What Netflix’s Social Dilemma Gets Wrong about the Power of Social Media
I wasn’t sure what to expect from “The Social Dilemma,” a new Netflix documentary about the ways in which social networks infiltrate our psyches and disrupt our seemingly stable institutions. The movie has received positive reviews for its accessible treatment of this timely topic, but the fact that Netflix uses the same tactics as Facebook or Instagram to keep our eyeballs glued to the screen, made me wonder just how far the documentary could go.
Though the movie does a great job explaining the tech giants’ complex mechanisms of manipulation, it fails to consider the social and political failures that have left both our psyches and our democracies vulnerable to their exploitation.
As we learn during the first ten minutes, the film’s main protagonists are some of the entrepreneurs who had helped build these tech giants. Tristan Harris, for example, was Google’s “Design Ethicist” until he underwent a crisis of conscience and became a proselytizer for “humane” technology. He and others like him explain (mansplain?) the inner workings of the apps that collects minute data about us and use it to manipulate our thoughts and habits. Not surprisingly almost all of these intrepid reformers are young, white, and male. As they address the camera from underneath a halo of impressionistic lighting, their charisma and ambition speak as loudly as the stories they tell.
These interviews are intercut with a fictional dramatization of the toll technology takes on a suburban Everyfamily, and in particular its younger children: a teenage boy and a pre-teen girl, both of whom experience the world through little bright screens. Neither of the children can keep away from their devices and both suffer emotional consequences because of them. This dramatization isn’t much better written and acted than the cautionary videos we’ve been shown at school, yet the young protagonists are sympathetic, and the simple narratives get the point across.
The film’s main argument, which becomes evident about half-way through the film, is that digital, mobile technologies are manipulative and persuasive in unprecedented ways. At various moments we are treated to a visualization where a personified algorithm — played by a triple-cloned Vincent Kartheiser of Madmen fame— monitors and controls the actions of a half-paralyzed users. The interfaces and algorithms, we are told, have been designed to tap into the most primitive pleasure-seeking parts of our brain, using our desire for companionships and well-being to sell advertising.
The movie is at its strongest when it shows the harm that these technologies do to children and young adults. In the fictional sequence we see how Instagram affects the youngest girl’s self-image, and how the teenage boy disengages from his peers and is eventually drawn into the underworld of the “Extreme Center” — a conspiracy-theory ridden online subculture. Alarming charts demonstrate that the rates of depression and suicide for young people began to surge around 2008, when social media apps started to become widespread.
But as the movie begins to analyze the influence of social media on politics and society, its arguments become narrow and simplistic. By intercutting interviews with scenes of social unrest, the filmmakers variously reiterate the familiar claim that Facebook and Twitter use their hyper-persuasive algorithms to sow division and undermine democracies. Just like the teenage boy, adult citizens are beguiled by charismatic internet personalities and “fake news” that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Though most of us have heard these claims before, reiterating them is actually not a bad thing. After all, social media owes much of its power to repetition — the fact that we turn to it over and over again throughout the day. The problem is that the filmmakers don’t stop there. By amping up the foreboding soundtrack and the apocalyptic rhetoric, they want to convince us that the crisis we’re facing is unprecedented and that the technology is both the cause and the solution.
Clearly, this is not the first time that social and political structures are being disrupted by technological innovation. The history of communication technologies is also a history of social disruption. Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type around 1450 led to the spread of Protestantism through many bloody wars and enabled the major revolutions of the last three centuries. Further innovations in print and the invention and popularization of the typewriter transformed gender roles. The radio, as some argue, was an extremely effective means of political propaganda in the early 20th century, contributing to the rise of the Nazi party.
But the movie’s worst omission is of the political and economic conditions that allow Facebook, Twitter and Google to hold so much power over our hearts and minds. The movie argues that these technologies erode our social and political institutions, but in fact they arrived at a time when years of neoliberal policy have already weakened everything from “traditional” media to education to systems of government. Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg took an advantage of a cultural void and a deficit of trust in governing bodies. Under different circumstances their addictive and persuasive technologies would still have caused a disruption, but they wouldn’t have brought us to the brink.
At the conclusion, the filmmakers and their interviewees insist on turning to technology for solutions: perhaps the tech giants can be reigned in by stronger regulation; maybe the apps themselves can be made less addictive, less attuned to our vices and impulses. But as we’ve seen over the past 10 years — and throughout history — such attempts are more or less useless. These technologies have become part of our life, our politics, and our economy. They are here to stay. If we want to regain control over our consciousness and our culture, we have to strengthen the institutions that allow us to form social bonds and exchange ideas in meaningful ways — without algorithms or ads. As long as schools, universities, media outlets and governments bow down to the logic of capitalism, social technologies will likely continue to exert unchecked, insidious power over populations set adrift by inequitable governance, poor education, and deficient safety nets.
