Comment by humanetech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanetech | Hacker News Reader

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Tristan Harris, founder of the non-profit Center for Humane Technology (CHT) [0] has been quite successful at high government circles and board level of big tech companies.

At the time Mark Zuckerberg didn't want to testify in the UK, he testified to the UK House of Commons commission to inform them about Fake News [1]

In the corporate world the strategy is to 'Engage employees', make them aware of the harms of technology and philosophy of Humane Tech. I found it enlightening to see him address the opening keynote at Dreamforce 2018 "How to Stop Technology from Destabilizing the World" [2] to a hall full of SalesForce customers.

The CHT now focuses primarily on fake news, disinformation, political influencing problems that arise from tech - i.e. the topics where the risk for civic breakdown is highest, but they have also played a role in bringing the concept of 'Time Well Spent' - focussed on healthy tech use - across at e.g. Google and Apple (but much to be done still in this area).

PS. I represent the Humane Tech Community, which is affiliated yet operates independently of the CHT, as a grassroots movement [3].

[0] https://humanetech.com

[1] https://community.humanetech.com/t/witness-account-of-trista...

[2] https://community.humanetech.com/t/must-see-video-explaining...

[3] https://community.humanetech.com/t/who-we-are-what-we-do-and...

The other day I heard Time Well Spent get thoroughly mocked in The Culture podcast, but I was too out of the loop to understand why. Still am.

Not sure if this was about the CHT then, as there exists still the Time Well Spent movement (as a FB group). But it could well be. The CHT realize quite well that TWS constitutes only a small part of what makes tech humane. Also the way that companies are adopting it, has a great deal of marketing to it (akin to 'greenwashing'). So you could say that regarding TWS some tiny steps were made in the right direction.

I'm also concerned that the fight against political influencing by fake news and whatnot quickly becomes a tool for political influencing itself. I've seen it first hand. I've just seen it happen in the third world: elections are actually well regulated and at the decisive last week, the incumbent party A who has been in power for 15 years accuses the outsider of using fake news (they even used a picture of Steve Bannon) spread through Whatsapp to influence the election. In due time the social network companies actually answered to department of justice probes and said nothing out of the ordinary (mass forwards, etc) had happened at all. This, of course, was after the election.

They "stole" quite a few points from the then-frontrunning outsider too. It wasn't enough because it was too-late-too-little; they were too far behind. And yet, the narrative that the outsider won because of fake news steve bannon donald trump russia stuck. International press reports of it are still around. What, is Glenn Greenwald going to own up to dirty maneuvering?

I think the green-washing comment is definitely on-point. co-opt the opposition and there is no opposition.

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