A few times after wilfully ignoring its preview on my screen, I hit play on Netflix’s docu-drama, The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski (award-winning director, environmentalist, and UN Environment Champion of the Earth), the 93-minute film foregrounds the malefic parallels between our digital and offline lives. It communicates a sense of urgency through crisp talking-head interviews, moderately contrived dramatizations around a fictitious suburban American family whose lives embody some of the ills of social networking, and swathes of news clips from the last several years where reporters report on innumerable concerning manifestations of social media’s ravaging nature.
The apostates to social networking did not only work for companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Google and more, but also cradled them while they were in their infancy. They urge us to look beyond the endearing dog videos being recommended to us every minute and confront the vicious algorithms behind them that use our psychology against us. They also discourage us from swallowing the misconception that social media is a mere tool by bringing to our attention that it has its own goals and its own means to pursue them. The sinister background score and the interviews chime in perfectly with the tenor of the film.
Twitter is usually regarded as the newspaper of this century, but all the news we see on it is from the Algorithm’s Choice section. The film acquaints us with an MIT study that shows that fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news. Umpteen disturbing instances like the Pizzagate and Flat-Earth conspiracy theories, the hate speech against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims and Russian interference in the 2016 US elections were used to elucidate the ‘disinformation-for-profit’ business model that contaminates our information ecosystem. “One of the problems with Facebook is that as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created. Imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian”, says Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and an early investor in Facebook.
The film centres around Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google who has been called ‘the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience’. He poses the question: Have our brains evolved for social media? At some point in his interview, he compares the ‘pull-to-refresh’ and infinite scrolling mechanism on our news feeds to a slot machine. “It operates just like the slot machines in Vegas”, he says. Psychologically speaking, intermittent reinforcement is at the root of this mechanism. “I actually had to write myself software to break my addiction to reading Reddit”, says Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll. Almost every interlocutor on The Social Dilemma asserts that at least one breed of social networking is undeniably their Achilles’ heel.
Although I did not fancy the fictional strands in the documentary, I liked how they seemed almost incidental to the cautionary testimonies of the tech-insiders. The workings of these algorithms are amusingly personified through dramatized scenes starring Vincent Kartheiser (who plays Pete Campbell in Mad Men) as a trio of wickedly ambitious, attention-seeking oddities who promptly dispatch bespoke push-notifications, ads and recommendations to the user’s device. Through the efforts of this unethical trio, the avatar of the user goes through an intriguing character arc.
The Social Dilemma, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, has undoubtedly exposed the underbelly of these companies, but the crux of its revelation is certainly stale news. It successfully sounds the alarm on Surveillance Capitalism, but it fails to recognise it as a mere offshoot of a cultural phenomenon that is not limited to just the business models of these platforms. Its inadequacies in certain areas do not render it unworthy of being a must-see. Its hopeful ending encourages us to:
1. Turn off notifications.
2. Avoid accepting video recommendations on YouTube.
3. Use Chrome extensions that remove recommendations.
4. Fact-check before sharing information on social media.
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