We delve into the systemic issues of the tech industry with the CHT co-founder

This week, we welcome Randima Fernando. Randy works at the intersection of technology, mindfulness, and social impact, helping to find ethical solutions to complex problems. Here’s a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), a nonprofit whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests. The Center for Humane Technology was featured in the Emmy-winning film, The Social Dilemma, which has been seen by over a hundred million people globally.

This episode is part of our series on the tools we use, discussing how technology mediates our lived experiences.

We discuss:

In this wide-ranging conversation, we delve into some of the current systemic issues of the technology industry, which are now shaping how we live. We discuss how business incentives, not human interests, govern design, how no tools are created neutral, and why we all –consumers and designers alike– need to understand what thriving means to us so that we can live these values, eyes wide open, in the tools that we create and use.

The Center for Humane Technology offers several helpful resources:

• Their free online course, Foundations of Humane Technology, helps product teams create technology that treats attention and intention as sacred, protects wellbeing, and builds our collective capacity to address humanity’s most urgent challenges.

• Their podcast, Your Undivided Attention, has over 14 million downloads and explores the incredible power that technology has over our lives — and how we can use it to catalyze a humane future.

• Their free Youth Toolkit helps youth ages 13-25, as well as their parents and teachers, navigate—and push to change—a broken social media environment.

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell Sentient Digital

Music and audio production: Toccare Philip Amalong

Transcript:

Randy: Every interaction we have shapes us as humans. So, like right now we’re changing each other just by having this conversation. Listeners are hearing what we’re talking about and it’s changing certain things in their minds. This is happening all the time. 

And so we have to view our technology as having that kind of effect. Every relationship changes us. But if we have a relationship with technology that happens to be near our brain more than anything else, that has significant effects on how we think and how we act.

Georgie: Welcome to Freedom Matters, where we explore the intersection of technology, productivity, and digital well-being. I’m your host, Georgie Powell. And each episode, we’ll be talking to experts in productivity and digital wellness. We’ll be sharing their experiences on how to take back control of technology. We hope you leave feeling inspired, so let’s get to it. 

This week, we welcome Randima Fernando. Randy works at the intersection of technology, mindfulness, and social impact, helping to find ethical solutions to hard problems.

He is a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit whose mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests. The Center for Humane Tech was featured in the Emmy-winning film, The Social Dilemma, which has been seen by over a hundred million people globally. 

This episode is the first in our new series on the tools that we use, where we discuss how technology mediates our lived experiences. In this wide-ranging conversation, we delve into some of the systemic issues of the technology industry today, which are now shaping the way that we exist. 

We discuss how business incentives, not human interests, govern design, how no tools are created neutral, and why we all, users and designers alike, need to understand what thriving means to us so that we can live these values, eyes wide open, in the tools that we create and use.

Randy, thank you so much for coming and joining us today on the Freedom Matters podcast, it really is a privilege to speak with you.

Randy: I’m really happy to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Georgie: So, I’d love to start at the beginning. And can you just explain to me and to the listeners why you thought it was really important to found the Center for Humane Technology.

Randy: We saw all of these issues coming up around technology and the trends in technology and this idea of the attention economy starting to become more clear. And then the issues that were happening with how a persuasive technology, right, technology that interacts with the mind. 

So, social media being the top thing there, right how these persuasive technologies were interacting with our minds and causing problems at every level, right, from addiction to depression. But also including polarization and the breakdown of sense-making, like how we make sense of the world; affecting how we make choices, the values that we have, what we think is important, and what our children think is important. 

So, all of these issues. And we wanted to basically have an organization that was dedicated to fighting these problems but from this kind of systemic lens, which is really core to our work.

Georgie: I was interested since founding the Center for Humane Technology, how have the issues that they’ve been addressing changed?

Randy: Yeah, it’s a good question. A lot has changed, thankfully. Public awareness has grown incredibly. And a big piece of that was The Social Dilemma, right, this film was watched by an estimated over 100 million people worldwide, thanks to Netflix and the distribution there, right. 

So, you end up with a lot more awareness of the issues. And people just — it becomes safe to talk about it wherever you are. And that has all kinds of incredible downstream effects. So, when culture understands something, it becomes safe to talk about it at your school. Whether you’re a teen, you can talk about it with other teens. If you’re a parent, you can talk about it with other parents. 

But suddenly, policymakers, it’s good for policymakers to take action, because they know that a large number of citizens are behind them on the action. Same thing with insiders at technology companies, they can speak up, because they’re also aware that the public is behind them, and that there’s a large movement that understands the issues. And it can catalyze some downstream changes. 

So, I think there’s been a lot of work and a lot of progress on the problem side and understanding the problem. And now it’s time to talk a little more about the solution side people are more interested in, okay, what can we do? What does that look like? It turns out it’s a complex problem, which is why solutions don’t move forward so easily. But we can talk about some of that today as well.

Georgie: And I’m glad that you think there’s already kind of positive change happening. I worry that even though there’s increased awareness, the technology that we’re using is becoming even more persuasive and compelling at the same time. And so even though you can be very aware of say, for example, how addictive this technology is, it’s actually increasingly difficult to step away from it. 

Randy: No, I agree with you. I think this is how we see it as well, because technology advances at this exponential rate, right? Like, actually doubling in performance roughly every 18 months. 

And when we have that powering our AI and powering the persuasive technologies, in particular, you can make a fair argument that they are the most dangerous class of technology, because they’re the closest to your mind. They affect how you think. They affect how you make decisions. They affect how you understand what’s true, and how you put the information around you together to make decisions. 

And by the way, that is the foundation of democracy; the idea that citizens will gather information, synthesize that, and then make decisions in terms of actions, voting in particular, that reflects a good understanding of the issues. And then they vote for what’s best for them and their communities, and hopefully, the country. 

That all starts to break down when other people are manipulating the ability to make sense of the world and to make choices. So, this is why persuasive technology has been a big focal point for us because it’s this foundation. It affects the foundation of the functioning of society as a whole.

Georgie: Yeah. And as you say, if it’s doubling in improvement in function every 18 months, we have to ask the question, have I in the last year and a half, have I doubled my ability to be able to protect my ability to focus? 

Randy: And you haven’t. Yeah, exactly.

Georgie: Absolutely not, to work in this space, and absolutely not. You say there’s increasing evidence of the harms that technology is delivering against us. And I certainly agree, especially anecdotally, and I think people are a lot more self-aware of the harm. 

But from a research perspective, I’m still struggling to see conclusive evidence where there isn’t also counter research to say that actually, technology isn’t harming us. And I still feel like we’re fighting against this quite strong rhetoric to say, we’re really overreacting. We’re overdramatizing. This is a Luddite talk, which has existed with every kind of new wave of technology that’s ever been in the past. How are you finding that?

Randy: I think one of the challenges that research has in particular for this problem is that they don’t have the data, right. They don’t have access to all — The platforms know everything that’s going on. And they could do all this analysis for us. But of course, it’s not incentivized for them to do that. And so there’s a struggle that researchers always have with getting access. 

So, one of the really helpful forms of regulation that can be passed is more transparency, allowing researchers to look at these datasets and analyze them. 

But I think there’s still enough evidence of like, harms to children, developmental harms, forms of addiction, depression, narcissism, discrimination, all of these things are showing up, cyberbullying, the effects of cyberbullying. 

Every interaction we have shapes us as humans. So, like right now we’re changing each other just by having this conversation. Listeners are hearing what we’re talking about and it’s changing certain things in their minds. This is happening all the time. 

And so we have to view our technology as having that kind of effect. Every relationship changes us. But if we have a relationship with technology that happens to be near our brain more than anything else, that has significant effects on how we think and how we act. 

There’s an interesting statistic about how many hours teens, for example, are using daily average entertainment screen use. Right now, for boys, it’s nine hours and 16 minutes. And for girls, it’s eight hours and two minutes. And that’s data from 2021. 

So, I think we should be very concerned about when we have that kind of relationship with technology, and adults are not much different, right? All of us are on these devices for many hours of the day. 

And so we have to view it as these interactions, especially at these long durations, are affecting our minds. They’re changing us in ways that we don’t always understand. And so with children, for example, they pick up all of the rules of their environment naturally. 

So, they look around and they say, okay, attention is really important. Every child knows, right, attention, you want attention, right? They knew that long before social media, long before television, right? Everyone knows that from when they’re very young. It’s natural. 

But they also pick up how to get attention, right? Every child figures this out. And when they’re on these platforms, and they can notice that there’s this currency of likes and comments and shares and that is the fundamental currency of how attention works, of course, that’s going to affect their development, it’s going to affect their values, as an example. 

One of the things that are really important to understand is that when we interact with technology, the shaping process, the shaping of our minds, this interaction is not just happening in the time that we’re using the technology, right? The effects of that continue after. 

And I think this is one of the really, it’s very obvious, but one of the common kind of misconceptions that I think sometimes tech companies have when they’re designing products is they think about a session where the user is using a product, and something happens where the user wants to do something, and then they finish and then they leave. 

But for example, when we watch 15-second videos, again and again on TikTok, if a kid is doing that, in particular, but even adults, your attention is getting trained in a certain way. And this attention is actually the fundamental currency of doing anything in this world. 

And so we have to view it that way and say, okay, and then when the session ends, your mind is still conditioned to understand information and to process information in these tiny 15-second chunks. 

And you’ll find the effect because when you try to do something important, next, you try to get back to your work or maybe it’s your homework, or maybe it’s reading something, you can’t sustain your attention the way that you could before. So, I think that’s just a really concrete example of how these effects happen and how they have downstream consequences beyond the actual time of the interaction.

Georgie: Yeah, it’s interesting. I saw a report that came out recently. They were showing that teenagers are actually having trouble concentrating on YouTube videos now.

Randy: They’re too long.

Georgie: A 10-minute long YouTube video is too long, like goodness knows, there’s no hope for a movie. As you say, we see this in real life not just affecting how we interact offline, but also in our online experiences. They get changed over time too.

Randy: That’s right. And I just add one more thing, which is to solve problems, right? If you have real problems in the world, as we do, we have inequity, we have the climate crisis, and we have just so many problems that are out there. War, right? And all of these are complex, they require sustained attention and nuanced conversation. 

The ability to take in information, listen to someone’s viewpoint, understand, and reflect on that and this takes time. And this takes words and space. 

So, when Twitter came out, I was pretty concerned because the idea of having such a small number of characters to express information, to express ideas leads to this natural minification of everything. And you boil down complexity. And we all learn to do that. And only the most minified ideas succeed. 

And I think this is all dangerous. Again, it’s this constant training process, right, that now, we’ve all been through for more than 10 years. And when you think about the effects of that, even if you fix other aspects of social media or persuasive technology, this training stays behind.

Georgie: Yeah. But our brains are malleable. We can do it. We spoke with Krista Tippett recently. And I think one of the things she said really lasted with me was that not only is everything been distilled down to 100 characters, how many characters it all is, is this misperception that access to so much more information can give us all the answers. 

When actually, sometimes the best way to solve complex challenges in the world is to accept that there will be questions that aren’t answered and that we have to be able to sit with them, mull over them, and give them space. That goes far beyond the way that we interact with technology and in the moment, but that affects how we exist as humans and is really important.

Randy: There’s actually a very important related issue to that, which is this idea of delayed gratification. When we are used to getting information or answers everything immediately. And we lose patience, we become very impa–, we’ve all become more impatient, right? 

And then I think that relates at a deeper level, because delayed gratification, is the reason it correlates so much with success. You may have heard about the marshmallow experiment, this kind of famous experiment where basically children who are able to delay gratification and say, I’m going to take two marshmallows later versus one marshmallow, that’s the super short version of that. 

That correlated with a number of successful outcomes. They were happier. They had better jobs. I can’t — There’s a long list of things. And I would say the reason for that is that life doesn’t tend to go the way we want a lot of the time. So, how we respond to that is very important. 

But if we’re in this tree being programmed for whatever, nine hours, eight hours a day, basically outside of our job or school, we’re in this training program that is an instant gratification, hyper normal stimulation, that is not what we are biologically evolved to handle. 

We’re just being trained in a way that doesn’t equip us very well to handle the realities of life when they come. So, that’s another deeper issue that’s also happening through all of this.

Georgie: And we could go on and it does get quite concerning, I think. How do you balance it though, with the fact that for so many young people, for instance, we talk about young people quite a lot here and how their brains, how all of our brains have been trained. 

But you know, how they’ve managed to find identity by connecting with other people who are like them. For lots of people, they’re actually being able to communicate in new ways, which is really positive for them that so much of social interaction now does happen online. How do we marry the two?

Randy: One thing I would do is separate out communications technology, like video conferencing, or video chat, or even text type chats, from the actual platforms on the scrolls, right, the long feed of stuff that bounces your mind from one item to the next item. 

There’s a big difference there. And of course, the companies tend to want to conflate those, right? That’s one of the ways you defend yourself if you’re one of the companies. You say, hey, but it’s so great for connecting people, people talk to each other on our platform all the time. And that is true. And that is valuable. 

The trap is that most of the communications technologies also try to get you back into the rest of the platform, as part of the communication, experience, or interaction. And that’s when there’s trouble, right? 

Because when we are communicating on video, say we’re on a call together, there’s a lot of goodness here, right? We’re tapping into our natural human ability. We can be more candid with each other, we can be more authentic. 

Now, contrast that to an experience online, where you’re performing in front of all these other people, it’s very difficult, right? You start to have different behaviors. A lot of times, you’re using text only to communicate ideas. So, inflections can’t be conveyed easily, there are no facial expressions to help you. And therefore you get a lot of misinterpretation. 

And then when you start to have these kinds of arguments or debates, maybe even constructive, when you have so many people watching, and commenting without full context or knowing you or knowing me, it starts to go off the cliff very quickly. 

And then it becomes very hard because you’re performing in front of other people. Ideally, you’d want to take that conversation offline, and continue in a private, safer place if there’s an argument. 

But instead, it becomes like a gladiator situation where gladiators are going at it, and everyone’s watching. And there’s this kind of vociferous cheering. That’s not the kind of world that we want to have.

Georgie: Yeah. Fascinating. It’s fascinating that you see such a clear distinction as well between sort of communication channels and social media channels. And as you say, the tools have elements of both, and that’s where it gets really muddy. 

But if you take something that you think is pure communication, I think still, that in itself can also be overwhelming. There are still infinite opportunities to have all those conversations but I don’t actually have infinite time to have all those conversations, and you basically feel guilty all the time, but not getting back to all the people that you really should get back to.

Randy: That’s also true. Yes. I think that speaks to a different point, which is, I think, for all of us, I would encourage everyone to just stop for a moment and think, what is thriving to you? What does it mean? 

And we can maybe just pause for a few seconds and just reflect on it. What does that even mean? Because that is the sort of the guiding star for us to figure out. And we sometimes forget that, right? You have to start with that principle. And thriving folds in a lot of different pieces, but it also folds in an understanding of our own human nature. 

So, in the example you gave, it means understanding that we can only maintain a certain number of relationships at a time. We can’t have them all. We can’t go deep with everyone. And so we have to choose where we want to spend our time and our attention. 

And this idea of protecting attention in particular, which is very close to the heart for freedom, this idea of protecting our attention and intentions is the most important thing. Because this is a building block of how we make decisions, how we set our agenda, and ultimately how we get to thrive.

Georgie: So, what other questions should people think about when they think about what does thriving mean for me?

Randy: Yeah, So, let’s talk a little bit about it. We want to live by our values. But to do that, we have to understand what thriving is. And this is also, I know some of the people listening are going to be technologists. And I think technologists, in particular, need to understand the concept of thriving very deeply.

Because the reason we have these technologies is that they help us to thrive. So, we have to know what it means. And I think a lot of times, we can start by just eliminating some of the common misperceptions about thriving. 

So, it’s not an end goal. It’s not something you get to when you accomplish that task, you’re done. It’s not something that’s easy to put into metrics and maximize and achieve. It’s not something that you deliver. It’s not something that an app gives you. It’s not distraction, right? 

This is, I think, very important, we need genuine spacious rest. But this idea of hyperstimulation actually locks us into a kind of trance and gets us to be overwhelmed. 

Thriving also, isn’t the absence of pain or loss. Thriving, it’s about how we respond to those things. It’s about how we can be learning, how can we be resilient, and how can we find the ways to respond skillfully when things happen.