What if we had fixed social media?

Your Undivided Attention

Center for Humane Technology

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4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin imagine what a world with humane technology might look like—one where we recognized the harms of social media early and worked to fix them. This alternative history serves to show that there are narrow pathways to a better future, if we have the imagination and the courage to make them a reality.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone. Welcome to Your Undivided Attention. I'm Tristan Harris. And I'm Aza Raskin.
0:10.1	So, you know, I'd say that when Aza and I are running around the world and talking to everybody,
0:14.8	there's really just one question that's the most popular question that we get asked,
0:19.2	which is, so what do we do about all this? How do we get
0:22.5	out of this trap? And what would it look like if we got this right? And they're really mostly
0:27.9	talking about social media. So we did this Ask Us Anything episode where you sent us all your
0:32.7	questions. And this was the most popular question we got asked. Here's Max Berry.
0:38.2	Hey, Tristan, it's Max Barry from Canada.
0:40.6	It really seems like we're all stuck in these feeds.
0:43.2	And the companies are stuck too because they need the money from the ads.
0:46.9	It's like we're all trapped by the same algorithm.
0:49.6	Is there actually a way out of this whole thing?
0:52.1	So we're going to do a little thought exercise.
0:54.7	Just follow along here.
0:56.6	Imagine that we actually took action.
1:00.1	And we're not saying that we might or we should.
1:02.3	We're saying imagine in past tense that we did.
1:05.1	What would it look like to comprehensively respond with the cultural changes,
1:12.8	design and product design changes,
1:19.2	legal changes, incentive changes, the litigation and lawsuits that led to those incentive changes so that we could comprehensively reverse this problem. What would that look like?
1:24.5	My favorite thing about this is that it really can feel so bleak and so inevitable we live
1:31.3	in this world, and that's just because we can't articulate an alternative.
	...

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