What is the role of young people in changing the system?

Humanity is up against some major problems: growing wealth inequality, the catastrophic impacts of climate change, discrimination, and a global pandemic we were utterly unprepared for.

To solve these problems, we need to understand each other better, to be able to tell what’s true and what isn’t, and to work together at large scales across communities and nations.

Technology, with its ability to amplify our efforts and to reach large numbers of people, can do a lot to help with all this, both at the individual and societal levels.

And yet, our current social media technologies spend far more energy on ways to capture and monetize our attention than on solving big problems.

This situation has led technology into a moment of reckoning as more and more social media users, politicians, and technologists are agreeing that these products are unhealthy for many individuals and for society as a whole.

Your generation has grown up with social media. Your willingness to create and consume content has led to enormous profits for technology companies because they see you as easy to manipulate. While our brains are still developing, we’re all more vulnerable to peer pressure, social comparison, and tricks that hijack our attention.