Introduce Yourself

Hi , I’m a web developer at an insurance company. I have been a user of various social Services’s. I was an undergraduate researcher at UICs computational biology lab which showed me the horrors of what Facebook can do. I attempted to make a system that would tell you if it has peanuts in it but instead of releasing it I realized that if the system failed it could hurt people so I pivoted the project .

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Hi, I’m Chris, and I’ve been in mobile and social media marketing and development for around 10 years. I’ve been in a constant paradox with it for most of the time, between promoting methods, potential and technology for national brands, and cautioning against misuse and advising in lawsuit/violations for about as long. My first tech-ethical dilemma was prior to this, in a capacity of developing behavioral profile systems of employees to identify similar groups at a large company, which were then used as additional information on who didn’t fit in, and then red flagged towards the layoff pile, so very familiar with the tech’s direct effects on people. But the long term psychological health of the public, exposed to social media as it is, I feel is just as damaging, if not more.

As I’ve been moving towards AI and automated solutions and their own ethical landmines, I’ve been encountering much the same attitude of dismissal of concerns, where ethical questions have barely any weight behind them in environments where people are just looking for the next lightning in a bottle. And now with research on long term effects, attention, influencing psychological development, and blatant manipulation of people, I feel strongly something must be done to make tech a responsible field. Too many other industries rely on ‘what works’ with social, in the context of attention, not health. If we wait until a company decides to self regulate themselves with warning labels, I feel it would be too late to do any good. I hope groups like this can start to make a difference, and hope I get an opportunity to contribute.

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Hey everyone!

My name is Alex Beattie (Doreen Kibblesmith on Friends of TWS) and I’m a writer and PhD student who is researching how people disconnect from the internet using technology.

I’m interested in the Humane Tech movement on two levels. The first is as a general user - a public conversation about addictive design/constant connection is so desperately needed, and I’m excited to see what will come from this organisation.

The second is as a academic. If ‘data is the new oil’, then movements like this are a new type of environmentalism. TWS, Tristan, Max et al., have popularised this idea that our attention is scarce and needs protection. This has huge implications on academic fields of media, design or technology studies, among others. So I would love to contribute by providing some insights into how this movement is transforming how we think and study technology.

I look forward to having some discussions with you all!

Alex

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Hi there! :wave:

My name is Santiago Archila. I’m a former neuroscientist / current software engineer in the SF bay area. As a software engineer, I worked at Change.org leading the growth/engagement team, so have seen the efforts used at a high-profile tech company to drive return user-ship/engagement.

I’m very interested in this topic, because I experience first-hand the difficult choices involved in curbing ‘screen-time’ especially in a world where our social interactions are increasingly occurring online.

Look forward to getting involved in any way I can!

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Hello all,

My name is Nathan Kuik, and I’m a former clinical social worker from Seattle that now lives in Berlin doing software development to (hopefully) build empathetic chatbots.

In my endeavours outside of work, I’m doing some work for organizations like Open Sourcing Mental Illness and getting involved with other topics around attention, mindfulness, and empathy.

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Hi, my name is Arnold Schrijver. I’ve worked for 20 years in IT as architect, tech lead, product owner and manager mostly in the fields of print, marketing, content management and experience management.

Humane technology has become my passion and introducing it whereever I can is my professional purpose. I have volunteered my time with pleasure as your moderator, admin, facilitator, and Community Lead from the early days. Besides the activities I do here I am a big FOSS and Fediverse advocate.

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Hi there.

My name is Aaron Greenspan. I created a non-addictive student portal called houseSYSTEM in 2003, which included a feature called The Facebook. It’s a long story. You can read more about it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/71uva5/iama_classmate_of_mark_zuckerberg_who_created_the/

I’ve been concerned about the direction of social media for a very long time, and I’m glad to see some of the real problems getting more media attention. I’d be glad to help out however I can.

Aaron

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Hi there,

My name is Rebecca. I did my undergraduate in Business Information Systems. Currently, I’m finishing my MBA in Decision Sciences.

I’m interested in this campaign for a few reasons; one of my professors in my undergraduate education highlighted the value of tech for good - shared his work with One Laptop per child in India. The other reason is I’d like to learn more about others that see this same value in technology - while acknowledging the fall outs.

I’ve done previous work in political fundraising. Now, I’m interested in the opportunities surrounding the policies that are shaped by political action committees, lobbyists, and politicians. Especially, in the world of tech.

I look forward to learning more! Thanks for the inspiring introductions.

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Hello,

I am very interested in the interplay between the structures of online spaces and ideology formation in the users of those spaces. There is a concept in Marxist Spatial Analysis called the “Socio-Spacial Dialectic” which basically says that societies generate space, but at the same time space generates and reinforces the ideologies of the society. There is a synthesis. I believe this is occurring online.

As many have noted there is a great dehumanization of humanity going on online. between porn, gore, piracy, and the weaponization and the gamification of social interaction art and our the value of being human is becoming devalued.

If you are reaching out to someone, is it rude not to check on their news feed? If you check on their news feed you may be prevented from reaching out to ask how someone is doing - you already know - but in making that time-efficient decision, suddenly that person misses out on the knowledge that you are thinking of them.

You can like, or sad face, or mad face, etc. a post. But that itself turns social interaction into a points based validation system. And if you comment on a post, that must be preened for social consumption of future friends, family and employees. It must be tailored to political and social norms lest it be blasted in a buzzfeed article or lambasted as an example of the sins of the loony left or racist right. An incalculable number of beings may view and judge your comments ostensibly to a friend.

But beyond the impact on the individual moments of social interaction, what happens then to our seeking or searching for purpose and validation? Do we tailor our behavior, our choices and our desires around such validation as we receive through these specific constraints of various social media services?

I have spent an entire decade of my life on facebook, posting statuses, poking, debating politics, posting photos, starting relationships, planning events, messaging old friends, sharing news stories, posturing, and generally creeping on social contacts near and far who in any other age of society would be limited to moments of time in my life rather than a breathing and complex organ of my social network that requires gardening ‘friends’ en masse.

There are clear benefits of reducing time and distance and ease of communication and contact. But there is a loss of quality in this process. And frighteningly, we have freely given tens of thousands of data points to folks with the means to weaponize this to advance their, or their clients, interests.

Emerson’s essay on friendship strikes me as very important for recovering our humanness within these constraints:

“. . .But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation . . . Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present . . . Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.”

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Hello Harinda!

I worked at UN Women for a time, I would love to talk with you about your startup, and your general ideas regarding how working at/for the UN has influened your thoughts on technology and society.

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Hello friends - I am Keith, a technologist who has worked in the K-12 and higher education fields for over 20 yeas. As a champion of tech in schools, I believed in the power of technology to make teaching more effective. My confidence began to weaken when the movement to put computers into the hands of younger and younger children began in the 1990s. I remember many conversations with teachers and librarians concerned with the lack of evidence that technology improved student learning. My time in higher education included witnessing an increasing reliance on digital social marketing for recruiting and “messaging” within the university community. Reading “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr was a game-changer for me and while still working the field, I have become increasingly skeptical of the idea that technology is only a tool. I have come to think of it more as a Genie on the loose, with the few controls in the hands of a few corporations with less-than altruistic motives. I’m very glad for this initiative and look forward to learning and contributing more.

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Hi all,

I’m an occupational therapist working in a first nations community in Canada. I have no tech background, but have recently become very interested in the possibility for a kind of decentralization revolution, where our digital identities, our social media, our web applications, and even perhaps our online banking and finance, can be taken out of the hands of centralized powers and be given back to us as sovereign individuals.

Recently I’ve been particularly interested in a technology called Holochain, which is an alternative to blockchain that is designed to be “agent-centric” rather than “data-centric.” The main reason why I joined the humanetech community discussion was because it seemed likely to be that I might find others who would be interested in this technology, and/or be able to criticize it in a thoughtful way that could be helpful for me in continuing my journey of discovering how to contribute to improving the digital world. I’ll likely start a separate thread just to talk about Holochain, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested. Glad to be here!

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Hi, I’m Matti Schneider.

Where I come from

From founding a social impact startup on sustainable mobility to coaching a dozen at the French Prime minister task force for open data and state modernisation, I have always worked on building digital tools to drive action and social change.
For the last three years, I have run the public incubator beta.gouv.fr that initiated over 30 startups, delivering public digital services used as digital transformation vehicles.
Before that, I wrote an MS thesis in cognitive anthropology describing how agile teams share representations of information. I know how to study human-human and human-machine interactions.
I organise sponsorless community events and work for diversity through AgileFrance to decorrelate money from technical expertise.
I recently moved to Aotearoa New Zealand and work with Enspiral, a network / community / cooperative of cooperative ventures.
I published a whitepaper on how to build digital commons so communities stay in control of their digital tools (in French): communs.mattischneider.fr.

What I already did

  • I built and coached public digital services by using all methods and practices of the private sector startups, but focused on efficient interactions rather than claiming attention. I wrote about how to use pirate metrics and conversion tunnels for the benefit of your users, which illustrates how we can use standard attention retention practices and just reverse their optimisation function (minimise rather than maximise).
  • I explored solutions to preserve my own attention, and had independently discovered 5 out of 7 practices listed on the Take control page, and recommended them to others around me.

What I can bring

  • I can contribute to the movement by promoting it in NZ and EU, writing for the French-speaking community, and mobilising both public actors and community on specific actions in France.
  • I can advise on how to engage policy- and decision-makers.
  • I can do public speaking on the topic.
  • I can explore how to teach the topic in developer bootcamps.
  • I could join research on the topic.
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Hi i’m Drew. To pay the bills, I have done test automation for 20+ years on many types of applications. So I have seen the morphing and twisting of some areas of tech into an insidious sales tool. For some time, I have been concerned by the manipulative and inequitable nature of social media. In 2014 I tried to start a campaign called ‘A penny a follower’ where people with 10k plus followers have remuneration given to a charity of their choice. (If we can get 10 celebrities to ask for this, it could still work!).
The power of online global communities is undeniable and will ultimately serve mankind well. But it seems that too much power is in too few hands. Maybe a group such as the ‘Center’ can bring some balance back.

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Hi there,

Ehsan is here. I am a technologist and data scientist with a background in Machine Learning. I have worked with video games in the past and currently working with Amazon.

I have witnessed how video game companies use the most powerful Artificial Intelligence tools and AB test fiercely to sell more and make the products more sticky.

On one side, there is a belief that if the customer pays more, they are happier. Mathematically speaking Z = Revenue (or lifetime revenue - LTV). There is no limit, do whatever you can to increase revenue.

On the other side, neuroscience says the human brain can be trained such that it takes action against its own well being. In fact, that is how we develop depression and few other mental diseases.

Should we stop making our products more sticky and addictive? You might say, No, but we should consider the customer’s well being. Now the question is, how do we define the customer’s well being? Is it moral or possible to define such metrics?

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Hello!

I’m Yvette, the CTO of Meetup. I work everyday to try to figure out ways to use the smallest amount of software to get people to meetup in person and build real human connection in their local communities. The world needs human connection now more than ever. I have a 4 year old daughter and I’m going to do whatever I can to help create a world where she and her generation aren’t targeted in unethical and unregulated ways software companies.

Also, if the Center for Human Technology people would like to start a network of Meetup groups to help people meetup in person, instead of only virtually via this forum and a Facebook group…please do reach out!

Yvette

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Hi there, I’m Laure. I work as a Senior User Experience Researcher for Joya Communications. We make an app called Marco Polo. I’ve been interested in the intersection of humans, ethics, and technology for a while. In the past, I was the organizer for Copynight NYC and on the steering committee for Innovate/Activate, a conference about legal and human issues in tech, among other things. I currently organize a neuroscience Meetup in Portland as well as ProductTank PDX. I’ve recently been working on a Slack community with similar aims as Human Tech, at SUXS.es. In the past, I was a documentary person and was interested in the story side of evolving technology (@accelerations on Twitter). I’m a Canadian who’s spent many years now in the states.

I’m very excited to be a part of this community. As there work I do directly impacts people’s lives in this area, I’m hoping to learn and help ensure there are options to the advertising, behavioural data, and attention-sucking approaches to technology that are affecting us today.

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I’m a cultural anthropologist and educator and am so glad to have found the Humane Tech movement. Throughout my career, I’ve applied my anthropological lens to my students’ lived experiences, and I am worried about their wellbeing, as well as the health of our society at large.

I recently created and taught an anthropology course at Summit Public Schools -> It’s a Silicon Valley darling having partnered with Facebook for tech assistance. SPS has created an online platform system of education whereby students do ALL of their schoolwork through their computers. All of their resources, activities, and assessments are ultimately consumed through Chromebook screens. This method of education was extremely unsettling to me. My students not only interacted with screens during their classes but also during breaks and when they returned home. Screen addiction - diagnosable addiction - is now a common problem among our students. SPS’ goal is to incorporate its online platform into the majority of U.S. secondary schools in the very near future. It seemed to me that their mission of giving students access to high-quality, “personalized” learning has been cannibalized by SPS’ utter faith in the inherent goodness of ed. tech interventions in our schools. But MANY of us teachers (myself included) recognize how deference to tech is negatively affecting our students as learners and as human beings.

Having previously done my graduate studies with a focus on Korean society, I’m currently transitioning my career out of the classroom and back into research. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our modern lives, and moral concepts of time and productivity, are producing friction (Anna Tsing’s use of the term) with our corporeal, primate selves. How can we parse how we as organic beings within organic environments have created and used these technologies within the scope of our species’ social capacities? In other words, what are we capable of doing to ourselves, and what are the acute and chronic consequences as a species? Perhaps the ultimate question is: Why are we doing this to ourselves?

My gut has been pushing my focus toward a career where I can research assemblages of culture-specific ethics and internet-centric lived experiences. My bank account suggests I should apply my skillset to user experience research for the time being (TBD).

I’m in flux - and very glad to join this community, to find a home where I can learn from you all.

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Hi !

I quit Facebook on 26th March 2013 and I badly want to do something about this.

I can devote extensive amounts of time (upto 40 hours a week) to this project, for next 10 odd years or so, pro bono.

I had an eclectic professional life, part-time consulting for a startup, pays my rent currently.

Nemo Out,

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Bonjour All,

My name is Michael, and I created www.GetMotivatedBuddies.com as a direct response to the destructive nature of social media on our attention.

I’ve been passionate about the Time Well Spent Movement since I heard about it on Sam Harris’ podcast, because it’s existence validated and clarified what I had been articulating for many years.

Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants likewise did the same, putting our current attention economy into context.

As an actor and writer I had difficulty understanding why I had no difficulty hitting my marks in grad school (an acting conservatory) or in plays or films, yet when working alone on projects deeply important to me, I would yield to resistance, and distraction would take over my life.

As an adult I was diagnosed with ADHD, which helped me make sense of so many of my faults and strengths, but I still couldn’t reconcile how I could maintain hyperfocused attention so well in certain aspects of my life but not others that felt just as important.

It then struck me that in conservatory or on a collaborative project, my colleagues kept me accountable. If you slacked off, weren’t fully present bringing everything you had to a rehearsal, class, or performance, your classmates looked bad, fellow actors looked bad, the production looked bad; you let everyone down.

I realized in each of these circumstances, where I felt nothing would get in the way of accomplishing what was necessary, I was a member of a group, a group that assumed an identity and forced a much higher level of accountability than when on my own. (In fact, in grad school the names of each class were Group numbers: "Group 30, Group 31, etc.) Within this group identity it was obvious that my individual actions affected the entire group. So I, and most others, were hyper-mindful of our behavior, because we wanted to succeed.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a longstanding interest in neuroscience, and the relationship of the brain to behavior, and the majority of my life has been a study of behavior and motivation in many of their forms.

GetMotivatedBuddies is a community dedicated to reclaiming our time and attention for the behaviors we want to enact. As of now, you are matched with an accountability partner based on your preferences. But we are currently building out the system that integrates positive reinforcement, community, and gamification to help people measure their accountability in a friendly, competitive and group minded way. We are creating a measure of integrity, of trust.

Unlike Facebook, where your friends are really “fracquaintances”, and you’re manipulated to stay on the site as long as possible, distracting you from your life goals, we are building a community where you are rewarded for following through on your plans offline, and held accountable to those plans by a buddy working towards the same goals. If you let yourself down, you let them down.

We’re developing different kinds of relationships and dynamics of interacting, but the response from users has been dramatic. People are desperate for these kinds of meaningful relationships. Even though we’re more connected than ever many many people feel acutely alone, and are desperate for meaning.

This movement to reclaim our attention is the first step towards regaining a sense of meaning that so many of us have lost. Attention is the is the tool of consciousness. And when our attention is bought and sold, we lose the feeling of being conscious, of being alive. It’s time to start to live a little.

So on that note, Hello, I’m Michael!

p.s. We’re looking for people to join us, and could use help in various areas!

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