The Social Dilemma: Is Tech Undermining Our Society?

Much of the internet has been abuzz lately with talk of the new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a mix of interviews with tech employees and a dramatization of the effects of social media on one family, all packaged up in a tight 94 minutes of screentime. The basic premise is that social media platforms, with their algorithms and AI, have expanded beyond what anybody could have predicted, and that the platforms have grown into Frankenstein’s monsters that nobody can control anymore.

As with just about anything, there were some parts of it that really resonated with us, and other parts where we kind of scratched our heads. Let’s take a look at the parts that we liked, first.

What we liked about The Social Dilemma:

People use tech as a digital pacifier.
One of the presenters made the point that tech has become a digital pacifier for many people. We couldn’t agree more. When life is stressful or there are things people don’t want to think about, many prefer to disappear down a rabbit hole of pretty Instagram pictures or funny tweets rather than confront the hard things head-on. It’s why we’re such big advocates of intentionally limiting screentime and why we emphasize mindful consumption of digital media.
Manipulative tech algorithms push us to extremes.
The documentary makes the very important point that social media algorithms are set up to push ever more extreme positions and information, because those extremes drive engagement more than moderate positions do. This isn’t exactly a new idea, but it bears repeating loudly and often. In pushing this content on us, social media can desensitize and acclimatize us to increasingly extreme positions, ideas, and images. It’s important to be cognizant of how the algorithms shape the content you consume and to interact intentionally with the kind of content you know is trustworthy while purposefully ignoring other content.
Social media is engineered to be addictive.
With the “pull-down to refresh” function, the endless scroll, autoplay, and so many other features, social media has been intentionally designed to keep you on the platform as long as possible. These features often borrow from known successful tactics used in casinos, and they have the same effect: they get you hooked. It’s no wonder that the average adult’s phone time has increased significantly over the last decade.

All of these points - while not necessarily revolutionary - are crucial to understanding how social media shapes our daily lives and how it helps drive societal trends that we might not otherwise understand. These are important and necessary critiques, and they need to be heard by as many people as possible.

But there were parts, too, where it felt like the documentary came up short.

Where The Social Dilemma missed the mark:

The social media manipulator characters.
Vincent Kartheiser, best known for playing the pathetically tormented Pete Campbell on Mad Men, appears in some dramatization portions of the documentary as three characters manipulating people’s engagement with social media. Articles about the film make it clear that these characters are meant to represent a Growth AI, an Engagement AI, and an Advertising AI, but this isn’t terribly clear from the film and ends up making his characters seem like cartoonish supervillains lurking inside the various social media networks.
The failure to mention Netflix is behind it.
The documentary talks a lot about the algorithms employed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to keep people hooked and scrolling. That’s all true, and something that has troubled us for a while. But there’s one thing the documentary never mentions: one of the most powerful algorithms was the one invented by Netflix, which is producing this very same documentary. Nobody in the film acknowledges that, in convincing people to dump their social media, Netflix stands to scoop up more valuable attention from its customers, who suddenly have much more time to binge-watch shows on Netflix’s platform. A reporter asked Tristan Harris about it in this interview, and he sort of danced around the subject, acknowledging that all the sites are competing against each other for attention, but never really dug into it.
The lack of historical perspective.
There’s a point in the documentary where Tristan Harris argues that “no one got upset when bicycles showed up,” and that “no one said, ‘Oh my God, we’ve just ruined society,’” because bicycles are a tool that are just sitting there, waiting to be used. That’s just simply not true. In fact, the bicycle caused a significant amount of controversy, especially as it related to independence for women and the scandalous outfits they wore while cycling. Historians have written extensively on this issue, and about how many people at the time worried that bicycles would give women too much independence, so that they wouldn’t want to settle down and marry and have children, and the social fabric would fall apart. This is the kind of historical perspective that tech companies are sorely lacking, and without it, their analysis will always be flawed. Tech needs humanities and social sciences if it’s ever going to fix its many problems, and the tech world needs to stop sneering at those “soft” subjects and recognize their inherent value.

Overall, we think The Social Dilemma is still worth watching, because there are important points to be made about how our reliance on social media has negative, unforeseen consequences. As with any form of media consumption, though, it’s important to engage critically and not simply accept what’s presented without considering who’s providing the information and why.

Happy watching.

7 quick tips to curb your tech use

If you’re looking for 7 quick tips to curb your tech use and liberate you from big-tech’s algorithms and the social dilemma, check these out:

Turn off all those push notifications on your smartphone and desktop.
Use Duck Duck Go to search the internet — the search engine that doesn’t track your activity or build a profile to target ads and results to you (or use Chrome in incognito mode).
Put physical distance between yourself and your phone if you want to stop reaching for it involuntarily (eg. put it in another room or lock it in a cabinet, etc.).
Check your Screen Time App on your smartphone occasionally to remind yourself how long you’re actually spending staring at Instagram.
Remove YouTube recommendations, and avoid going down click-baity rabbitholes that serve you more of what you already like, with the help of this Chrome plugin.
Perform a digital wellness checkup to make sure you’re using your tech the way you want to.
Read these books to get more ideas and learn about others’ fight against the social dilemma and big tech’s power.