‘The Social Dilemma’ Exposes the Need for a Fundamental Reassessment of Social Media

You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete — Buckminster Fuller, American architect, systems theorist, and futurist

The 38-million-and-counting people who watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix experienced a very methodical and compelling argument for something they likely suspected for a long time: that social media was having a significant negative impact on their mental and physical health.

The Social Dilemma featured an impressive roster of former executives from the major social networks all discussing how their former employers, in a quest to increase their monthly active users, impressions, and profits, drove policies and algorithm changes to increase social media addiction and expose their users to outrage, confusion, and conspiracy theories.

It does not matter that the founders of these social networks had a humble or positive impetus for creating their respective companies. No matter their intent, these platforms were not built to create a true connection between people. Without a real reason for empathy and trust between people, they were always going to end up as they did, and they’re all too far gone to change.

The positive stories when, for instance, a community assembles on Facebook to donate to someone who lost their house to a natural disaster or Twitter users band together to help find a missing cat, are too far and infrequent to blunt the daily attacks and animus that pervades the newsfeeds.

Simply put, these companies built their platforms in a way that made negative engagements unavoidable.

The documentary is a foundational asset for a long-overdue conversation about social media’s drain on society. But while The Social Dilemma made a forceful argument, it fell short of prescribing any solution.

The “star” of the Social Dilemma is former Google engineer Tristan Harris, who now serves as co-founder and president of the Center for Humane Technology, which seeks to “realign technology with humanity.”

Harris recently sat down for an expansive, two-hour podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, who asked a question on many people’s minds after watching the documentary.

Rogan: “Your organization highlights all of these issues… and it’s very important. But do you have any solutions?”

After a long pause, Harris responds: “It’s hard, right? This is as complex a problem as climate change in the sense that you need to change the business model.”

Social media’s pernicious effect is not a new topic of discussion. Douglas Rushkoff has long sounded the alarm over technology’s potential pall on humanity and has continued the conversation in his book (and podcast) Team Human. Long before that, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 had competing but similarly foreboding treatises of technology’s power to marshall forces for evil or reinforce existing power structures at the expense of humanity.

Rushkoff’s 2019 TedTalk is the ideal precursor to The Social Dilemma.

“Does social media connect people in new, interesting ways? No, social media is about using our data to predict our future behavior or influence… our future behavior so we act more in accordance with our statistical profiles,” Rushkoff said.

As a co-founder of TimeRepublik, my team and I have thought long and hard about how social media has the power to connect or tear apart communities.

We started TimeRepublik in 2012 with a simple goal: to enable people to connect online and help each other. We want to build a strong community with the sole goal of scaling empathy, dignity, and ultimately trust.

We think there is a strong value in a global time banking community where users post requests for services (walking a dog, designing a website, providing legal advice), and those who have the skills and resources to help can fulfill them.

Every day, our communities connect over the idea of service. Anyone can post a request for help and receive help from others. They pay in the time they’ve accrued in helping others. This creates a powerful and positive network effect where our members feel the value of helping and being helped.

But the exchanging of services is only the means for our members to connect initially. The goal is to drive meaningful relationships where communities trust and have empathy for each other. We believe every person has something to offer their fellow humans and that giving is more powerful than receiving. There is no algorithm to game and no flawed metrics that inspire people to inflame or demean for the goal of clicks or likes. There is no incentive to attack or post controversial topics — because the community is aligned around helping.

While there will always be those who seek to exploit or divide, we think the Internet can make it possible for a more utopian society, where individuals identify ways to help and to benefit in healthy ways.

Later in the Rogan interview, Harris says: “Social media is rewarding the things that keep people addicted, instead of rewarding meaningful things.”

While this is undoubtedly true about our current approach to each other online, it does not have to be this way.

As Rushkoff describes in his TedTalk:

“It’s not about rejecting the technological; it’s about retrieving the values we’re in danger of leaving behind and embedding them into the digital infrastructure for the future…. It’s about creating an economy that doesn’t favor a platform monopoly that wants to extract all of the value out of people and places, but one that promotes the circulation of value through a community and allows us to establish platform cooperatives that distribute ownership as wide as possible.”

We know this is possible because we’ve built a place where it already exists.

Learn more about TimeRepublik.