Which social dilemma?
A few days ago, like another couple billion semi-confined people on the planet with a Netflix account, I saw The social dilemma appear on my screen. I clicked on Friends reruns instead. Then the promo came back with a vengeance: apparently, now, it was in the top most watched movies on the platform. I started checking out the trailer: looked just like Black Mirror, only as a documentary. Side note: I have never seen Black Mirror.
So I did what I do best: watched more Friends reruns. Then (actual) friends of mine started mentioning the thing on Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram… OK, basically, on Facebook: it’s all just one big company, in case you didn’t know by now. Which is kind of the point of the documentary — we finally watched it one night we were out of new (or old) romantic comedies. And not only does it go heavy on the monopoly threat that this behemoth of a company — along with Google and a few others — poses, but it also quite directly asserts that social media is a giant manipulation apparatus designed to slowly but surely tweak your mind into buying whatever product is being advertised on said platform. In other words, the stuff Orwell would have killed to write about.
“It’s like the fundamental way that this stuff is designed isn’t going in a good direction.” — Tristan Harris, de facto star of this show
Now, quick side note on who this Tristan Harris guy, who’s on screen about half the time, actually is: while working at Google, he came up with a slide deck on the ethical problems big tech companies — like Google — were posing in this day and age. Then he left to create a sort of non profit whose purpose is to fight for more humane tech. While this is all well and good, what the documentary doesn’t mention is that Harris actually got bought up by Google (for an undisclosed amount) along with the startup he created… which developed a rich media search engine. Talk about what you know, I guess.
The bigger point here is the wild claim Harris makes (above) that, as far as he is concerned, the entire tech industry is inherently flawed and therefore dangerous. Another speaker, Shoshana Zuboff (who, incredibly, taught at Harvard), does one better by comparing tech companies with human organ trafficking and human slavery, which should all be outlawed just the same. And there is a scripted part throughout which comes up in-between interviews, where we see a fairly normal teenager get so messed up by social media that he ends up in some obscure radical political group, in a thinly vailed parallel with the extreme right wing, conspiracy theorist, Trump voter groups that we hear about way too much these days.
So, what gives? Is social media potentially dangerous? You bet. And so is television, radio, the internet in general and, oh, books. In other words, every bit of technological evolution ever designed to help humans communicate ideas amongst each other. And, while a book / television set / social media platform can indeed say a lot of crap, and while AI can somewhat accentuate the risk today, what the movie completely ignores is all the rest — all the good stuff. Facebook’s algorithms actually allow you to find things you might enjoy quicker. Google allows you to get access to information in a way that has never been so swift and efficient. And, lest we forget, social media can even trigger democratic revolutions: remember how Twitter and Facebook helped the 2009 Iranian revolution, or the Arab spring movements? And how, interestingly, many autocratic regimes try to take down the very same platforms?
It is always healthy to ponder the downsides of any new phenomenon — and definitely pertinent to work on regulating said phenomenon if it comes to play a significant role in society, which is clearly the case with tech and social media today. Incidentally, we could start by making sure Apple and Google actually pay their taxes. But to discount an entire technological trend just because it comes at a risk amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or is it throwing websites out with human traffickers?