17: What We Need to Do to Create a Better Internet, with Damian Bradfield The JOMOcast with Christina Crook

Damian Bradfield, Chief Creative Officer at WeTransfer and Author of the Trust Manifesto, on what we need to reclaim to create a better Internet for all.  We’re at a very unusual moment in modern history, where a roughly equal number of generations alive today have either a lived experience of near-total personal privacy, and with it, great consumer power over the way they were marketed to- or a lived experience of nearly every experience, action, and statement being collected, analyzed, and sold as commodities by the entities selling us their goods, ideas, and policies, to the point that we can be offered something before we consciously know we want it.  How did that happen? Damian Bradfield is the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of WeTransfer and WePresent, the author of The Trust Manifesto, host of the Influence podcast, and the creator of Empty Day. Damian’s file-sharing company WeTransfer sends over 1.5 million files a day. In 2016, he moved from Amsterdam to California to set up WeTransfer's U.S. headquarters in Venice, Los Angeles, where he’s been instrumental in shaping the company's policy in support of the creative community. Damian is proud that companies like his recognize and value our rights to personal privacy and their responsibilities to their community- but he’s painfully aware, as a creator, consumer, and parent, that the landscape is anything but benevolent. Damian is a powerful amplifier of the responsibility of tech companies, in their roles as creators of some of the most powerful and influential presences in our lives, to not hurt us, not trick us, not manipulate us, and to own the staggering impact their products have on the very fabric of our societies. In his new book, The Trust Manifesto: What We Need To Do to Create a Better Internet, which I devoured, he describes the web as our new collective city and asks: are these the conditions we want to live under? Key takeaways from this conversation:- How our well-being depends on us cultivating much greater intentionality towards our tech use: when, where, how, and how much;- How online technology from social media to gaming to video streaming is deliberately designed to engage the addictive systems of the human mind to hijack our intentionality as consumers- and how we should rightly see this as unethical;- How convenience is packaged to create an attractive tradeoff for our privacy, autonomy, and personal data points;Favorite Quotes:“No matter what you can do with technology, no matter how much fun you can have with it, no matter how much you can consume or learn or discover or be entertained by, none of it is a replacement for physical connection.”“...what a lot of tech companies are producing is obsessive, compulsive, addictive pieces of software without really any concern or care for what it was going to do to people’s minds or emotional well-being.”SupportThis podcast is made possible by you — our listeners all over the world — from Brazil to Australia, the USA to Singapore. Please support the JOMO(cast) for just $3 a month. Sign up at patreon.com/jomocast. Thank you for supporting the content that supports you.  Go Deeper Sign Up for 7 Days of JOMO Quests, a free series of science-backed challenges to reclaim joyexperiencejomo.com/free-resources  Follow @experiencejomo on Instagram, Facebook + Twitter
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