Our streaming entertainment options are overwhelming and not always easy to sort through. This week I watched Netflix’s jaw-dropping documentary on social media, The social dilemma, which played at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Since the streaming service launched it in September, it’s generated a lot of buzz on – you guessed it – social media.
The agreement
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Instagram, Pinterest… If you think these are wonderful free tools designed to inform, connect and entertain you, think again. “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” warns Tristan Harris, a former Google designer who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology.
Director Jeff Orlowski has assembled a cast of talking heads who understand social media networks because they helped build them – former high-rollers from Twitter, Apple, Facebook and more. They describe how these networks are designed to be physiologically addictive, delivering dopamine hits like slot machines while selling our attention to the highest bidder. They warn of the “fragile fake popularity” that social media offers and link it to rising rates of teenage self-harm and suicide.
Finally, the film details the threats disinformation can pose to democracy when social media takes it viral. With Facebook’s total ban on QAnon content for less than two months and hashtags promoting presidential election conspiracy theories still trending, this side of the story continues to unfold before our eyes.
Will you like it?
For all its news, The social dilemma does not announce any great news. If you’ve been following what people like Harris and Jaron Lanier (Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) have been saying this for years, nothing here will surprise you. But it’s still powerful and persuasive to see all the arguments summarized in one place.
Where Orlowski stumbles is in dramatizing these arguments. Admittedly, pundits sitting in office chairs aren’t all that fun to watch for 94 minutes, but the doc gains little from a series of scripted interludes attempting to show how the dynamics of “surveillance capitalism” takes place in the real world. We watch the world’s most generic suburban family argue over their use of social media, until teenage bully Ben (Skyler Gisondo) succumbs to his phone’s siren song and slips down a rabbit hole alt -right.
This skit features amusing surreal scenes in which Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell in “Mad Men”) plays three personified AIs who attempt to monopolize Ben’s attention like an evil version of the emotions in Upside down. Overall, though, this nail-biting family drama is reminiscent of the 2014 internet flick. Men, women and children – it’s awful.
The social dilemma is a better movie when it stays with the “boring” pundits, many of whom speak eloquently about how social media amplifies both the good and the bad in human nature. It’s natural for humans to care about what other humans think of them, for example, Harris mused. But “Have we evolved to be aware of what 10,000 people think of us?
Though they get alarmist at times, these talking heads aren’t Luddites who expect you to break your phone and go live in a wireless hut. They, too, are trying to figure out how to navigate what Harris calls “simultaneous utopia and dystopia.” The document is perhaps most compelling when talking about his own struggles with addiction to particular social feeds or even emails.
As the credits roll, these cookies offer some simple advice: Disable everything of your non-essential notifications! — which are none the less indispensable in order to be obvious. The message we need to take back control of our virtual lives may not be bold or new, but it bears repeating until it has to.
If you like it, try…
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016; YouTube, Tubi, Hulu, For Rent): While this may not be the most current documentary on internet culture, Werner Herzog’s quirky take on the subject is fascinating.
Terms and conditions may apply (2013; Commendable): Cullen Hoback’s documentary digs deep into all the ways we give up our right to privacy every time we click “accept” on a new app.
Eigth year (2018; Amazon Prime Video, Commendable): What if you poured your soul out on YouTube and no one clicked? While the dramatic interludes of The social dilemma leaves something to be desired, this indie drama from Bo Burnham – himself a YouTube star – offers a believable and poignant portrayal of a girl coming of age entangled in social media.