A few years ago I read an article dedicated to a former Google employee who had left the company because he no longer shared the way digital platforms tried to take possession of users' time. The passage that struck me most concerned notifications: sounds, vibrations, screens that light up, windows that appear and small red numbers on icons would not be simple tools to inform us, but devices also designed to gain immediate access to our attention, exploiting the natural human sensitivity towards what suddenly appears new, urgent or potentially relevant.
The author proposed a very simple experiment: disable all non-essential notifications. Messages, news and updates would not disappear; they would remain waiting for us until the moment we decided to look for them. What would change would be a seemingly small, but essential thing: who decides when to interrupt our time. With notifications active, applications summon us. Without notifications, we choose when to enter.
The person that article talked about was Tristan Harris: former product manager and design ethicist at Google, promoter of the Time Well Spent movement and later co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. I am not a psychologist, a neuroscientist or a digital media specialist. I wanted to delve into this story because I believe that the control of attention represents one of the decisive issues of our time. To write this article I also used artificial intelligence as a tool for researching and organizing information, while trying to trace the main statements back to the original articles on Harris, the publications of the Center for Humane Technology and scientific studies on notifications and digital interruptions.
It is useful to distinguish three levels right away. The first concerns what Harris actually claimed and did. The second concerns what scientific research has observed about the effects of notifications and interruptions. The third contains some broader considerations on the social and political meaning of the battle for our time. The latter should not be confused with experimental results: they are forward-looking interpretations.
Before TikTok: the birth of a critique of the attention economy
To fully understand Harris's position, it must be placed in its time. When he begins to raise the issue, TikTok was not yet the global phenomenon we know today. Instagram already existed since 2010, but it was not yet dominated by Stories, Reels and short videos. Stories arrived in 2016, TikTok asserted itself on an international scale especially after the merger with Musical.ly in 2018, while Instagram Reels was launched in 2020. Harris's critique is born before the current explosion of short videos: it takes shape in the early 2010s, when the main problem was already the attention captured by smartphones, emails, push notifications, Facebook, YouTube, infinite feeds and applications designed around engagement metrics.
This point is important because it avoids a misunderstanding. Harris was not only denouncing TikTok, nor only social networks in their most recent form. He was identifying a more general principle: many digital technologies, when evaluated primarily on the basis of dwell time and frequency of return, tend to be designed to interrupt, retain and direct user behavior. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Stories are not simply "notifications"; they are rather environments of attention capture. Notifications bring us back inside. Feeds, short videos and automatic successions of content keep us there once we have entered.
According to the reconstruction published by The Atlantic in 2016, Harris had already prepared an internal presentation at Google in 2013 in which he argued that Google, Apple and Facebook had a great responsibility to reduce distraction and respect users' attention. That document circulated widely within the company and contributed to the creation, for Harris, of a role dedicated to design ethics. Harris then left Google in 2015 and became one of the best-known voices of the movement for a more human-respectful technology.
His belief was simple and radical: the problem was not about a single feature or a particular application, but the overall model in which technology companies operated. When the success of a product is measured through the number of accesses, dwell time, views, interactions and frequency with which the user returns, the company receives a structural incentive to design tools capable of retaining them. It is not necessary for every designer to have manipulative intentions; it is enough that the measurement systems and the economic model reward what produces the most engagement.
The race to capture attention
In 2017 Harris described to Wired the digital system as an increasingly sophisticated race to direct what we pay attention to and what we do with our time. His thesis was not that smartphones were inherently negative, but that major platforms were engaged in a competition in which human attention represented the resource to conquer.
Autoplay, notifications, infinite feeds, presence indicators, "like" counts, personalized suggestions and automatic successions of content were not necessarily all born with a harmful intent. However, they share a property: they reduce the points at which the user could stop and consciously decide to exit. A movie ends, a book has a last page, a newspaper can be closed after being leafed through. The infinite feed, on the other hand, never communicates that the experience is complete. Each piece of content is replaced by the next before the user has even formulated a new intention.
The platform, in this way, does not limit itself to satisfying a demand: it contributes to keeping it open. The disproportion between user and platform is evident. On the one hand there is a person with a limited capacity for self-control, subject to fatigue, curiosity, boredom, loneliness and the need for approval. On the other there are companies equipped with large amounts of data, continuous experimentation systems and algorithms capable of identifying which stimuli work best for each one. It is not, therefore, just a matter of our individual weakness. It is a competition between human fragility and a technological structure that can progressively learn to know it.
What notifications really are
The notification perhaps represents the clearest manifestation of this asymmetry. When we decide to open an application, we initiate the interaction. When we receive a notification, the application initiates the interaction with us. A sound, a vibration or the sudden lighting up of the screen interrupt the current activity and present something as deserving immediate attention. The notification does not only communicate information to us; it also establishes when that information must enter our consciousness.
However, not all notifications have the same value. "Maria wrote to you" may correspond to a real human request. "There is new content for you", "You haven't seen this story yet", "Look what's happening" or "Someone reacted to a post you might want to check" often belong to another category: they do not only inform, but create the reason for the return. The distinction between notifications produced by people and notifications generated automatically by a platform is decisive. In the first case someone is looking for us; in the second case a system is trying to make us come back in.
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Stories must also be placed in this broader architecture. They are not notifications in the strict sense, but they work together with notifications. A notification can call us back inside the application; once inside, the personalized feed, short videos and continuous playback do the rest. It is a sequence: interruption, access, retention. The notification opens the door; the algorithmic environment tries not to let us out too soon.
The ancient brain and sudden novelty
In popular language, Harris and other critics of the attention economy have often recalled the idea that extremely recent technologies exploit very ancient vulnerabilities of the human being. The image is effective, but must be used with caution. It would not be correct to state that every notification simply activates "the part of the brain intended for dangers". The neuroscientific reality is more complex: notifications can involve attentional orientation, salience, curiosity, social expectations, reward anticipation and fear of missing out.
However, the general intuition is plausible. Our attentional system is sensitive to sudden stimuli. A sound, a vibration, a movement or a visual change can interrupt the current activity and orient the mind towards what has just happened. From an evolutionary point of view, this sensitivity had a useful function: a sudden variation in the environment could signal a threat, an opportunity, a person from the group, an event to evaluate. Notifications exploit this general predisposition. We do not yet know if what has happened is important, but we are driven to verify it.
The strength of the thesis does not therefore depend on a too simple brain localization. It depends on a more evident fact: notifications are designed to be difficult to ignore.
The experiment: turn everything off
The experiment suggested by Harris is simple: disable, for a few days, all non-essential notifications. It doesn't mean stopping using the phone. It means moving from reactive use to intentional use. With active notifications, the platform sends a stimulus, the stimulus interrupts what we are doing, we open the phone, enter the application and often stay longer than we had planned. With notifications disabled, however, we decide to check the phone, choose which application to open, verify what interests us and can close it without having been summoned.
The difference does not only concern the annoyance produced by a sound. It concerns the subject of the action. In the first case we react; in the second case we decide. An experimental study conducted on thirty participants, invited to disable notifications for twenty-four hours, observed that the participants felt on average less distracted and more productive. Some, however, also reported greater anxiety and less sense of social connection, because they feared not responding with the rapidity expected by others. Two years later, about half of the participants had maintained at least part of the new notification management habits.
This result is interesting because it shows both sides of the problem. Notifications interrupt us, but they also reassure us. Turning them off can restore attention, but can produce the feeling of being less present, less available, less ready to respond. The question, therefore, is not only technological. It has also become social. We have built relationships, jobs and communication habits around the expectation of continuous availability.
When others' time enters ours
Every notification introduces an external priority into our time. Sometimes this priority is legitimate: a child, a family member, a colleague, a real emergency. In these cases being reachable is a value. But many notifications do not correspond to a real need. They are artificial reminders, automatically generated calls, invitations to re-enter, suggestions built because the platform has detected a possible engagement opportunity.
The word "notification" is therefore ambiguous. In appearance it means: I inform you. In many cases it means: I interrupt you. Even more precisely: I subtract from you for an instant the right to decide what to think about. This is the deepest point. Time is not only subtracted when we spend an hour in front of the screen. It is also subtracted when what we were doing is interrupted, fragmented, made less continuous. A notification can last a few seconds, but it can break a conversation, a reading, a concentration, a newly born thought. The loss is not only measured in chronological time. It is measured in mental continuity.
Time Well Spent
Harris's original proposal revolved around a simple formula: Time Well Spent. Not all time spent on a screen is lost time. We can use a phone to talk to those we love, navigate a city, study, read, photograph, listen to music, work, write, create, remember. The question is therefore not only how much time we spent online, but whether that time brought us closer to or further from the life we wanted to live.
An hour spent reading an essay on the phone is not equivalent to an hour spent scrolling through content of which, five minutes later, we remember almost nothing. Ten minutes dedicated to replying to a loved one are not equivalent to ten minutes spent checking automatically generated notifications. The same amount of time can have completely different qualities.
Harris's intuition was precisely this: shift the evaluation of technology from captured time to truly useful time. If a platform increases dwell time but leaves the user more tired, distracted, irritated or dissatisfied, can it really be considered a successful product? From an economic point of view, perhaps yes. From a human point of view, much less.
The problem is not the tool, but the model
One of the most frequent objections is that we are free not to use the phone, to close the applications, to silence notifications. Formally it is true. But this answer ignores the disproportion between individual choice and the architecture of the digital environment. A supermarket can arrange products to guide purchases. A casino can eliminate clocks and windows to make people lose their perception of time. A platform can design flows, colors, sounds, suggestions and intermittent rewards to make staying more likely.
In all these cases, individual choice does not disappear. However, it is conditioned by the environment. Harris does not argue that users lack will. He argues that individual will is embedded in systems designed by subjects who increasingly better know the conditions under which that will weakens.
For this reason, the solution cannot be limited to individual advice. Disabling notifications is useful. Moving the most compulsive apps from the home screen is useful. Using grayscale, setting time limits, creating phone-free zones can help. But if the economic model continues to primarily reward engagement, the responsibility is almost entirely shifted onto the user. It is like asking everyone to defend themselves alone in an environment built to make defense difficult.
From the phone to democracy
In subsequent years Harris broadened his discourse. The problem is not only about the time we lose on the phone. It is also about the type of content that platforms tend to reward. If what generates the most engagement receives the most visibility, it is not certain that the truest, most balanced or useful content will be favored. Intense emotions often work better: indignation, fear, tribal belonging, anger, suspicion, morbid curiosity.
A system designed to maximize engagement can therefore contribute, even unintentionally, to making the most divisive content more visible. Hence one of the strongest expressions used by Harris and the Center for Humane Technology: human downgrading. The idea is that technologies geared primarily towards attention capture can progressively weaken some essential faculties: concentration, trust, dialogue, ability to distinguish true from false, quality of public debate.
This thesis should be considered for what it is: a cultural and political diagnosis, not a mathematical formula. But it captures an essential point. When billions of people receive information through systems that privilege what retains them the most, the issue is no longer just about individual well-being. It concerns the quality of public space.
The Netflix documentary and the response of big platforms
Harris's reflection reached a much wider audience with the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, released in 2020, in which several former executives, designers and scholars of Silicon Valley recount the mechanisms through which social networks and digital platforms compete to capture users' attention. The documentary, albeit with some deliberately dramatic and simplified passages, had the merit of bringing into the public debate a question hitherto discussed mostly among specialists: if platforms increasingly know our vulnerabilities, who guarantees that they are designed to respect our autonomy instead of exploiting it? For those wishing to approach these issues in an accessible way, watching the documentary remains a good starting point, provided it is considered not as a complete scientific treatise, but as a popular and critical work.
The cultural pressure generated by Harris, the Time Well Spent movement and a growing public debate also contributed to pushing big tech companies to introduce tools for controlling usage time. In 2018 Apple introduced Screen Time within iOS 12, along with new features to reduce interruptions, manage notifications and set usage limits for applications and content categories. Around the same time Google developed Digital Wellbeing, designed to show users the time spent on applications, the number of notifications received and the frequency with which they check their phone.
These tools represent an important step, because they make visible what previously remained almost invisible: how many times we pick up the phone, how much time we spend in individual applications, which apps interrupt us most often. However, they also constitute a partial response. Knowing that you have spent two hours on an application does not automatically change the way that application is designed. Setting a personal limit can help, but it does not change the fact that many platforms continue to compete on user retention, interaction and return.
Not surprisingly, some observers spoke of a co-optation of the language of Time Well Spent by the very companies that had been criticized. In a 2018 article, Wired recalled that, for Harris, the point was not simply to provide the user with a counter of the time spent on the phone, but to change the competitive terrain on which tech companies measure their success. The risk, otherwise, is transforming a structural problem into an individual responsibility: if you spend too much time on your phone, now you can see it; if you keep doing it, it's your fault. But the environment remains built to retain you.
The time counter can make us more aware, but it is not enough if the stopwatch is installed inside an environment designed to make us stay.
From the Center for Humane Technology to artificial intelligence
The Time Well Spent movement merged into the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit organization co-founded by Tristan Harris with the aim of realigning technology to the deep interests of humanity. It is not a matter of rejecting innovation, but of demanding that innovation be judged also on the basis of its effects on people's lives, relationships, mental health, democracy and the ability to understand the world.
In recent years Harris's work has increasingly shifted towards artificial intelligence. The transition is consistent. Social networks have shown that digital systems designed to maximize engagement can modify the behavior of billions of people. Generative artificial intelligence adds a further level: it is not limited to choosing what content to show us, but can produce texts, images, videos, voices, conversations and personalized information environments.
The question, then, is no longer just what content we will see, but who will build the content through which we will interpret reality. In 2023 Harris and Aza Raskin presented The A.I. Dilemma, arguing that the race for artificial intelligence reproduces, on an even more powerful scale, the problem already observed with social media: companies driven by competition to release technologies before society has developed adequate rules, institutions and defenses.
The trajectory seems clear. First applications learned to capture our attention. Then algorithms learned to select what we saw. Now artificial intelligence can help generate what we see, read, listen to and believe. The problem is no longer just time. It is the mediation of reality.
A small practice of freedom
The strength of the notifications experiment lies in its simplicity. It does not require a complex theory, nor a political revolution, nor the abandonment of technology. It only requires trying: disable for a few days all non-essential notifications, leave active only those that correspond to real emergencies or to people by whom we want to be immediately reachable, remove the red numbers from the icons, move the most compulsive applications from the home screen, decide a few moments of the day in which to check messages and updates.
Perhaps we will realize that we have not really lost important information. Perhaps we will discover that many emergencies were not emergencies. Perhaps we will feel that the phone is still useful, but less invasive. And perhaps something rarer will return: the continuity of our time.
Conclusion: the right not to be interrupted
Tristan Harris's battle is not just about smartphones. It is about the right not to be continuously summoned. It is about the possibility of choosing when to read, when to answer, when to inform ourselves, when to stay alone, when to think.
In a world where information is abundant, what becomes scarce is attention. And when attention becomes scarce, it becomes precious. For this reason it is sought, measured, sold, predicted, interrupted. The decisive question is not whether we should use or not use technology, but whether technology should serve us or retain us; whether it should expand our freedom or continuously reduce the space of our decision.
Perhaps the first gesture to take back our time is small, almost trivial: turning off what calls us for no reason, letting non-essential information stay out of our time, remembering that not everything that vibrates deserves to interrupt a thought.
I too did the experiment proposed by Harris. In a few days I discovered that many notifications were not only postponable: they were simply useless. I disabled some permanently. I could do without them, as happened when I didn't yet have a smartphone. It wasn't the world disappearing: it was the phone stopping deciding when to interrupt me.
Essential Bibliography
Apple (2018), "iOS 12 introduces new features to reduce interruptions and manage screen time", Apple Newsroom.
Center for Humane Technology, "Impact and Story", official organization page.
Center for Humane Technology, "Tristan Harris", official profile.
Center for Humane Technology (2023), "The A.I. Dilemma", public presentation by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin.
Center for Humane Technology, Your Undivided Attention, official podcast.
Google, "Digital Wellbeing", official Android page.
Harris, T. (2016), "How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist", Thrive Global / Medium.
Kushlev, K., Proulx, J. D. E. and Dunn, E. W. (2016), "Silence Your Phones: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms", Proceedings of CHI 2016.
Lewis, P. (2016), "The Binge Breaker", The Atlantic.
Netflix (2020), The Social Dilemma, documentary directed by Jeff Orlowski.
Pielot, M. and Rello, L. (2016), "Productive, Anxious, Lonely — 24 Hours Without Push Notifications", arXiv.
Thompson, N. (2017), "Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones. Tristan Harris Wants to Rescue Them", Wired.
Wired (2018), "How Big Tech Co-opted Time Well Spent".
Cover Image
Keith Haring, Untitled (Pyramid Heart), 1989. © The Keith Haring Foundation.
Note on the use of artificial intelligence — This article was drafted with the support of artificial intelligence tools for research, analysis, source organization and writing. The selection of content, critical interpretation and final responsibility for the text remain with the author.