Netflix’s new documentary “The Social Dilemma” lays out the case against the dominance of big tech companies.
The film highlights the concerns of former technology employees who say social media is undermining the common sense of reality that underpins society. “The Social Dilemma” asks viewers to reevaluate their relationship with technology, arguing that social media is eroding democracy.
Director Jeff Orlowski is known for his environmental films “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral.” Orlowski said that in “The Social Dilemma,” one of his interviewees described the existential crisis of social media as “cultural climate change.”
“[Social media] “It changes us in invisible ways through the codes and information we interact with every day,” he says. “And these platforms are changing our society and civilization before our eyes.”
After realizing the amount of influence these technology companies had, he wanted to explore this fundamental problem, which he believed was at the root of all other societal problems.
Most of the voices in the documentary are former employees of the tech giant, and Orlowski said it was difficult to get them on record. But as more people speak out in the industry, former employees are feeling more comfortable, he said.
His team wanted to focus on former employees after hearing engineers share how they designed code and executives explaining why business models worked a certain way. I thought about it. Their perspectives had “authenticity and validation” and helped audiences understand the film’s message, he says.
culture of manipulation
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and a central figure in the documentary, says social media is no longer a tool people use. Instead, he explains, social media has its own goals and pursues them by using psychology against its users.
“It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants something from you,” Harris says in the film. “And we went from a tool-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment. That’s what changed.”
The ad-centric business models behind social platforms drive this need to manipulate users, Orlowski said.
The ultimate goal for technology companies, he says, is to “identify one target audience” and extract as much data as possible about each user. This led to everyone falling down an individually hand-picked rabbit hole, or, as one of the documentary’s subjects puts it, creating “his 2.7 billion ‘Truman Shows’ operating simultaneously”. says.
“I think what concerns me most about this whole issue is that we’re moving away from a common sense of reality,” he says. “And now we all have our own individual realities, with our own individual facts, and our own individual stories that we see on a daily basis.”
The film also addresses the impact of social media on young people. Many young people don’t know a world without social media. The Social Dilemma highlights rising rates of suicide and self-harm among teenagers, especially young girls.
“We’ve created a global generation of people who have grown up in a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation,” author Jaron Lanier says in the film. . “We have put deceit and meanness at the absolute center of everything we do.”
Orlowski, 36, said she’s scared to see teenagers grow up on social platforms designed by commercial companies rather than child psychologists. He says it will take years to fully understand the impact social media has on people’s connections and relationships.
“If we don’t make these changes now, an entire generation of humanity will be fundamentally shaped by this technology in ways that we cannot predict the outcome,” he says.
Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter never intended to reach this point when they were founded, but The Social Dilemma says that doesn’t matter. Intentions aside, social media’s harmful effects now resemble those of the fossil fuel industry, Orlowski said.
He says that when people first started extracting fossil fuels from the earth, they were thought to be a useful resource for humanity. But the effects of burning fossil fuels became apparent years later, and the industry had to choose between addressing them or hiding them.
In the case of both fossil fuels and social media, he says, the industry has chosen to hide. Now, he says, the question remains whether the technology industry will decide to change in the best interest of society, or whether financial incentives will have “an unknown impact on humanity.”
Many subjects in the documentary talk about government regulation as a way to address this problem. Orlowski believes that technology companies have two options. You either choose to change or you are forced to change.
“At the end of the day, from my perspective, it’s that they have to break away from this business model, that they have to serve the interests of society first, that they have gotten so big that they have to “That means it has become a public utility,” he says. “And if they are going to play these roles, they have to play them for the purposes of society, rather than serving other masters. They contribute to the advertising model and in that way They receive funding and still fail to gain public trust.”
threat to democracy
As the presidential election approaches, American political activists and foreign officials are once again using social media to send their messages. Orlowski said he fears political misinformation and worries about the “collapse of truth,” making it increasingly difficult for people who disagree with each other to have productive discussions. It pointed out.
He says that when people cannot agree on the truth, society is at risk and it becomes difficult to address problems. In the documentary, former Pinterest president Tim Kendall said he feared civil war.
At first, Orlowski doubted Kendall’s fear. However, as he continued his editing work with this idea in mind, he was able to envision society following this destructive path.
“We have a machine whose main currency is anger and outrage,” he says. Our life experiences, and that’s what we see on a daily basis, why doesn’t it end up like that? ”
He says a shift to developing technology that brings people together rather than fostering division can prevent outcomes like civil war.
As information that is harmful to society continues to be shared, Orlowski hopes The Social Dilemma will serve as a shocking wake-up call that will snap people out of a decade-long hypnosis. Masu.
“Social media could really be designed with society’s best interests in mind. At the moment, they are designed around commercial interests. It’s a tool designed for profit,” he says. “This is the biggest problem of our time.”
Chris Bentley produced and edited this story for broadcast with Tinku Ray. Alison Hagan adapted it for the web.