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“People everywhere seem to be morally aroused,” said Seidman. “The philosopher David Hume argued that ‘the moral imagination diminishes with distance.’ It would follow that the opposite is also true: As distance decreases, the moral imagination increases. Now that we have no distance — it’s like we’re all in a crowded theater, making everything personal — we are experiencing the aspirations, hopes, frustrations, plights of others in direct and visceral ways.”

“A dentist from Minnesota shoots a cherished lion in Zimbabwe named Cecil, and days later everyone in the world knows about it, triggering a tsunami of moral outrage on Twitter and Facebook. As a result, some people try to shut down his dental practice by posting negative reviews on Yelp and spray paint ‘Lion Killer’ on his Florida vacation home. Almost 400,000 people then sign a petition in one day on Change.org demanding that Delta Air Lines change their policy of transporting trophy kills. Delta does so and other airlines follow. And then hunters who contribute to Zimbabwe’s tourism industry protest the protest, claiming that they were being discriminated against.”

That we are becoming more morally aroused “is generally a good thing,” argued Seidman. Institutionalized racism in police departments, or in college fraternities, is real and had been tolerated for way too long. That it’s being called out is a sign of a society’s health “and re-engagement.”

But when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage, he added, “it can either inspire or repress a serious conversation or the truth.”

“If moral outrage, as justified as it may be, is followed immediately by demands for firings or resignations,” argued Seidman, “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

Furthermore, “when moral outrage skips over moral conversation, then the outcome is likely going to be acquiescence, not inspired solutions,” Seidman added. It can also feed the current epidemic of inauthentic apologies, “since apologies extracted under pressure are like telling a child, `Just say you’re sorry,’ to move past the issue without ever making amends.”

it’s as if “we’re living in a never-ending storm,” he said. Alas, though, resolving moral disputes “requires perspective, fuller context and the ability to make meaningful distinctions.”

requires leaders with the courage and empathy “to inspire people to pause to reflect, so that instead of reacting by yelling in 140 characters they can channel all this moral outrage into deep and honest conversations.”

It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity

The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.

its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.

In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.

the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track

The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,

In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.

After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.

these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires

Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform

Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes

they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.

To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”

this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives

Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.

Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.

They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.

The story of our species began when we began to make tools

All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.

This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used

The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities

Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.

The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology

Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.

Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.

Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes

The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.

They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.

This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.

Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.

these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.

reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”

Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable

not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”

Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.

Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them

Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact

emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.

“time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics

industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.

there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.

It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.

The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power

The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.

If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right

The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.

Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology

What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.

Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources

democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation

This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.

we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.

I’m learning I can have nothing but an iPhone and I’m fine.

The game changer was the smartphone. It's not only my office phone. I can also use it to record interviews (its microphone is better than the one in my old Olympus, which is important in crowded, noisy places), take pictures and videos to help me remember the details of what I see, and even type or speak notes and interview answers into emails that I send myself.

I use it the way other people use their phones. I email, text, tweet, post to Instagram, get directions, set timers and alarms, change flights, check weather, update my calendar, map my jogs, and listen to podcasts and Spotify during long drives or plane rides. On assignment, I’ve had entire conversations with Google Translate, two of us passing my phone back and forth.

Besides being an all-in-one communication tool, the iPhone helps my writing. I take photographs of places I know I’ll want to describe in detail later — the inside of someone’s home, a rocky mountain summit, a piece of jewelry that a subject is wearing, the shape of the clouds and the color of the sky. I take videos of places, too, and narrate them as I shoot so that I can watch and listen later.

I often do stories overseas, and for the last couple of years, I have constantly connected with sources, interview subjects and my own family on my phone through WhatsApp, a brilliant messaging service that seems to be well known everywhere except the United States.

I use it to text, but also to trade photographs, short videos and voice messages, instantly. And you can call from it, even use it for face-to-face video conversations, free if you’re on Wi-Fi.

More than anything, technology has brought the sports world into the “now.”

Now we can see almost any game on television, in a dozen sports from anywhere in the world, with a computer on our laps and a phone in our hands. We receive and give instant analysis through the world of social media. We can track statistics for our fantasy teams. We can tweet nasty messages to famous athletes and coaches who disappoint us. Like so many other parts of society, we’re probably watching sports more physically alone than ever, but more connected in other ways.

The spyware’s capabilities are near absolute. Once installed on a phone, the software can extract all of the data that’s already on the device (text messages, contacts, GPS location, email, browser history, etc) in addition to creating new data by using the phone’s microphone and camera to record the user’s surroundings and ambient sounds, according to a 2016 report by the New York Times.

NSO limits sales of its spyware, Pegasus, to state intelligence agencies

þffWhatsApp has about 1.5bn users around the world. The messaging app uses end-to-end encryption, making it popular and secure for activists and dissidents. The Pegasus spyware does not affect or involve the app’s encryption.

Her adopted son, David, has been deprived of a phone

as a species, we are not doing nearly enough to avoid always being watched or otherwise digitally recorded.

our location, your purchases, video and audio from within your home and office, your online searches and every digital wandering, biometric tracking of your face and other body parts, your heart rate and other vital signs, your every communication, recording, and perhaps your deepest thoughts or idlest dreams

in the future, if not already, much of this data and more will be collected and analyzed by some combination of governments and corporations, among them a handful of megacompanies whose powers nearly match those of governments

Over the last year, as part of Times Opinion’s Privacy Project, I’ve participated in experiments in which my devices were closely monitored in order to determine the kind of data that was being collected about me.

I’ve realized how blind we are to the kinds of insights tech companies are gaining about us through our gadgets. Our blindness not only keeps us glued to privacy-invading tech

it also means that we’ve failed to create a political culture that is in any way up to the task of limiting surveillance.

few of our cultural or political institutions are even much trying to tamp down the surveillance state.

Yet the United States and other supposedly liberty-loving Western democracies have not ruled out such a future

like Barack Obama before him, Trump and the Justice Department are pushing Apple to create a backdoor into the data on encrypted iPhones — they want the untrustworthy F.B.I. and any local cop to be able to see everything inside anyone’s phone.

the fact that both Obama and Trump agreed on the need for breaking iPhone encryption suggests how thoroughly political leaders across a wide spectrum have neglected privacy as a fundamental value worthy of protection.

Americans are sleepwalking into a future nearly as frightening as the one the Chinese are constructing. I choose the word “sleepwalking” deliberately, because when it comes to digital privacy, a lot of us prefer the comfortable bliss of ignorance.

Among other revelations: Advertising companies and data brokers are keeping insanely close tabs on smartphones’ location data, tracking users so precisely that their databases could arguably compromise national security or political liberty.

Tracking technologies have become cheap and widely available — for less than $100, my colleagues were able to identify people walking by surveillance cameras in Bryant Park in Manhattan.

The Clearview AI story suggests another reason to worry that our march into surveillance has become inexorable: Each new privacy-invading technology builds on a previous one, allowing for scary outcomes from new integrations and collections of data that few users might have anticipated.

The upshot: As the location-tracking apps followed me, I was able to capture the pings they sent to online servers — essentially recording their spying

On the map, you can see the apps are essentially stalking me. They see me drive out one morning to the gas station, then to the produce store, then to Safeway; later on I passed by a music school, stopped at a restaurant, then Whole Foods.

But location was only one part of the data the companies had about me; because geographic data is often combined with other personal information — including a mobile advertising ID that can help merge what you see and do online with where you go in the real world — the story these companies can tell about me is actually far more detailed than I can tell about myself.

I can longer pretend I’ve got nothing to worry about. Sure, I’m not a criminal — but do I want anyone to learn everything about me?

more to the point: Is it wise for us to let any entity learn everything about everyone?

The remaining uncertainty about the surveillance state is not whether we will submit to it — only how readily and completely, and how thoroughly it will warp our society.

Will we allow the government and corporations unrestricted access to every bit of data we ever generate, or will we decide that some kinds of collections, like the encrypted data on your phone, should be forever off limits, even when a judge has issued a warrant for it?

In the future, will there be room for any true secret — will society allow any unrecorded thought or communication to evade detection and commercial analysis?

How completely will living under surveillance numb creativity and silence radical thought?

Can human agency survive the possibility that some companies will know more about all of us than any of us can ever know about ourselves?

The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income.

The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?

One answer might be computer games. Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside.

This, in fact, is a very old solution. For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions”.

Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).

As religions show us, the virtual reality need not be encased inside an isolated box. Rather, it can be superimposed on the physical reality. In the past this was done with the human imagination and with sacred books, and in the 21st century it can be done with smartphones.

Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game.

we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

In the end, the real action always takes place inside the human brain. Does it matter whether the neurons are stimulated by observing pixels on a computer screen, by looking outside the windows of a Caribbean resort, or by seeing heaven in our mind’s eyes?

Indeed, one particularly interesting section of Israeli society provides a unique laboratory for how to live a contented life in a post-work world. In Israel, a significant percentage of ultra-orthodox Jewish men never work. They spend their entire lives studying holy scriptures and performing religion rituals. They and their families don’t starve to death partly because the wives often work, and partly because the government provides them with generous subsidies. Though they usually live in poverty, government support means that they never lack for the basic necessities of life.

That’s universal basic income in action. Though they are poor and never work, in survey after survey these ultra-orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life-satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society.

Hence virtual realities are likely to be key to providing meaning to the useless class of the post-work world. Maybe these virtual realities will be generated inside computers. Maybe they will be generated outside computers, in the shape of new religions and ideologies. Maybe it will be a combination of the two. The possibilities are endless

In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working.

People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.

But what about truth? What about reality? Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.

By the end of World War II, however, American corporations were facing severe talent shortages. Their senior executives were growing old, and a dearth of hiring from the Depression through the war had resulted in a shortfall of able, well-trained managers. Finding people who had the potential to rise quickly through the ranks became an overriding preoccupation of American businesses. They began to devise a formal hiring-and-management system based in part on new studies of human behavior, and in part on military techniques developed during both world wars, when huge mobilization efforts and mass casualties created the need to get the right people into the right roles as efficiently as possible. By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential.

But companies abandoned their hard-edged practices for another important reason: many of their methods of evaluation turned out not to be very scientific.

this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,”

Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased.

about a quarter of the country’s corporations were using similar tests to evaluate managers and junior executives, usually to assess whether they were ready for bigger roles.

He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers.

Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.

When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process.

What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out.

Aptitude, skills, personal history, psychological stability, discretion, loyalty—companies at the time felt they had a need (and the right) to look into them all. That ambit is expanding once again, and this is undeniably unsettling. Should the ideas of scientists be dismissed because of the way they play a game? Should job candidates be ranked by what their Web habits say about them? Should the “data signature” of natural leaders play a role in promotion? These are all live questions today, and they prompt heavy concerns: that we will cede one of the most subtle and human of skills, the evaluation of the gifts and promise of other people, to machines; that the models will get it wrong; that some people will never get a shot in the new workforce.

scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.”

consider the alternative. A mountain of scholarly literature has shown that the intuitive way we now judge professional potential is rife with snap judgments and hidden biases, rooted in our upbringing or in deep neurological connections that doubtless served us well on the savanna but would seem to have less bearing on the world of work.

We may like to think that society has become more enlightened since those days, and in many ways it has, but our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.

a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests.

Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

the prevailing system of hiring and management in this country involves a level of dysfunction that should be inconceivable in an economy as sophisticated as ours. Recent survey data collected by the Corporate Executive Board, for example, indicate that nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year of their start date, and that hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team

In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”

Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building)

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people

the idea that hiring was a science fell out of favor. But now it’s coming back, thanks to new technologies and methods of analysis that are cheaper, faster, and much-wider-ranging than what we had before

what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company.

Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.

I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk.

His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.

people analytics will ultimately have a vastly larger impact on the economy than the algorithms that now trade on Wall Street or figure out which ads to show us. He reminded me that we’ve witnessed this kind of transformation before in the history of management science. Near the turn of the 20th century, both Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with stopwatches, to improve worker efficiency.

“The quantities of data that those earlier generations were working with,” he said, “were infinitesimal compared to what’s available now. There’s been a real sea change in the past five years, where the quantities have just grown so large—petabytes, exabytes, zetta—that you start to be able to do things you never could before.”

People analytics will unquestionably provide many workers with more options and more power. Gild, for example, helps companies find undervalued software programmers, working indirectly to raise those people’s pay. Other companies are doing similar work. One called Entelo, for instance, specializes in using algorithms to identify potentially unhappy programmers who might be receptive to a phone cal

He sees it not only as a boon to a business’s productivity and overall health but also as an important new tool that individual employees can use for self-improvement: a sort of radically expanded The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, custom-written for each of us, or at least each type of job, in the workforce.

the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers, across all companies, all the time.

The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

Gild’s CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company’s approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects. Graphic design is one field that the company is now looking at, and many scientific, technical, and engineering roles might also fit the bill. Regardless of their occupation, most people leave “data exhaust” in their wake, a kind of digital aura that can reveal a lot about a potential hire.

professionally relevant personality traits can be judged effectively merely by scanning Facebook feeds and photos. LinkedIn, of course, captures an enormous amount of professional data and network information, across just about every profession. A controversial start-up called Klout has made its mission the measurement and public scoring of people’s online social influence.

Mullainathan expressed amazement at how little most creative and professional workers (himself included) know about what makes them effective or ineffective in the office. Most of us can’t even say with any certainty how long we’ve spent gathering information for a given project, or our pattern of information-gathering, never mind know which parts of the pattern should be reinforced, and which jettisoned. As Mullainathan put it, we don’t know our own “production function.”

Over time, better job-matching technologies are likely to begin serving people directly, helping them see more clearly which jobs might suit them and which companies could use their skills. In the future, Gild plans to let programmers see their own profiles and take skills challenges to try to improve their scores. It intends to show them its estimates of their market value, too, and to recommend coursework that might allow them to raise their scores even more. Not least, it plans to make accessible the scores of typical hires at specific companies, so that software engineers can better see the profile they’d need to land a particular job

Knack, for its part, is making some of its video games available to anyone with a smartphone, so people can get a better sense of their strengths, and of the fields in which their strengths would be most valued. (Palo Alto High School recently adopted the games to help students assess careers.) Ultimately, the company hopes to act as matchmaker between a large network of people who play its games (or have ever played its games) and a widening roster of corporate clients, each with its own specific profile for any given type of job.

When I began my reporting for this story, I was worried that people analytics, if it worked at all, would only widen the divergent arcs of our professional lives, further gilding the path of the meritocratic elite from cradle to grave, and shutting out some workers more definitively. But I now believe the opposite is likely to happen, and that we’re headed toward a labor market that’s fairer to people at every stage of their careers

For decades, as we’ve assessed people’s potential in the professional workforce, the most important piece of data—the one that launches careers or keeps them grounded—has been educational background: typically, whether and where people went to college, and how they did there. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life. A degree has become a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness, one that grows stronger the more selective the school and the higher a student’s GPA, that is easily understood by employers, and that, until the advent of people analytics, was probably unrivaled in its predictive powers.

the limitations of that signal—the way it degrades with age, its overall imprecision, its many inherent biases, its extraordinary cost—are obvious. “Academic environments are artificial environments,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” which is often quite different from the workplace.

because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. That such early factors so profoundly affect career arcs and hiring decisions made two or three decades later is, on its face, absurd.

I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history,

Google, too, is hiring a growing number of nongraduates. Many of the people I talked with reported that when it comes to high-paying and fast-track jobs, they’re reducing their preference for Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly selective schools.

This process is just beginning. Online courses are proliferating, and so are online markets that involve crowd-sourcing. Both arenas offer new opportunities for workers to build skills and showcase competence. Neither produces the kind of instantly recognizable signals of potential that a degree from a selective college, or a first job at a prestigious firm, might. That’s a problem for traditional hiring managers, because sifting through lots of small signals is so difficult and time-consuming.

all of these new developments raise philosophical questions. As professional performance becomes easier to measure and see, will we become slaves to our own status and potential, ever-focused on the metrics that tell us how and whether we are measuring up? Will too much knowledge about our limitations hinder achievement and stifle our dreams? All I can offer in response to these questions, ironically, is my own gut sense, which leads me to feel cautiously optimistic.

Google’s understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else’s, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses. (Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.) But for all of Google’s technological enthusiasm, these same practices are still deeply human. A real, live person looks at every résumé the company receives. Hiring decisions are made by committee and are based in no small part on opinions formed during structured interviews.

So while the experiment began as an exercise to learn calligraphy, it doubled as a useful sort of digital detox that revealed my relationship with technology. Here's what I learned:

Receiving handwritten messages made people feel special. The awesome feeling of receiving personalized mail really can be replicated with a handwritten text.

Handwriting allows for more self-expression. I found I could give words a certain flourish to mimic the intonation of spoken language. Expressing myself via handwriting could also give the illusion of real-time presence. One friend told me, “it’s like you’re here with us!”

Before I started, I established rules for myself: I could create only handwritten text messages for seven days, absolutely no using my phone’s keyboard. I had to write out my messages on paper, photograph them, then hit “send.” I didn’t reveal my plan to my friends unless asked

Sometimes you don't need to respond. Most conversations aren’t life or death situations, so it was refreshing to feel 100 percent present in all interactions. I didn’t interrupt conversations by checking social media or shooting text messages to friends. I was more in tune with my surroundings. On transit, I took part in people watching—which, yes, meant mostly watching people staring at their phones. I smiled more at passersby while walking since I didn’t feel the need to avoid human interaction by staring at my phone.

A phone isn't only a texting device. As I texted less, I used my phone less frequently—mostly because I didn’t feel the need to look at it to keep me busy, nor did I want to feel guilty for utilizing the keyboard through other applications. I still took photos, streamed music, and logged workouts since I felt okay with pressing buttons for selection purposes

People don’t expect to receive phone calls anymore. Texting brings about a less intimidating, more convenient experience. But it wasn't that long ago when real-time voice were the norm. It's clear to me that, these days, people prefer to be warned about an upcoming phone call before it comes in.

Having a pen and paper is handy at all times. Writing out responses is a great reminder to slow down and use your hands. While all keys on a keyboard feel the same, it’s difficult to replicate the tactile activity of tracing a letter’s shape

My sent messages were more thoughtful.

I was more careful with grammar and spelling. People often ignore the rules of grammar and spelling just to maintain the pace of texting conversation. But because a typical calligraphic text took minutes to craft, I had time to make sure I got things right. The usual texting acronyms and misspellings look absurd when texted with type, but they'd be especially ridiculous written by hand.

Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.

The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.

rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.

Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.

"The reality is, the vast majority of the activity that happens in a branch is not revenue generating,"

poor communities, rural communities and areas with a high concentration of Black and brown residents have been hardest hit.

"It's a good thing that banks are moving away from charging those kinds of fees, but it's a bad thing that they're moving away from serving those neighborhoods,"

It can also push people to more expensive options such as check-cashing stores or payday lenders.

It's a trend that's unlikely to reverse now that the pandemic has pushed more customers to bank on smartphones and computers.

Williams understands that for small towns a bank can be more than a place to cash a check. It can also be the place to catch up or gossip about what's going on around town.

People want to come to that bank branch because it's social."

Even though a lot of banking can now be done online, an FDIC survey found that 83% of people still met with a teller or other bank employee at least once during 2019.

"A lot of banks have utilized the pandemic to justify downsizing even more,"

"When you have young boys and girls riding by and seeing empty buildings, or that building which was once a bank is turned over to a payday lender, what message are we sending?" he asks. "Is my neighborhood not a priority?"

Begin to build boundaries by starting with the easy stuff, whatever that means for you

This one is relatively simple: don’t have television news on in the background (or better, a news podcast). Clean up the passive background noise

Assess the situation

Figure out your main problem area

Choose what, when, where, and how

“What level of news is going to make me feel suitably up-to-date and responsible without driving me insane? Recognize that may be a moving target and that it’s going to be extremely difficult to stick with, but at least have some kind of goal.

A word on the “when” part 

Sometimes this means buying an alarm clock and putting your phone in a different room/closet than the one where you sleep. 

Ask for help

Who profits from my fear, my elation, my outrage? It’s a nice question to keep in the back of one’s head when you’re down the rabbit hole—especially when you’re not really getting much out of it, but just half-remembered ideas about what you’re reading and why.

In the early days of his campaign, Mr. Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Mr. Biden, “Here’s the Deal.”

those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Mr. Trump’s social media machine.

So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Mr. Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,

Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Mr. Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets

the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Mr. Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal.

2. Tune Out Twitter, and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’

“The whole Biden campaign ethos was ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Mr. Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyper-aware of your own ideological corner.”

As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content

“Our goal was really to meet people where they were,”

3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust

“When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.”

Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.

“I had the freedom to go for the jugular,” said Rafael Rivero, a co-founder of Occupy Democrats and Ridin’ With Biden, another big pro-Biden Facebook page.

“It was sort of a big, distributed message test,” Mr. Flaherty said of the Rebel Alliance. “If it was popping through Occupy or any of our other partners, we knew there was heat there.”

These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Mr. Biden to keep most of his messaging positive, while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt.

4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials

the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Mr. Biden.

“The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.”

In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads

5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles

The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses.

“The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick, because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,”

the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes, but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back

On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign.

“We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”

In recent years, Twitter and much of the rest of the internet have been getting hotter, more reflexively outraged, less fun. Venturing onto social media these days, I often feel like a cat burglar stepping through a field of upturned rakes. I could imagine my dumb joke getting picked apart for all the ways it was problematic — “New York Times writer casually encourages bestial sexual assault! #deertoo” — bringing me ever closer to cancellation.

Think of Day One as a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.

You post updates to it just as you might on Instagram or Facebook.

The app — which runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads, syncing your entries between your devices — can handle long text journals, short picture-focused status updates, and pretty much anything else that comes across the digital transom.

I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life

It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.

Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.

The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely.

one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration

journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity

a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one

you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket

because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.

photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text.

According to Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of nine hours a day online (paywall), compared to about six hours for those aged eight to 12 and 50 minutes for kids between 0 and eight

“It’s not a drug, but it might as well be. It works the same way… it has the same results,

A startling 44% of teens tell Pew that they often check their phones for messages or notifications as soon as they wake up; 28% say they check at least sometimes.

Pelosi said Sunday “the evidence is that it was a well-planned, organized group with leadership and guidance and direction. And the direction was to go get people.”

But with countless smartphone videos emerging from the scene, much of it from gloating insurrectionists themselves, and more lawmakers recounting the chaos that was around them, contours of the uprising are increasingly coming into relief.

Criminals pardoned by Trump, among them Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, came forward at rallies on the eve of the attack to tell the crowds they were fighting a battle between good and evil and they were on the side of good.

“If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,”

Although the Capitol’s attackers had been sent with Trump’s exhortation to fight, they appeared in some cases to be surprised that they had actually made it in.

Within the hour, the Senate had resumed its work and the House followed, returning the People’s House to the control of the people’s representatives.

Said McGovern: “I was in such disbelief this could possibly happen. These domestic terrorists were in the People’s House, desecrating the People’s House, destroying the People’s House.”

“We have to start recognising the costs of time spent on social media. It’s not just a game – it affects us financially, physically and emotionally.”

The pull-to-refresh and infinite scrolling mechanism on our news feeds are unnervingly similar to a slot machine

“You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing,”

We cannot know when we will be rewarded, and more often than not we don’t find anything interesting or gratifying, much like gambling. But that’s precisely what keeps us coming back.

“The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens,”

phone dependency, driven by high social-media usage, can lead us to think our phone is vibrating, or that we have received a message, even when we haven’t.

“There are whole departments trying to design their systems to be as addictive as possible. They want you to be permanently online and by bombarding you with messages and stimuli try to redirect your attention back to their app or webpage.”

Once a habit is formed something previously prompted by an external trigger, like a notification, email, or any sort of ring or ding, is no longer needed, Eyal remarked.It is replaced or supplemented with an internal trigger meaning that we form a mental association between wanting to use this product and seeking to serve an emotional need.