This is an astoundingly naive article on an extremely important topic.

The core fallacy is that we’re all “good people” with “the best of intentions” and that we’re all shocked, simply shocked, at the “unintended, negative consequences” of the systems we deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible. i.e.:

- “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
- McNamee: “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences”
- “Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive.

The last quote is especially ludicrous. With all due respect to Tristan Harris, if he isn’t being misquoted then he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. I was an engineer/PM/exec at Bebo in the early days, before the $850M AOL exit and the complete catastrophe that followed. We absolutely 100% “deliberately set out to make our products addictive”. Bebo only existed as a serious venture-backed company at all due to extremely aggressive viral flows which were, yes, deliberately designed to get the unsuspecting user to email invite links to every single person in their address book. All of the top social startups were doing the same thing. The ends (better UX + higher valuation thanks to network effects) justified the means (deliberate hijacking of our users’ minds at scale).

But don’t take my word for it. The article’s author proves my point by immediately contradicting himself. Here’s the full quote in context:

Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.

A friend at Facebook told Harris that designers initially decided the notification icon, which alerts people to new activity such as “friend requests” or “likes”, should be blue. It fit Facebook’s style and, the thinking went, would appear “subtle and innocuous”. “But no one used it,” Harris says. “Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.”

Okay. So to recap: they decided to use a red button because nobody used the blue one. It was not an unintentional accident. It was based on careful reflection after testing different versions. This is what I call “deliberate”.

Why does this matter?

Because if we aren’t honest with ourselves about the problem, we’re not going to fix it.

How many times are people going to fall for the “oops, I did it again?” excuse from the titans of social tech? Does anyone else remember Facebook platform? The original F8 conference outlined a vision of an open-access social technology platform that would make the world a better place. Instead, we got FarmVille.

The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is that the vision for this technology was always about money and power. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and ultimately counterproductive if the goal is to fix the system.

I don’t want to come across as overly negative to the author or to the people cited in it. We need more critical discussion of these issues, not less. But fundamentally this problem is due to a lack of integrity in people, not technology. And we’ll never fix the lack of integrity at the heart of the tech world if we keep pretending that none of us knew what we were doing.