'A climate change-scale problem': how the
internet is destroying us
Documentary
films
The Social Dilemma, a new Netflix film, meets former
tech executives and developers who helped build the online world – and think
it’s causing serious harm
Adrian
Horton
Tue 8 Sep
2020 16.23 BSTLast modified on Tue 8 Sep 2020 17.12 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/08/the-social-dilemma-netflix-internet-tech-film
In 2010,
the writer Zadie Smith urged users of Facebook to step back and consider the
look of one’s Facebook “wall”: doesn’t it look ridiculous, she asked, “your
life in this format? The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps
me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do
that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface
with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg.” The year 2010 is basically archaic, in
social media terms, and yet Smith was spot on in reading Facebook not as an
inspiring phenomenon, or even a world-opening tool of connection, but as a
flattening, bottomless manmade trap – a series of narrow, insidious design
choices made by a select group of real people.
“Never
before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men,
white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies” — Google, Apple and
Facebook — “had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend
their attention,” wrote Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris in a 144-page
PowerPoint manifesto called A Call To Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’
Attention, which exploded within the company in 2013. Then a software designer
working to make Gmail more “enjoyable”, Harris was concerned by the company’s
ravenous pursuit of profit through attention without consideration of its
consequence.
At the
time, Harris’s presentation garnered buzz but largely fell on deaf ears; social
media and tech companies’ hunger for growth and engagement through distraction
and division continued apace. But in the years since the 2016 election, in
which Russian disinformation campaigns on Facebook played an influential if not
consequential role in helping to elect Donald Trump, numerous tech insiders
have joined Harris in publicly condemning the tools they built. “I wish more
people could understand how this works, because it shouldn’t be something that
only the tech industry knows,” says Harris in The Social Dilemma, a new Netflix
documentary on the untenability of our current social media landscape. “It
should be something that everybody knows.”
The Social
Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski, explores and animates a philosophical shift
in Silicon Valley: that the tech industry’s tools, most predominantly social
media, aren’t promising tools but too-powerful entities fragmenting attention
and rewiring brains by design; that addiction to phones and social media is a
function of their business model; that this divisive, degrading status quo is
driving us straight to dystopia.
This is a
dark conclusion many have already reached, be it relative of a QAnon convert or
everyday American whose hand has been reshaped into a phone-sized claw, but the
film grounds its critique in first-person warnings from Silicon Valley
insiders, most prominently Harris, but also: former Facebook platform
operations manager Sandy Parakilas; Bailey Richardson, one of Instagram’s 13
original employees who has since deleted the app; virtual reality pioneer,
philosopher and “tech oracle” Jaron Lanier; and Justin Rosenstein, the guy
behind Facebook’s “like” button. The film is part accounting of the grave
psychological and social damage caused by algorithmic, growth-determined
content feeds, as explained by experts such as Dr Shoshana Zuboff, the author
of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and it’s part dramatization of
destructive design choices – Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser anthropomorphizes an
amoral algorithm programmed to feed addictive and jittering content.
The point
is that our current social media impasse, a concentration of power over users
made both twitchy and sluggish, is neither acceptable nor changeable without a
radical reimagining of tech companies. It’s a far cry from the expansive,
hopeful dialogue of the early aughts, when Orlowski repped Apple computers as a
Stanford undergraduate and believed the internet “could take us further, and
faster – this technology could be massively empowering”, he told the Guardian.
But by
2017, when Orlowski caught up with Harris, an acquaintance from college who
left Google in 2015 to form the Center for Humane Technology, a cultural
“techlash” over the perils of surveillance capitalism, the psychological damage
of social media designed to fragment attention, and the grave threat of
widespread misinformation had begun to cement.
That
techlash – from the combative anti-trust congressional hearings with tech CEOs
last month to the #StopHateForProfit campaign against Facebook – is still a
relatively recent phenomenon. When Orlowski began work on The Social Dilemma,
in 2017 and early 2018, it was difficult to get people to voice their gnawing
concerns on the record. “I don’t think [The Social Dilemma] could’ve been made
five years ago,” he said. “It took quite a while until we got to a place where
we had enough people on camera who were willing to speak out.”
But by
2018, the power of mushroomed technology companies had forced many in Silicon
Valley to re-evaluate the purpose of the tools they built, and the impact of
capitalist incentives of design choices. “Technology is not inevitable,” said
Orlowski. “People are making it based on, in part, the market and market
forces, and in part their values, ethics and choices. Google and Facebook chose
to go down a path that really optimized financial profitability.” Facebook, for
example, developed a bureau of talent known for “growth hacking” – design that
prioritized as much “user” growth as possible to rake in ungodly profits,
algorithms that elevated emotionally manipulative, divisive content.
Orlowski
compared the scale and rapidity of social media to the discovery of oil, which
propelled humanity to previously unfathomed speeds and distances and physical
connectivity at devastating long-term ecological cost. Similarly, he said, what
once seemed like a utopian promise of connection has been revealed to burn
through our data and attention and emotional stability for profit. “We’ve
become the resource. We have become the oil,” he said. “They’re mining and
extracting us, with no regards for the consequences it has on the society.”
The Social
Dilemma is particularly concerned about the political polarization accelerated
by social media networks, how Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter have
“become the digital infrastructure, they’ve become public utilities”, said
Orlowski. “They are the backbone of our information communication and yet they
are systemically putting people on their own islands of thought.”
But it
doesn’t have to be that way – “we can design a better internet,” he said. The
US could enact stricter laws around privacy on social media; companies could
reorient to deeper connections with fewer people rather than encouraging
unlimited reach that collapses context and a sense of scale. We could tax data
collection; there could be a shift toward what Lanier calls “data dignity” –
ownership over whatever data and insights you contribute to the cloud. There
could be platform bankruptcy, in which the giants would reset their user and
group follower counts to zero and rebuild from the ground up with robust
disinformation and hate speech policies.
But all of
these measures would be temporary Band-Aids; many, including several Social
Dilemma speakers, have concluded that the behemoth that is Facebook is too
large to govern responsibly, making reform impossible; the promised utopia of a
connected, generative online world is not achievable with the current
architecture of social media, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine a better
internet.
That’s the
hope proffered by The Social Dilemma, which ends on a note of possibility for
conscience-oriented tech to guard us from societal doom. “This is a climate
change-scale problem,” said Orlowski, noting a comparison of collective,
systemic change required over individual action. It’s possible, he said, if you
believe in the promise of more humanely oriented technology. “We can design
technology that works for humanity,” he said. “It’s absolutely a huge shift,
but it’s completely doable.”
The Social
Dilemma is available on Netflix on 9 September
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