Posted on:Oct 01 2020
“The Social Dilemma” is a documentary now streaming on Netflix.
Please watch it, soon, maybe more than once, and spread. the. word.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it groundbreaking news but it’s timely, and its value lies in pulling together some alarming, somewhat abstract concepts into a genuinely scary whole.
The documentary is a sobering ride as it scrolls through the ways social media warps our perceptions. It does an excellent job of explaining “addiction by design.” For me, it also helps explain this weird shift in the world’s atmosphere that started, oh I don’t know, a little over ten years ago and has been spreading and gathering momentum ever since. A shift of not knowing what to believe anymore.
Are there seriously people who think the world is flat ?!
If it’s not already clear to you how the system is rigged, it will be after watching this documentary - we’re lab rats, we’re being exploited and manipulated at, IMO, a level of creepiness that should bother us all. Maybe some of the consequences were unforeseen, but make no mistake, the strategies were intentional.
JSYK, I’m writing from the angle of a non-subscriber - I never got into any of the social media platforms and would’ve avoided Facebook entirely if not for the LRNhappiness business page, which operates differently than a personal page though I couldn’t tell you all the ways how (!), and needing a way to generate an online presence.
In the documentary, several Silicon Valley defectors talk to the camera, including the guy who led the Like button effort at Facebook, Justin Rosenstein. He says the team’s “only motivation was to spread positivity and love in the world.”
Hmm. How could a person not imagine the dark side of this button? How a teenager could become deeply depressed over not getting enough likes? It’s the online version of the popularity contest. I remember, back in the day, how a “cool girl,” with one sideways glance at my shoes or my hair or whatever could make me wish I was invisible. As if it's not hard enough to endure this shit at school from 8 - 3, there's an open-all-hours platform for doubling down.
Lucky for us, Justin and these other young executives, designers, and software engineers have left their crazy lucrative and influential positions to talk about their general misgivings about what’s going on, as well as their ethical concerns about addictive media that keep their head in the sand about their addictiveness; about political concerns over the polarization of society; about the spread of fake news.
Tristan Harris, a defector from Google, says in the movie: “When you look around you it feels like the world is going crazy. Is this normal or have we all fallen under some spell?”
On photo tagging : “When Facebook found that feature they just dialed the hell out of it,” says another interview subject.
The vertical scroll is likened to a Vegas slot machine : “Pull down, refresh, there’s always going to be a new thing at the top.”
Around the conversations with defectors, there’s some family dramatization going on and also a trio of all-knowing, all-seeing controllers - algorithms incarnate - who send users videos, photos, notifications, snippets of news or whatever trivia it takes to drive up their usage and keep them scrolling scrolling scrolling through ads and encourage them to invite friends who invite more friends on and on.
“Surveillance capitalism.”
The “attention-extraction model” of software design.
Chasing Likes and “fake, brittle popularity.”
It’s one thing to serve up a bunch of ads we look through while gathering data that predicts our behavior. It’s a whole different game to harness algorithms to the task of serving up the counterfeit news of our individualized feeds that reinforces our beliefs, immerses us in alternative realities, and helps foster conspiracy theories.
Can our democracy survive this blurring of fact and fiction?
Tristan again: “Imagine a world where no one believes what’s true.”
That's one scary imagining...
What can you do to push back on tech’s agenda?
Delete some apps.
Don’t click the bait.
Turn off notifications.
Be a beast about time management.
Unfollow outrage media.
Help raise awareness.
Maybe get a little ticked off at the deliberate design to extract your attention...extract it away from important things like having a real conversation, or doing nothing, or Googling your own brain (aka thinking). Maybe get a little ticked off at the massive interference with and undermining of our shared truth and reality.
Humans created this and humans must create something else. Quickly. Because we're ten years into this chaos and no one wins this kind of war on our psyche.
We need a world-wide cultural movement.
P.S. If you're into podcasts, Sam Harris's "Making Sense" is a favorite. In #218 Welcome to the Cult Factory, he talks to Tristan Harris.
