Since the 1950s with the rise of alcohol, cigarettes, and junk food, society has been exposed to a series of new consumer-facing products engineered to exploit our physiology and addict people in the name of record profits. History has proven that businesses like these will stop at nothing to not only keep the status quo intact but also aggressively expand. As an example of this, look no further than Big Tobacco introducing at one point in time glass particles into their cigarettes to have the nicotine really kick in.

Fast forward to today, technology companies have spent two decades engineering the next frontier: our psychology. Now, our relationships, identity, and volition are for the first time in human history being commercialized. Only a handful of tech companies monopolized the free and open web against its original promise of decentralization to become the trillion-dollar enterprises that they are today. These multinationals have become not just advertisement companies but what Shoshana Zuboff terms "surveillance capitalists." This new breed of capitalism made capturing human attention and reselling it at all costs the new economic imperative of the 21st Century. TikTok alone is commanding 1 billion hours of attention daily, which accumulates to 114.000 years every 24 hours.

A Digital Phantom World
More and more people live life inside a digital phantom world detached from the real one. In this new realm, 'these platforms hold a mirror to society,' Tristan Harris remarks, 'however, they are a funhouse mirror.' As such, all over the world, materially wealthy societies now find themselves suddenly amid widespread erosion of trusts, a cesspool of misinformation, contested negative partisanship, and debilitating meaninglessness, while individual citizens suffer from continuous partial attention and increased rates of suicidality, drug abuse, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

The canary in the coal mine are the most heavy users, teenagers, who are experiencing a global surge in social media fatigue and severe psychological distress. 40% of students report feeling 'too depressed to function.' Another 48% agree or strongly agree that 'they are addicted to social media.' In the same report, +61% report feeling “overwhelming anxiety’. 47% of teens wish there was an easier way to switch off social media. 36% deleted their social media app at least once annually to curb it. 32% of teenage girls in the UK report Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. There is a +78% increase in ‘serious psychological distress’ episodes by 20-year-olds. There is a +189% increase in 10-14-year-old girls being hospitalized for self-harm, as well a +58% increase in teen suicides ages 14-18. The majority of these figures are compared to the pre-social media era and are growing double-digits annually.

The single biggest expenditure of life in the 21 century
How we spend our lives is a reflection of how we spend our days. As today’s screenagers reach the end of theirs, many will likely look back and realize—with painful clarity—that envy of strangers and keeping tabs on who at any given moment everyone is mad about has sadly inadvertently become the defining activity of most people’s life in the 21st Century. Let us ignore for a moment the 9 hours most spent on screens  and instead only concern ourselves with social media of which the average screenagers clocks in four hours daily. As the age at which children get their first smartphone keeps dropping, doomscrolling life away will amount to a devastating total of approximately 11 years and 8 months—the single largest discretionary expenditure of their life. As William James remarked in 1890, ‘Our life experiences equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.' Why did we allow a technology to capture and resell an entire generation’s attention from cradle to grave, as if it weren’t the lifeblood of their very existence?

They will inevitably ask “What were all these junk connections for?” when it hits them that despite years of 'connecting', all along, they belonged to the generation with the highest self-reported levels of loneliness in recorded history. As a result, how many will conclude that the story of their lives have been insidiously co-opted and ultimately irreparably harmed by corporations and their addictive algorithms that were never on their side—but someone else's? If we continue down this path, we will have failed an entire generation by allowing them to be raised by this digital abyss. We will be guilty of standing by and doing nothing while we watch as pre-adolescents—who lack the fully developed prefrontal cortices essential for self-awareness and impulse control—inevitably become addicted to the technological narcotics of the 21st century. What was termed ‘the social dilemma’ in 2020 has escalated into a full-blown social catastrophe poised to wreck the lives of an entire generation.
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Humanity is a tiny candle surrounded by a vast darkness
There is a narrow path forward, but misunderstandings about the nature of the problem remain a significant obstacle. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan warned of a dangerous tendency he termed ‘The Rearview Mirror’ effect, where people interpret the new through the lens of the old. The tendency to view technological, cultural, and innovative shifts through familiar frameworks prevents us from fully grasping the new. Extending the metaphor of driving, this flawed thinking would lead one, for example, to refer to a car as merely a ‘horseless carriage.’ In other words, to grasp our conundrum adequately and act decisively, we must not be deceived by the unrecognizability of the unprecedented.

Within the realm of information technology, perceiving each new advancement as merely a linear continuation of its predecessor leads us astray.  It suggests that radio is just an extension of writing and the telegraph; television, an extension of radio; and social media, merely a continuation of television. This Rearview Mirror conclusion blinds us to the radical transformations occurring; it is fundamentally flawed and impedes our ability to do what we must. The reality of the erosion before us is that we are confronting an entirely different beast.

As Yuval Noah Harari points out, democracy is, at its core, a conversation. Today, we are in the midst of a post-truth epistemological crisis that renders large-scale conversation impossible, undermining people’s belief in meritocracy, and the positive-sum nature of human cooperation. Let there be no doubt: much hangs in the balance. If this vicious spiral of distrust continues unchecked and permeates the level of nation-states, we might lose the unprecedented era of world peace we’ve come to take so much for granted. Humanity is a tiny candle surrounded by a vast darkness. I am often reminded of Earth’s veins of beautiful light shining so brilliantly they are visible even from outer space. From this vantage point, it becomes evident that if we prolong inaction, our unique flicker of light may soon be swiftly snuffed out. This future cannot be allowed to unfold. Thus, Telos was born to help accelerate the advent of a humane technology future.
Sources on the Dilemma Page

The emerging field of responsible technology is to social media what clean tech is to the fossil fuel industry. Just as the environmental damage caused by burning hydrocarbons went unaddressed for years, the attention economy underlying social media has created significant negative externalities—both subjective and intersubjective—that we are only now beginning to understand. Polarization, fake news, information overload, addictive use, isolation, and influencer culture are just a few examples. However, as with climate change, these are symptoms of a larger root cause. Given the unprecedented reach of social media today, anyone paying attention will realize that those who work at these companies are no longer merely designing products; they are designing people and society as a whole. The faster we collectively move away from the attention economy, the better.

Donella Meadows’ framework for changing complex systems teaches us that systemic change requires a paradigm shift—a fundamental change supported by a new mindset, new goals, and new structures sustained through realigned and reinforced incentives. Following this framework, the most effective lever to pull here is organized change through a market-based solution. A compelling alternative that is founded on a different economic model, rapidly spearheading innovation to continuously improve itself, ultimately moving the industry forward by applying competitive market pressure on incumbents. However, introducing a new product to the market and competing as a small entrant against entrenched, deep-pocketed incumbents is a daunting challenge—further compounded by reliance on network effects. Moreover, consumers are unlikely to switch to an unproven “me-too” product that merely removes tracking and ads, enforces limits, or promises restrained self-regulation. That won't work. Instead, you need to go with the grain of humanity, not against it. Pull, don't push. To effectively transition away from the attention economy, the alternative must do more than eliminate surveillance capitalism, persuasive technology, and, ultimately, user regret. It needs to be better in every way—transforming time spent into time well spent—to become the new de facto choice for individual self-interest.
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To better understand how something better could be offered in the future, it’s crucial to identify what we are being offered today. James Williams argues compellingly that we have entrusted our lives to something akin to a corrupted GPS. We were promised a companion, but rather than helping us define our destination and navigate toward it, this particular technology has proven to be adversarial in nature—guiding billions of people toward an awful destination they never intended to reach. The key difference, of course, is that we inexplicably continue to rely on this adversarial technology, whereas, after the third wrong turn, we would have thrown a faulty GPS out of the car. More generally, the ultimate purpose of today's sphinx-like adversarial technology can best be classified through the lens of an entertainment, information, and personal communication technology in one. As such, entertainment can be fun, but life is short, and amusing ourselves to death is tragic. As for the latter two, as technologies to inform or bond, social media has proven itself worse than useless—for the individual, it has proven counterproductive. Viewed through this lens, the status quo presents abundant opportunities for breakthrough innovations that could transform countless lives.
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At Telos, we are not playing by the rules of the attention economy, nor are we competing in the race to the bottom by exploiting human weaknesses to addict users. We believe the future of this industry lies in technology that converts users into happy customers. Instead of propagating confusion and disinformation, it will provide trusted insight. Instead of fostering shallow junk connections, it will nurture lifelong companionships. Most importantly, Instead of capturing and holding our attention, it will, for the first time, support our intention.