Weekend Watch: The Social Dilemma
Technological terror on a personal level
Image Credit: Netflix
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, how Facebook, Twitter, Google and the other beeping bastions of our phones and tablets are unravelling the social fabric.
It’s a little ironic that most people will reach this post via some fashion of social networking; sent out via email, I also promote this column via Twitter and Facebook. And Jeff Orlowski, Vickie Curtis and Davis Coombe’s Sundance Film Festival premiere The Social Dilemma is now on Netflix, which itself uses a gigantic computer brain to decide what it thinks you should watch. Because this is most certainly a cautionary tale about social media, data mining and the psychological impact on society in general and our emotions in particular.
A blend of documentary interviews with people who work in tech and are now sounding the alarm about the dangers of their creations run amok around the ‘net and a dramatic representation of the impact on a family’s teenagers, The Social Dilemma presents a clear-eyed look at how behaviour-modifying behemoths such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others are slowly degrading societal contact. Not to mention promoting depression and unnatural beauty expectations and generally messing with our brains for money. Think you’re just casually swiping and scrolling and searching? Think again! Every touchscreen press, every cat video watched, every news story you read based on one of these platforms is being carefully monitored and logged to build a virtual model of you, primed to sell you that perfect set of shoes, or, in a more worrying development, subtly influence your political stance.
The meatiest material here is from the real-life tech gurus, such as Tristan Harris, who spent years working as a “Google Ethicist” (surely a candidate for oxymoron of the century) and who is now looking to find a way to make technology more human and more humane. Sounding the alarm to anyone who will listen, he recounts his frustration at a Jerry Maguire-style document that sparked multiple meetings but little actual results. It hasn’t stopped him trying to improve the world, and he’s not alone. Trouble is, we’re all guilty of letting technology run our lives and choosing to ignore the warning signs – this side of the film doesn’t just point the finger at the money-grabbing corporations who have handed such things over to teams of engineers and temperature-controlled banks of supercomputers. It also highlights the human element, our worst tribal natures and need to hand over decision-making to someone (or something else). And the tech gurus angle is fascinating: at times, it is a little like hearing Grand Moff Tarkin talk about how the Death Star was perhaps a bad idea for galactic peace.
Less impactful is the dramatic side of things, in which Skyler Gisondo plays Ben, a teen who is being manipulated by the apps on his phone (makes sense that the evil algorithm is played in triplicate by Vincent “Pete Campbell from Mad Men” Kartheiser). It’s a perfectly fine morality play and helps to highlight just how insidious these virtual gizmos can be, but it’s not exactly a subtle exploration of the subject.
The Social Dilemma might just make you want to delete Instagram or WhatsApp from your phone, and it’ll almost certainly have you switching off notifications. But ask yourself this question – are you already too reliant on the dopamine hit of a tagged photo or a liked post?
Oh, and please like this blog post.
See?
The Social Dilemma is on Netflix now.