The Social Dilemma
Jeff Orlowski's latest polemic is a vigorous indictment of the insidious manipulation and control exercised by Internet platforms.
Programmed addiction
It’s a fact that millions of people believe the coronavirus
is a real thing. In a YouGov survey it was revealed that one in six Americans
were not convinced the earth was round. And the leader of one of the three most
powerful nations on earth suggested that maybe we could inject bleach into our veins
to fight off that fictitious virus. Hard as it is to believe, people will
believe anything. The thing is, with the influence of global, profit-hungry
organisations like Google, Twitter and Facebook, we can no longer agree on what
is true. Apparently, fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than the
truth – because the truth is boring.
Many a documentary rises or falls by the conviction of its
talking heads. In Tristan Harris, former ‘design ethicist’ at Google and co-founder
of the Center for Humane Technology, it has an engaged, charismatic presence
whose views embody the substance of the film. The Social Dilemma is anything if not clear: social media, search
engines and multinational technology companies like Amazon are destroying civilisation.
As Harris says, if a product appears to be free, then we are the product. Borrowing
its title and logo from David Fincher’s The
Social Network (2010), the film jumps forward one whole decade and sees the
mess that Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk have left us in.
Much of The Social
Dilemma, directed and co-written by Jeff Orlowski – who won the Emmy for
his climate change documentary Chasing
Ice (2012) – regurgitates the familiar. But its cumulative effect, and its neat
introduction of a fictitious teenage protagonist called Ben (played by Skyler
Gisondo), punches home its message with articulate, frightening urgency. In
amongst the on-camera declarations by well-informed doom-mongers like Harris, Aza
Raskin and Jaron Lanier, Ben attempts to survive a whole week without his mobile
phone (spoiler alert: he fails). He, along with millions of teenagers like him,
gobble up the digital ephemera fed them in order to sustain the appetite for
data by the monsters of Silicon Valley. The more data the companies harvest,
the bigger the profit margin – and to hell with the mental health of the next
generation. Since the proliferation of social media, the hospitalisation of
pre-adults from self-harming and attempted suicide has jumped exponentially. No
self-respecting school child can live up to the avatar of perfection with which
they are spoon-fed.
But beyond scrambling the egos and expectations of an entire
generation, the Internet is displaying an even graver trend. It is promoting
civil war. According to one pundit, more than a third of Republicans in the US say
that the Democratic party is a threat to the nation, while more than a quarter
of Republicans say the same thing about the Democrats. Come the third of November
2020, well… watch this space. Even scarier is that when people in Myanmar purchase
a mobile phone, Facebook is already installed on the device. And on that
version of Facebook – indistinguishable from the World Wide Web – the military posted
anti- Rohingya propaganda, resulting in the largest case of human migration in
recent history.
The fact is, nobody can no longer agree what is true.
Depending on who or where you are, the same request typed into a Google search
engine will offer up different results. In the words of data researcher Renée DiResta,
“what we are seeing is a global assault on democracy,” and, perhaps more
emotionally, US Senator Jon Tester opined: “when all this shit comes to
fruition… it scares me to death.” The venture capitalist and musician Roger
McName reasons that, “if everyone is entitled to their own facts, there’s really
no need for compromise, no need for people to come together. [But] we need to have some shared understanding
of reality.”
It hasn’t been a vintage year for horror films, but this is
one scary entry.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Featuring Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, Justin Rosenstein,
Shoshana Zuboff, Jaron Lanier, Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Vincent Kartheiser,
Jonathan Haidt, Cathy O'Neil, Rashida Richardson, Anna Lembke, Roger McNamee, Renée
DiResta, Jon Tester.
Dir Jeff Orlowski,
Pro Larissa Rhodes, Screenplay Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis
and Jeff Orlowski, Ph John Behrens
and Jonathan Pope, Pro Des Adam Wheatley,
Ed Davis Coombe, Music Mark A. Crawford, Costumes
Suzie Ford and Melissa Karsh.
Exposure Labs/Argent Pictures/The Space Program-Netflix.
93 mins. USA. 2020. Rel: 9 September 2020. Available on Netflix. Cert. 12.