recent studies that have highlighted this. Robert Epstein last year published a paper that showed that just by altering, and they played with this artificially, but altering the ranking of Google searches so that candidates for elections—so the searches showed up either favourable or unfavourable, results for the candidates for elections. They could sway undecided voter’s choices by 20 percent and they would never have noticed it. The previous year, Facebook published a very controversial experiment where they manipulated the news feed of just 680,000 of their users by a little bit, and they could modify their emotional content, their emotional state by the content of that news feed and the users of course, never noticed.

AMT: You're describing something out of a science fiction movie where they all make us go vote for the wrong guy or something but, along with that kind of manipulation you're also suggesting that we get distracted, that we get pulled over to things where we lose that agency; that the very thing that is supposed to actually enhance our ability to be an autonomous and give us more options, kind of closes down.

PETER REINER: There's a plus and minus to all of these technologies and to everything that we interact with and the objective is really to try to find a way to alter the balance so that we maximize the benefits and minimize the deficits, if you will, of interacting with these technologies. What we think we really need to do is to have consumers and those of us who are watching the space very carefully pound the table hard to demand that these companies move the technology in a way that helps us live our lives in a more productive, but also a more satisfying way. One way that we could think about that is by having something akin to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval that could be awarded to companies or software products so that you could see that, oh they have done something to help me, and then you might be more likely to use that particular technology that another one that doesn't have that seal of approval. That way, we incentivize everybody appropriately as opposed to trying to ask Facebook to route its business model, I don't think that's realistic.

AMT: But we are still, as you say then, cyborgs. How do we get our autonomy back?

PETER REINER: It's a real dilemma that we have. I think it's the major ethical dilemma that I see in terms of the way that we're interacting with our technologies. I guess the only way that I know of is by having people like me pound the table in favour of more user autonomy and less corporate autonomy.

AMT: It's really important to hear your thinking on this, Peter Reiner. Thank you.

PETER REINER: Thank you.

MF: Peter Reiner, professor at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of BC, and he spoke to Anna Maria in April. And that is our program for the day. Speaking of calm technology, we’ll leave you with the sounds of a website that might come in handy if you ever work in a busy office. The website is called A Soft Murmur. I’m Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current, and we’ll see you Monday.

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July 8, 2016 full episode transcript

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