The Social Dilemma: A Horror Film Starring Us
My biggest takeaways from the 2020 documentary-drama, and why it finally opened my eyes…
Last weekend I watched 2020 documentary-drama The Social Dilemma. It left me terrified, repulsed, outraged, and numb at the same time. As a computer science major, a Silicon Valley native who previously worked at Google, I was shocked to my core by how bad the situation actually is. Sitting there while the credits rolled, I felt more worried about Facebook than I did about climate change.
I knew the big culprits: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and more. I thought I knew the problems: device addiction, fake news, mental health deterioration, polarization. But what I didn’t know was the fundamental problem underlying all of this. And I didn’t know that this problem threatens the very fabric of our society.
The Social Dilemma exposes the horrifying extent to which social media companies like Facebook have used big data and machine learning to drill down into the deepest parts of our brain stem. It shows us how social media is accelerating us towards a Matrix-like existence. I now genuinely believe that our society has a significant chance of devolving into a technological dystopia.
All that might sound way too Black Mirror. But I found The Social Dilemma a uniquely powerful exposé because it actually connected the dots all the way from cat videos to existential threat. After watching it, you cannot think of social media and persuasive technology as anything less.
Here are my five biggest takeaways from The Social Dilemma, but please don’t just take my word for it. Watch it for yourself, with undivided attention.
Big social media companies don’t sell data, they sell certainty
I’ve heard countless times before, if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product. Social media is free for us users because social media companies have paying customers: advertisers (who could be anyone from companies to political organizations to Flat Earthers.) However, it’s not accurate to say that social media companies are selling our data.
As former Firefox & Mozilla Labs employee Aza Raskin points out, it’s not in Facebook’s business interest to give up the massive amounts of user data they harvest. This data is crucial feed for Facebook’s machine learning models, which give rise to insights and predictions — the big bucks. These targeted insights and predictions allow social media companies to sell advertisers certainty, or as technology writer Jaron Lanier describes it, sell the guarantee that gradually, imperceptibly, social media platforms will shift the behavior of users over time. In a nutshell, social media companies sell a highly tunable mass manipulation system to the highest bidder.
Social media is not a tool — it’s much worse
A tool is something that sits passively waiting to be used. The purpose of a tool is to help its owner accomplish their goals. Social media is therefore not a tool, because a) it doesn’t sit passively waiting for us to use it, and b) its purpose is not to help us accomplish our goals. Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, warns that “if something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you, it’s manipulating you. It wants things from you.”
Social media platforms are much more than, and much worse than, tools. These platforms have their own goal (selling advertisers the ability to control our behavior) and their own means of pursuing that goal (implementing more and more addictive features). These platforms are constantly, relentlessly using the data they collect and the insights they form to drive changes in our behavior. Social media isn’t a digital tool waiting to be used — it’s using us. And, as evidenced by the global assault on truth and democracy around the world, it’s not even using us for our own good.
These platforms would be bad even without bad actors
Until I watched The Social Dilemma I thought that the problem with social media was how easy it was for those with bad intentions (e.g. sabotaging democratic elections) to abuse the platforms. This gets back to the concept of social media as a tool — tools themselves are not good or evil, people use them for good or evil purposes. I think social media has been hiding behind this concept for a very long time.
Social media as it exists today, the most sophisticated addiction machine humankind has ever known and would never win against, is an evil in and of itself. Of course, bad actors using social media to further their agendas is a monstrous issue. But even if social media was magically free of all fake news and hateful content, it would still drain more and more of our attention on ads. It would still plunge us into pits of insecurity and FOMO. It would still keep us trapped in a digital world, away from meaningful human connection. No matter how “good” the content, social media platforms are inherently bad for us. And this is no accident.
Human beings are worth more dead (inside) than alive
Justin Rosenstein, cofounder of Asana, hit me hard with this:
We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive … This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs … What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way.
Thanks to the multi-billion dollar market in human behavior that social media companies have created, the more time we spend as zombies on our devices, the more we are worth. Without financial incentives (e.g. taxing data assets) and strict legal restrictions, there is no sign that social media companies will change how they treat human beings. Their attention extraction business model is simply too profitable.
“This is checkmate on humanity”
So far, I haven’t heard anyone capture the essence of this whole mess more succinctly than Tristan Harris. Basically, we have been way too preoccupied with questions about the point in time when AI will overwhelm human strengths — I think of long-term strategizing, imagination, empathy, etc. And over the course of the digital technology race, as social media has tightened its grip over billions of minds, we’ve missed an earlier (and arguably more crucial) point in time: when AI overwhelms human weaknesses.
Human weaknesses are many — addiction pathways, tribalism, insecurity, confirmation bias, among others. Our biological software just hasn’t evolved that much. The machine learning models of social media companies are exploiting these weaknesses and “using our psychology against us” in order to capture as much of our attention as possible. They’ve proven that even relatively primitive AI systems can overwhelm human weaknesses. We’ve crossed a point of no return, and “this is checkmate on humanity.”
With social media tied so tightly to not just social connection but also to a social-professional online presence, it’s easier said than done to delete my accounts outright (Jaron Lanier might convince you though). However, the day after watching The Social Dilemma, I spent several hours (and yes, it took several hours) to dig through every single privacy, data, ads, and notifications setting of every single social media app on my phone, and turn off almost every one. No more badges or push notifications. (Since doing so, my screen time on those apps has gone down by over half, averaged over 3 weeks.) I also started using Brave as my primary browser + DuckDuckGo as my search engine.
We should all be panicking and that’s okay
Beyond these small changes, my brain is still in a numb panic. How much has my attention span degraded up to now and how much worse will it get over time? How will new generations, born into digital device addiction, form real friendships? Is this the beginning of the end of democracy? Of critical thinking in conversation? If/when I have kids, will they ever talk to me?
I hope I’m not the only one panicking. Panic used productively becomes activation energy. I’m speaking now especially to my fellow tech people. It’s just the beginning of the 21st century and we’re kind of failing. We all know policy is lagging behind tech, and that gap continues to widen. Our actions will determine how much damage occurs in that lag time. So panic! And then do something about it. Individually, our goal should be to spend less time on social media; collectively, our goal should be to completely reform it.
Myrmecology expert Edward O. Wilson once wrote:
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
So far we’ve been mostly focused on wondering what we can and will do with technology. We‘ve been neglecting to ask ourselves what technology can and will do with us. Horror or dystopian films involving AI often show humans united against a superintelligent AI. But this very minute, comparatively primitive AI systems are zombifying people and then pitting us against each other… without even being sentient. If that isn’t horror, what is?
I cannot stress how important it is for as many people as possible to watch The Social Dilemma, because even if highly dramatized, it finally explains the root problem in a way those beyond the tech world can understand. And I think once you understand that root problem, it’s just impossible not to feel personally, existentially threatened. You will want to act immediately.
Follow up on The Social Dilemma with:
- A memo from Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang, describing how Facebook ignores and perpetuates political manipulation
- Jaron Lanier’s latest book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and accompanying articles
- Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin’s new podcast, “Your Undivided Attention,” on how the big tech arms race is eroding our social fabric
- Video overview of “Humane: A New Agenda for Tech,” from the Center for Humane Technology
- New York Times interview of Tristan Harris and Yuval Noah Harari on truth decay and the technology threat
