Distracting, polarizing, dividing, controlling, manipulating. These are the adjectives used in a new documentary to describe social media technology that promises to connect us. Slated as a ‘docu-drama hybrid’ by distributor Netflix, The Social Dilemma is described as an exploration of the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. The film features interviews with former executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, who are now speaking out on the darkside of social media platforms. The alarm bells they ring are interspersed with a dramatization of a family torn apart by the detrimental effects of social media use. The impact of these two narratives intertwining in one film is jawdropping.
It has made a splash, not just – ironically — on friends Facebook pages calling for folks to be aware of how detrimental social media usage can be, but also in the mainstream press. “Perhaps the single most lucid, succinct and profoundly terrifying analysis of social media ever created for mass consumption,” writes Indiewire about The Social Dilemma. Vanity Fair offers that “the Social Dilemma may finally convince you that we’re being watched, manipulated and misled by unscrupulous platforms and attention-harvesting algorithms.”
The underlying issue that the docudrama raises is that the monetization of social media platforms is leading to unfavorable outcomes among individuals and ultimately society. “Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube. Companies like this, their business model is to keep people engaged on the screen,” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, in The Social Dilemma. “When I was there, I always thought it was a force fundamentally for good,” says a former Twitter employee. “I’m not sure if I feel that way anymore.”
The need to retain eyeballs and create revenue has led to what was once considered ethically positive or benign social media products, to be reconsidered as harmful by those that created them. “You release them and they take on a life of their own,” the former Twitter employee says. “And how they are used is pretty different from how you intended.” He is one of many people speaking out who are uncomfortable with the role they have played in creating products that impact mental health and are shifting political and social structures all over the world.
“Never before in history have 50 designers – 20 to 35-year-old white guys in California – made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people,” Tristan Harris states in The Social Dilemma. “Two billion people will have thoughts that they didn’t intend to have because a designer at Google said “this is how notifications work on that screen that you wake up to in the morning.” Harris has since left the tech industry and is now co-founder at the Center for Humane Technology. He also hosts a podcast called ‘Your Undivided Attention’ where experts are interviewed to unravel ‘the ways that digital platforms pose an existential threat to the social fabric.’
So how do these platforms create big systemic changes in societies? The answer is in changing the thoughts of one individual at a time. “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product,” says computer scientist Jaron Lanier in the film. Lanier wrote a book on the darkside of advertising and nudging users to think differently called ‘Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.’ He previously authored a booked by the name of ‘You Are Not A Gadget.’
“That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from. Changing what you do, how you think, who you are. It’s a gradual change. It’s slight. If you can go to somebody and you say, “Give me $10 million, and I will change the world one percent in the direction you want it to change…” It’s the world! That can be incredible, and that’s worth a lot of money.”
Shoshana Zuboff is a social psychologist and a professor at Harvard. “This is what every business has always dreamt of: to have a guarantee that if it places an ad, it will be successful. That’s their business. They sell certainty,” says Zuboff in the film. She explains how the information that social media companies extract is of value to advertisers, and that the revenue they pay to social media platforms has made them extraordinarily influential. “In order to be successful in that business, you have to have great predictions. Great predictions begin with one imperative: you need a lot of data. Many people call this surveillance capitalism, capitalism profiting off of the infinite tracking of everywhere everyone goes by large technology companies whose business model is to make sure that advertisers are as successful as possible.”
Zuboff connects nudging our thoughts and actions to economics. “This is a new kind of marketplace now. It’s a marketplace that never existed before. And it’s a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures.” She wants that this marketplace is infinitely lucrative. “Just like there are markets that trade in pork belly futures or oil futures. We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale, and those markets have produced the trillions of dollars that have made the Internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity.”