Rahaf Harfoush Speaker Reel

This is a story about how we grieve in the digital age. We idolize creativity, but we worship productivity. We say we want people to be creative, but we respect and admire people who are productive. No one should design a tool and say, oops, we accidentally ruined democracy. We need to start having these transparent conversations about what companies are collecting what information and what they're doing with it. Do you spend hours reading productivity hacks, trying new frameworks, and testing new apps to get even more done? We've created a generation of brilliant technological minds that know how to code, but not what to code, and more importantly, not why to code. And what happens when we're in a virtual world and you spend hours in a virtual space with a different voice, a different face, A different digital body, different digital goods, and you spend all of this time in this environment. And then what happens when you take off the headset and look at yourself in the mirror? We're sharing things that are a lot more personal. We're sharing our moods, how we feel. We're sharing our ovulation cycles, our reproductive health. We're sharing our medical history and the medication that we're on. The number of steps that we take in a day, the quality of our sleep at night, our financial and budgeting goals, all these pieces of ourselves that we're constantly sharing online. What this is doing is it's normalizing digital intimacy. It's making it normal for us to have this expectation that we're going to share these pieces of ourselves with our devices. Mark Zuckerberg has a very specific idea of the role of technology in people's lives. He has a very specific idea about what privacy should look like, in his opinion. And that idea is driving the evolution of his algorithms, of his products, of his platform that impacts 2 billion people. Because economic growth isn't just going to be solved by more technology. In fact, more technology without the proper design for a human-centric experience is probably going to result in a lot less jobs anyway. Knowledge workers are facing a big challenge. We're expected to be constantly productive and creative in equal measure, but it's actually almost impossible for our brains to continuously generate new ideas with no rest. In fact, downtime is a necessity for our brain to recover and to operate properly. How can you innovate When the tools that you're using, the way that you're recruiting, the way that you train people, the way that you bill hours, the way that you look at how jobs are structured in your organization, if all of those have this outdated philosophy that are essentially relics from the past. Signals of digital wealth are becoming more important to consumers, that consumers are willing to spend money on digital goods in order to signal their wealth in the digital space. And this also makes sense because if I'm Snoop Dogg, I can drive my Rolls-Royce around, okay? But if I change my Twitter profile picture to one of these Bored Apes, then I'm showing that luxury item to 54 million people. Work devotion is a pattern of communication. There's signals that we as a species have developed to communicate to each other that we deserve to be at work, and we demonstrate this through acts of sacrifice and struggle. And if we're going to have a meaningful conversation about recalibrating those systems and putting them back into balance because they're so out of whack right now, we have to be able to say things like, are we comfortable saying, hey, I get a lot of validation from likes on Instagram, or hey, my professional title makes me feel important? We need to have those conversations because if we don't solve that, all of the solutions are just treating the symptoms and like not the root cause.

I'm so glad your voice is out there. I really am. I hope everyone reads these books. I think, I think maybe we need them more than ever.

Last year, Denmark appointed an ambassador of GAFA, someone whose sole responsibility was to manage the state's relationship with Google and Amazon and Facebook and Apple. The Danish foreign minister said, in the years to come, we will have more bilateral relations with GAFA than with Greece. We live in an era where these companies are the ones that are making the values that we all adhere to. Because some of our biggest and most admired technology companies are American. And so globally, our standards of success have been influenced by these companies and by their culture. Welcome to Humane Productivity. I'm Rahaf Harfoush, digital anthropologist, author, and professor. And in this LinkedIn Learning course, we'll debunk outdated productivity myths. I'll show you how to evaluate your own digital habits, how to talk to your team about digital boundaries, And how to put some protocols in place to handle anything unexpected that comes your way. When you bring a technology into the workplace, you're not just bringing the functionality and the spiffy features; you are bringing an ideology of what someone thinks the world should look like. Pour des tâches qui n'existent plus dans les domaines professionnels, donc on est en train de forcer les créatifs dans des systèmes où ils doivent dire.