Whose Life Is the Technology For?

Most attention advice asks a question about you: how much are you using, when, how do you cut back. There is a different question, quieter and harder, that a handful of people are now asking about the tools themselves — what were they built to serve. If a product's purpose is to hold you, no amount of personal discipline is a fair fight.

The usual framing of digital wellbeing puts the burden on the individual. Set a timer, grayscale the screen, leave the phone in another room. These help. But the more interesting recent conversation has moved upstream, to the design and intent of the technology itself — and it is being led, oddly, from outside the tech industry.

The Center for Humane Technology has spent this year trying to name the thing underneath the symptoms. In one episode, co-founders Aza Raskin and Randy Fernando argue that we tend to treat technology's harms as separate, disconnected problems, which makes fixing them feel like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole [7]. Their alternative is to look for the shared patterns in how tools are designed, developed, and deployed, and to work from a set of principles for building humane technology rather than patching each harm after it appears [7]. It is a subtle shift, but it matters for how you think about your own attention: if the fragmentation you feel is a pattern baked into design, then treating it as a personal failing is a category error.

What makes this year notable is who else has entered the argument. In May, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," warning of the dangers that runaway AI poses to human dignity and agency [4]. You do not have to share the theology to notice the oddity the podcast points to: that a 2,000-year-old religious institution is among the loudest voices insisting technology be measured against human flourishing, at a moment when you might expect governance structures to have caught up with powerful new tools [4]. The vacuum is the story. When the institutions we'd expect to draw lines are quiet, older ones step into the gap.

The most generative thread runs through Tristan Harris's conversation with Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, recorded before an audience at a wisdom forum in Australia [2]. Their subject was trust in the age of AI, organized around a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to build technology in service of life [2]. That phrase — in service of life — is worth sitting with, because it reframes the attention problem entirely. The opposite of a tool built in service of life is not a tool that wastes your time. It is a tool built in service of something else — engagement, retention, ad inventory — that happens to run on your time.

Here is where the design conversation and the clinical evidence quietly agree, without either side saying so directly. This year's research keeps finding that the damage is not a function of raw hours but of pattern and dependence: a systematic review and meta-analysis in JMIR Mental Health set out precisely because evidence on treating problematic digital use had grown fragmented across different behaviors, following PRISMA 2020 guidelines to compare interventions across domains [1]. A separate study of South African university students found that smartphone addiction, not social media use as such, was the pathway linking heavier engagement to psychological distress [5]. The common thread: the problem lives in the compulsive loop, the addiction-like pattern — exactly the thing a product optimized for engagement is designed to produce, and exactly what a humane-design framework would try to remove at the root [7].

What is still contested is whether the upstream approach can scale. Principles are not regulation. An encyclical is not a law. The CHT episodes lean on analogies to treaty-making — nuclear arms control succeeded partly because verification technology let adversaries trust each other's promises [6] — which is honest about the difficulty: red lines only hold when everyone can see they're being kept. There is no such verification for how an app is designed to capture attention. So for now the burden stays split. The tools are built the way they're built, and you are left to manage the loop yourself. But naming the design as a choice, rather than weather, changes what you ask of yourself — and what you demand of the people who build.

Research radar

1. A JMIR Mental Health systematic review and meta-analysis set out to evaluate and compare therapeutic interventions for problematic digital use across behavioral domains, noting that despite growing research the evidence had remained fragmented [1]. The value is in the synthesis: treating "problematic use" as one condition obscures how differently interventions perform across behaviors.
2. Among South African university students, smartphone addiction acted as the pathway linking social media use to psychological distress — implying it is the dependence, not the platform itself, that carries the harm [5].
3. A narrative review in Cureus found associations between screen use and disrupted sleep in young adults were stronger for bedtime exposure and addiction-like patterns than for total screen time alone [3]. Timing and dependence, again, over raw quantity.

One thing to try

Pick one app you open reflexively and ask a single question about it: what is this designed to reward — my attention, or my life. Not to delete it. Just to name the answer once, out loud. Awareness of the design intent is the cheapest form of resistance there is.

Worth your attention

• "Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett" — Your Undivided Attention [2]. A conversation about trust and technology that asks the reframing question underneath all attention advice.
• "What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?" — Your Undivided Attention [7]. The Seven Principles of Humane Technology, and why treating harms one at a time is a losing game.
• "Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo's Clarion Call on AI" — Your Undivided Attention [4]. On why an ancient institution is drawing the lines that governance hasn't.
• The JMIR Mental Health meta-analysis [1]. If you want the clinical ground truth on what treatment for problematic use actually does.

The question that opened this issue was whose life the technology is for. Harris and Tippett's phrase — building in service of life — is the whole answer folded small [2]. Your attention will always be contested. The useful move is to stop asking only how to spend it better, and start asking what, exactly, is asking for it.