♦   8   ♦

A Vision for a More Humane Tech

Imagine that your smartphone had a pause button that would stop all buzzing and notifications for multiples of fifteen minutes and clear your home screen to leave nothing on it except for a clock—and that you could block all incoming messages by pushing a single button on the phone. You might say that your phone already does that with its Do Not Disturb (DND) mode, but DND requires quite a bit of management in its present state, and when the DND period ends, you get a rush of notifications, followed by newly arriving notifications. What if you could program the phone to send you notifications only on the hour, in regular batches?

In fact, someone has already invented a phone like that. It’s named “Siempo,” and it was designed by a team from the ground up to encourage more conscious, thoughtful use of applications and technology, and to return to users control over their lives. Siempo calls the device the “phone for humans.”¹ Siempo was launched on Kickstarter in March 2017, and it raised only a fraction of its goal of $500,000. Sadly, the market did not fully validate what Siempo was offering.

What Siempo was trying to build is something long argued for by Tristan Harris. Harris says that a standard feature of all technology should be our ability to choose to focus and regain our choice and control over it. That might seem far-fetched, but is it?

Actually, the number of tech companies adopting Harris’s philosophy—or at least ending up conforming to his ideals—is growing. These companies are giving us human choices in normal product categories, or they are giving us products that help us restore the humanity to our technology tools. They range from giants such as Apple to one-person start-ups such as Moment. And they range from travel applications to project-management applications to dating applications. Siempo struggled to raise sufficient funding, but many of these freedom-friendly companies are doing very well, with at least one approaching unicorn status (a valuation of $1 billion). These applications replace the focus of consuming and extracting money with one of giving us back our time, giving us intelligent choices that are better aligned with our own interests, and contributing to our well-being.

Apps That Make Tech Better

Some of life’s most frustrating moments happen when we’re traveling. Flight delays, long layovers, expensive routes, and other miseries compound to make modern travel unpleasant much of the time. Today’s travel search engines too are unpleasant. Yes, they pull in loads of information. But the information is poorly presented or confusing, and it’s difficult to navigate.

This is why Hipmunk, a popular travel search engine and hotel-booking portal, created an “agony” algorithm. The algorithm calculates an agony ranking for flights based on a number of factors such as flight duration, number of stops, and likelihood of delays and weighs them against price. Travel shoppers on Hipmunk can sort by any other combination of parameters, but many default to results ranked by “agony” by clicking on the agony tab. This is a choice that takes into account our comfort: the human choice.

Alex has long been a lover of Hipmunk and its agony tab, so he was encouraged when he saw that Tristan Harris had given it his thumbs-up. In 2016, Hipmunk was purchased by expense-management company Concur for between $50 and $100 million. Although that wasn’t a huge success for investors, Hipmunk demonstrated that human-centric design can succeed in making an online shopping process that we expect to be painfully complex bearable and even fun.

In fact, we are encouraged by the trend of elegant simplicity that we see in a lot of product and service design today. Lyft and Uber are a case in point. Before their advent, a taxicab required a phone call, or a wait on the street for a random cab that we didn’t know would come (and that might not come). Uber and Lyft made the entire process transparent: we know when the car is coming, where it’s coming from, who the driver is, the license-plate number, and the color, make, and model of the car. We can even text or call the driver. Time previously wasted in hassling with the old system is time we have regained—with the push of a button. Another case in point is the Nest Thermostat, built by a former Apple designer, Tony Fadell: it has made saving energy and managing the temperature of your house simple. And it’s easy on the eyes.

To regain control over their browsing experiences, many people we know are using AdBlock or similar services that strip advertising from web pages and minimize invasive, interruptive ads. By some estimates, the proportions of people using ad-blocking services is approaching 40 percent, and with good reason. Another way to handle this is to put a web page into “reader mode,” something you can do either in the browser with a feature flag, or in Google Chrome by installing the extension Just Read. Apple’s Safari browser has a built-in reader mode. We understand that this puts a lot of pressure on publishers, but they can surely work with it. And we could voluntarily white-list sites and view ads on domains whose content we value and whose publishers we would like to support. By using an ad blocker, we restore the balance of power and put the human user in control.

We should note that the current prevalent advertising-driven economy of the Internet may be at cross-purposes with healthy technology usage. The sole currency of this economy is attention, as measured in impressions, views, clicks, and other metrics of uncontrolled consumption. Unless Facebook, Google, and others can figure out a way to increase their revenues through lower engagement, it seems unlikely that they will themselves create an alternative. Granted, Google has regularly reduced the number of ads showing on a page in order to reduce ad overload, but the goal of this reduction remains unchanged: to obtain more (and more-valuable) clicks, ultimately in support of charging more for the ads.

Publishers have already learned the hard way that the attention economy, in particular when it is controlled by the giant platforms, has no way to support quality of interaction or Tristan Harris’s concept of time well spent. That said, a number of quality-centric publishers, such as the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, have built subscription businesses that are overtaking their advertising businesses. The paying users also support rising ad costs through engaging and showing clear desire to be reading that content rather than a drive-by dump of something from a social-media link.

Very encouragingly, a rising chorus has called on Apple to engineer an iPhone that promotes healthier interactions with technology, particularly for children. That may be a challenge, but Apple has made a start. It added “Night Shift” mode to iOS and to its most recent Mac OS in late 2017. Night Shift changes the colors emitted on the screen to reduce the amount of potentially sleep-disturbing blue light that it exposes users to.

Better Work through Tech

The productivity slowdown in the office has not gone unnoticed. Many companies have started using what some call “agile development” to focus technical work (and increasingly marketing work) by reducing the focus of each worker to a single task and unifying teams around a limited set of tools and processes. Many productivity gurus agree that greater focus can be achieved by setting up better processes and creating limits. The most famous of these is David Allen, who developed the GTD (Getting Things Done) method and built it into a mini business empire of seminars, branded products, and curricula. We can’t necessarily recommend any of these methods or strategies. Many do have merits, although in our experience, when imposed on teams, they can feel top-heavy and paternalistic.

For individual use, there are dozens of productivity applications designed to help us refocus and get more done by wasting less time on digital frittering. Calendly, Meetingbird, and a number of other applications sync with an online calendar and let you shift the burden of scheduling meetings to the person who is asking for one by letting him or her pick a free time from your calendar without having access to its content. Inbox When Ready lets you set up detailed e-mail rules on when you can access e-mails and how you want the inbox to look, and thus helps you control your urge to use e-mail. SaneBox automatically filters out less-useful mail (promotions, updates, etc.) and raises the most important e-mails to the top of the queue. There are apps and browser extensions to block or ration social-media usage and to track exactly how you spend your time on your computer (breaking down your actions by application to the nearest minute on a daily basis). And applications such as Moment can show which applications you are using on your phone and even poll you on how much you like using them.

These productivity tools fall into three classes: those that seek to improve processes, those that seek to limit distractions, and those that seek to illuminate our habits. All three can be useful, but only if they fit nicely into your working day. Calendaring applications, for example, do not handle situations well when someone is juggling personal and work calendars and mirroring schedules in order to keep a spouse informed. Ad blocking works well until enough publishers start blocking content; then managing the ad blocker becomes a chore in itself. Activity-tracking software works to the extent that it serves to enable conscious changes in behavior, not merely as a vanity metric. All three of these concepts, however, play a critical role in restoring freedom of choice by making our work activities conscious choices, a key contributor to work satisfaction. On the book’s website, HackedHappiness.com, we include a page that lists many of these tools.

It is a shame, though, to have to cobble these tools together for want of human-centric product design that would incorporate their capabilities and characteristics. Imagine if Apple and Samsung offered such features as prominent features of their phones. Apple does have some useful features on the iPhone, such as Do Not Disturb and Night Shift, but there is no way to globally set notification preferences for all applications. If Tim Cook told his developers to build DND on steroids for smartphones and laptops, then our freedom of choice and our control over how we use our phones would at least improve.

Notifications and other types of application noise are not the only way in which technology products bludgeon us into confused submission. The advertisements that now dominate many search-engine results—in particular on mobile devices—have rendered information retrieval essentially an act of blind faith answered with results that are purchased by those with the wallet to buy the ads at the top of the page.

What if, as an alternative approach to revenue raising, Google offered its own AdBlock button that let us see search results stripped of all advertising? Even those results would be imperfect: very large sites with large budgets have a lot more time and energy to invest in developing so-called inbound links from other sites—the primary measure of site relevance that Google’s search engine algorithms trade in. But at least results would be less readily up for sale. Google might even make up for the initial loss of ad revenue through search results by improving user engagement with the resulting pages. And users who stand to benefit from the ads, as Google claims many do, could continue to search in the normal manner.

Alternatively, as we asked earlier, what if Google offered a paid ad-free version? How much would people pay? Would they pay? How many people would adopt it? We don’t know, but it would be a worthwhile experiment. The point is that it’s feasible to give users a clean and easy choice and let them decide.

Google did announce such a product when it was faced with competition from Netflix for its video platform, YouTube. The product is a monthly YouTube subscription that removes advertisements from all videos, on every device you and your family watch. It also allows the downloading of videos to phone and tablet and makes them available for up to thirty days to watch without a connection. For $10 a month at the time of this writing, you can hire freedom from the mindless ads that YouTube serves up and can take the videos with you wherever you travel—even if there is no Internet connection. Vivek has been using it and does not miss the incessant ads and interruptions of content.

And some of us would gladly pay Google another $10 a month—or more—to get the same quality of search results as before it began selling ads to the highest bidder. We yearn to see web content unobscured by digital billboards.

Tristan Harris suggests an interesting scenario for Google Maps. What if an application on our device knew or inferred that we want to stay in better shape? Then it might highlight walking options in Google Map directions. And if the application knew that we like podcasts, it might even suggest a podcast from our playlist that perfectly fits the walk’s projected duration. In such instances, the application would be working with our own stated preferences to give us choices that reflect our needs and wants and help us live better.

What might Facebook be like if it offered multiple modes? One of these modes would show posts only from your close friends and not consider Facebook’s content-selection algorithms. (Of course, you can do this manually, spending hours sifting through friends and indicating which ones you want to follow and which ones you want notification preferences from.) Another mode could select just “trending” news from across Facebook or across your network. An alternative to such modes could be an ad-free paid version of Facebook. Perhaps the lack of a paid version is just another example of the big tech businesses’ shortsightedness: Twitter founder Biz Stone advocated for this model in a Medium post four years ago. The paid version could offer additional benefits, such as special commercial offers from stores you chose to receive them from.

Facebook could become the broker for your digital life by making the users the boss and selling access on an opt-in rather than an opt-out basis. This might be less lucrative in the short term, but in the long term, true opt-in businesses based on subscriptions or voluntary participation tend to perform exceptionally well when the product is worth paying for. LinkedIn, for instance, has been highly successful in its lucrative subscription model for professional users, who use it to send so-called InMails and to enhance their ability to search the network.

Beyond Tech Platforms: A Holistic Approach

Beyond Big Technology and the massive platforms that control so much of our online lives lurks another layer that is perhaps more difficult to adapt to a vision of coexistence with a more humane technology. One form of technology noise is the barrage of meeting requests and e-mails we face at work, many of which we accept because we fear the consequences of rejecting them.

Another form of technology noise is the omnipresence of screens, not just in our homes but also in bars, restaurants, and elevators, even at gas-station pumps, where a television advertising network now competes for our attention. In the entertainment media, product placements are another form of invasion, a subtle way to influence our opinions and preferences that, in an age of video games and digital video transmissions, is turning entertainment into yet another advertising venue.

Even within our screen time, our attention is becoming increasingly splintered. In the broadcast of a baseball game, there are two and sometimes as many as four split screens showing data analysis, interviews, or other video footage, as well, of course, as advertisements for other programs that we must watch after we finish with this one!

What this comes down to are simple questions: What is our attention worth? How can we force companies to put a value on it as they design their products and their user experiences? Is that even a viable option?

As discussed earlier in this chapter, there are dozens of applications designed to help us avoid overuse and regain some control over our digital lives. Nearly all are only palliatives of one kind or another; they paper over the core problem. With every system upgrade, we generally have to go back and redesign and reinstate our chosen digital lifestyles. That becomes exhausting, so it is no wonder that many of us choose to give up and allow technology to dictate what we see and when we see it or engage with it. There is no easy way to control it. Even if we do like all the features, we would benefit by being able to more easily control them and turn them on or off. Apple solved a huge user-experience problem by introducing the one-button mouse; other ingenious product and application designers can also surely design the user experience to be more humane.

Until they do, we humans are left to remodel our own user experience as best we can, wielding the sledgehammers of brute-force deletions, hard-and-fast rules, and turning devices off for long stretches of the day and night. It’s risible to have to take this upon ourselves as technology users, because one would hope that the brilliance of the technology sector would extend to designing a healthy way for tech to coexist with humans, maintaining and even increasing our freedoms, our quality of life, and our control without killing their profits. That said, the next section offers some suggestions toward that end.

How Technology Makers Can and Should Respond: Restraint, Respect, and Choice

How can we redesign technology to better respect choice, reduce technostress, and foster creative and social fulfillment? The ideal solution would be easy to implement and to customize, and easy to apply to multiple devices and platforms. It would have a centralized user account that allowed you to customize all your interactions and notifications, to which all applications would refer for guidance and permission. It would be, in other words, a true user agent, an intermediary that brokered our attention and implemented our rules in eliciting it. The concept of such a user agent has been discussed repeatedly in industry, but it has never been instituted. Given our growing collective discontent, our epidemic loneliness, and our declining productivity, the time may have come when such a solution is no longer simply ideal but essential.

Ultimately, such an agent will have to be habit-forming technology. It will have to take all the techniques that Silicon Valley’s “user-experience designers,” say at Facebook and Netflix, have used in forming destructive habits and invert them. We need good magic. We need technology to enhance chronic focus rather than bombard us with chronic distraction; to encourage beneficial habits rather than motivate us to pursue pathological addictions; to promote productivity, connectedness, creativity, spontaneity, and engagement rather than cheap facsimiles of those qualities. The well-lived life, which has never been further from our reach, is one that good technology design could and should make more straightforwardly and universally attainable than ever before.

What Moment, Siempo, Unglue, Calendly, SaneBox, and similar applications are aiming to deliver is that kind of beneficial magic and focus enhancement. They seek to reduce the frictions that we as users must endure in attaining focus. Most of the mechanisms that inhibit or destroy our focus create stress, unhappiness, regret, or sadness once they become too interruptive. (As described earlier, Mark Suster, for example, wrote that he had deleted Twitter from his phone because the constant news stream made him unhappy all too often.)

In sympathy with Tristan Harris’s user-rights manifesto, we have a vision of a technology world that works for humans rather than against them and that has each and every company consider the long-term health and benefit of its users to be an imperative design consideration. Even if it meant less profit in the short term, they would restrain themselves from inducing patterns of destructive overconsumption. We propose that this would work as follows.

First, technology makers would define patterns that suggest problem use—preferably without identifying problem users as individuals. Such patterns would include spending an inordinate amount of time with the product, spending too much money, or regularly exhibiting unhealthy behaviors such as binge-watching. Triggered by such patterns in its use, the technology product would treat the user differently, offering help in altering these patterns. This may seem like a patronizing approach, but we would wager that, given the option, many people would welcome the help.

In a work context, we might see Slack warning heavy users not only that they must keep desktop notifications enabled but also that they are in the upper percentage of GIF senders or message senders. E-mail providers might offer batch receiving of messages to its users who otherwise tend to respond the most quickly (which could indicate compulsion to check for and respond to messages). Or every e-mail client could offer batch receiving as its default mode, or simply ask us every day how many times we want to check e-mail that day (in a Siri-like voice, of course).

For consumers of video, product designers for Netflix and YouTube, for example, would make auto-play an opt-in function. In fact, opt in would become the default rather than requiring opt out as the standard product design. And when product designers did choose to deploy opt out, they would allow people to opt out very easily whenever the feature was showing. For example, every video auto-play would also display a Stop Auto-Play button as a preference. That might slow consumption, but then again it might help all of us feel more in control, be more productive, and be more loyal customers.

But how can initiatives such as these be given teeth and profit motive? We are hopeful that, in some cases, the profit motive will take care of itself. Both Netflix and LinkedIn have cracked that nut, as have Spotify and numerous other subscription-based technology businesses. In such a case, inducing massive consumption beyond a certain point becomes counterproductive of customer satisfaction; we suspect that these businesses know exactly where that threshold lies.

And, yes, those platforms are now just as guilty of the same attention-grabbing offenses as the free platforms. But they have the benefit of paid users and a willingness to put a value on attention, participation, and services rendered. The challenge is to price attention, participation, and customer satisfaction and loyalty in the attention economy.

So how might this work? Imagine that Facebook charges looked like our regular mobile-phone bills with a set of à la carte services. We could opt in or out of those services—for example, no ads in our feed, and a Focus button on our home page that blocks all notifications—and pay for them as features.

We realize that charging users is exceptionally difficult, and is probably not going to happen with Facebook or Google; it will probably be the next entrant that cracks this model. But we can point to one example in corporate America where businesses are showing exceptional ability to put a price on such fuzzy costs: Benefit Corporations (B Corps), whose ranks are growing quickly. Some extremely profitable and successful brands, such as Patagonia and Athleta, have become B Corps. Technology companies would find it at least as simple to enact a similar ethos of ensuring that the product and service on offer does no harm and is in the best interests of society.

The B Corp validation and rating process could easily incorporate a set of values and measurements specifically designed for technology companies. For example, a tech company that could be rated as a B Corp would allow users to unsubscribe from the service in no more than three clicks and without having to send an e-mail or make a phone call. The government of China mandates that game companies put in place user warnings beyond a certain number of hours; B Corp tech companies would have to warn users that their actions were perhaps unhealthy after they averaged more than, say, two hours of use per day over a week.

How Employers Can and Should Respond: Reduce Noise, Tools, and the Rule of Three

In the workplace, the existence of a hierarchy simplifies the rationalization of distractions. Rather than think only of how a new tool or application is going to provide yet another feature and capability, in deciding which tools to use, workers and managers must think about the cumulative effects of their decisions. This may fly in the face of the BYOA (Bring Your Own App) culture, but it acknowledges the collective price of switching costs.

We advocate what we call “the Rule of Three”: teams should try to narrow down their primary tools and applications, beyond e-mail, calendar, and word processing, to three choices. This, we believe, will cover the work requirements for 90 percent of teams in the workplace today. A team’s need for more than three tools is commonly a sign of distress and trouble (though in certain cases it simply indicates that the tools for the team’s job are not integrated). Society is levying high switching costs on that team.

The Silent Start and Other Ways to Rethink Work

Slowing down interruptions and encouraging more deep work is exceptionally difficult when a multitask ethos is ingrained. To combat multitasking during meetings and try to keep meetings meaningful, Amazon mandates that attendees spend the first part of a meeting reading a printed agenda and additional information that sets the table for the meeting. CEO Jeff Bezos calls it “the silent start.”² This is very good meeting hygiene and, according to Bezos, a wonderful way to spark innovation and interesting ideas.

It is really up to organizational leaders, such as Bezos, to give workers and their organizations the safe space in which to be creative and productive and fulfill their potential. We advocate that every company create a cohesive productivity policy. Some companies are already performing in-depth reviews on employee productivity and practices, meeting structures, meeting attendance, how quickly e-mails are answered, how documents are shared—all the minutiae that make up the bulk of our working day and can easily create employment hell.

The policy—or we can call it a performance enhancement plan (PEP) if you need an HR-friendly buzzword—could signify both management’s willingness to allow employees to design their work experiences and the willingness of employees to take ownership for the creation of a healthy environment that promotes productivity, balance, flow, and, as a consequence, work satisfaction.

For example, what if your company had a policy to actively discourage employees from checking and responding to e-mails every five minutes, and instead set up the e-mail servers to batch-receive e-mail messages on the hour or the half-hour? (This is entirely possible and almost trivial to implement.) What if companies had a warning system baked into calendars to alert employees that they are allocating more than 20 percent of their time to meetings, and highlighting transmission and reception of messages on weekends or e-mail threads that extend beyond five round trips? What if the system alerted users who overuse “reply all” in environments that don’t generally need it?

We could, in principle, build a work-satisfaction index—a single number that rates an employee’s state of work fulfillment and a manager’s adherence to these kinds of policies. Using the same tools that increasingly track productivity and monitor what employees do, we could easily make visible the unhealthy practices that lead to so much work frustration and discontentment.

Some companies have ad hoc versions of systems that work by giving employees maximum freedom. Netflix, for example, tells employees to take as much vacation as they want to and as much family leave as they want to, and even to show up at the office when they want to; its only requirement is for employees to be top performers. Best Buy for a while had a “meetings entirely optional policy” as part of its Results Oriented Work Program. That policy was discontinued in 2013, but many employees and managers felt that it worked extremely well by allowing people to design their work engagements and minimize imposition of time-wasting distractions. The core message of all this should be “Design the work environment you need, and we will back you up and let you deliver. Just be sure to deliver.”

Building such a culture of freedom takes a particularly strong stomach, for CEOs, managers, and employees. It necessitates that all of us take personal responsibility to banish FOMO, to avoid interruptions, and to silence our inner technology demons. So far, we collectively have remained unsure whether such drastic approaches could work over the long haul, because the broader pressures to be always “on” amid job uncertainty are so great.

As employees, we should always ask what the realistic expectations are for our roles and the culture of the company. If that culture goes against our notion of designed freedom of choice and flow, then we should vote with our feet and find work somewhere else. As leaders, executives must begin paying more than lip service to notions of holistic approaches to employee and organizational health.

For the most part, in a white-collar environment, productivity, engagement, and workplace satisfaction are closely related. Productivity is a measure of the output achieved per hour of input. Note that this is a ratio of one to the other, not an absolute. Numerous studies have shown that beyond a certain point, working excessive hours yields rapidly diminishing returns. True, that balance may shift, for instance when we are under looming project deadlines. But, as when we’ve crammed for exams at university, we need a break afterward: time to recharge our energy and our well-being. This too must be baked into the work environment.

How Governments Should Respond: Regulate Where Necessary

In some cases, resolution of the problems resulting from technology design and build may require government intervention. Though we would hope that companies would recognize when what they are doing is clearly not in the public interest, the profit motive may be too deeply ingrained, as has been borne out in other industries that foster deep addictions, such as the tobacco and alcohol industries, the gambling industry, and the processed-food (junk food) industry.

Particularly in order to protect children, we think that regulation or government intervention will be necessary. Some governments have taken that step. South Korea considers Internet addiction one of its most serious public-health issues. The average South Korean high-school student spends twenty-three hours a week playing online games. As of June 2007, South Korea had trained more than one thousand counselors to treat Internet and gaming addiction. The government has also signed up nearly two hundred hospitals and treatment centers in the campaign. In China, current laws strongly discourage more than three hours of daily game use by children under the age of eighteen. Chinese Internet game operators are mandated to install anti-addiction systems whereby the first three hours of play proceed normally, but the games themselves award points far more slowly for the next two hours, after which users receive in-game warnings like this: “You have entered unhealthy game time; please go off line immediately to rest. If you do not, your health will be damaged, and your points will be cut to zero.”³

These ways of approaching the problem do seem extraordinarily heavy-handed. An example of perhaps a better regulatory approach would be to ban companies from the advertising of games marketed for children under the age of eighteen, just as tobacco and alcohol companies are banned from advertising in publications or programs for children. In general, however, regulating our interactions with technology is a particularly tricky task because degrees of excess depend on individual vulnerabilities.

One case that seems to clearly call for regulation is that of texting while driving. A technology solution should be mandated to stop drivers from texting while their vehicles are in motion. Maybe this could be a granular geofencing of the driver’s seat. It also could entail much stricter penalties for accidents caused by texting while driving. But a problem that causes not just loss of attention but loss of lives seems to demand a solution that doesn’t wait for an accident to happen. As discussed, Apple introduced an optional feature called “Do Not Disturb While Driving” as part of iOS 11. Whenever the phone is connected to a car using either Bluetooth or a cable, or if the car is moving, the phone can withhold notifications. This raises the question: why shouldn’t it be mandatory—and in all mobile phones? No matter that leading technologists, business leaders, and politicians are calling for regulation, it is not in the cards. As a society we still seem to be strugglng to come to grips with the reality that we have far less control over our impulses than we want to believe we have. And we are struggling to control our interactions with the most addictive set of technologies ever unleashed. Agency assumes choice, but when choice is dictated by the companies that profit from our addictions and our bad habits, then the road to true reform will be long, bumpy, and painful.

Until the makers find the incentive to limit the push of their technologies into our lives, the best we can do is engineer our lives and our environments to craft a healthier relationship with our tech. We will not always succeed. Changing habits now hard-wired from years of activities is, as any behavioral psychologist can tell you, exceedingly difficult. We have to make these changes, however: for our own sakes, for the sake of society, and for the sake of our children. We might well be the last generation that remembers what life was like before the smartphone so totally dominated our lives as to become truly an extension of our brains and our beings—and likely on terms we have little or no say in setting. If we can build the muscles to wrestle back control and take a clear-eyed view of technologies’ effects on our lives, our relationships, and our work, then the future will be much brighter and happier for us, our families, and our communities.