The aim of The Social Dilemma is to at least get people to start to realize that there is a problem, and I really appreciate the work being done by those involved with its production. There is a lot more sinister stuff going on with social media in general and its spread is global. Facebook does work to delete and remove 100s of millions of fake accounts every month on average. You think those accounts are simply being used to give likes and follows? There's a rabbit hole to tumble down here that the documentary does not touch on much.
I watched the documentary a few weeks ago and have been listening to some of the podcasts put out by The Center for Humane Technology, one of the film's main contributors. The podcast name is "Your Undivided Attention" and they go in to a lot more detail about specific tactics of social media companies, discussion on the attention economy (their term for basically any form of media that is competing for your clicks/views), social psychology, mental health impact, possible steps to address, and a lot more.
I've been heavily against social media personally for 10+ years so this kind of thing is interesting to me. However, my viewpoint has been more along the lines of "I'm not going to participate, and those big companies can't get to me. Sucks to be those other people wasting their time." But that mindset is shifting as I see these things weaponized more and more.
There has been a thought bugging me for a long while though. "Where would we be if the best programmers, engineers, etc weren't getting paid top dollar to work at the big tech companies trying to maximize profit?"
That's starting to sound pretty anti-capitalist, but I assure you I'm not. Just a thought that's been rolling around.
And I'm not an all-out free market guy. Definitely not as much as I used to be.
But it's tough to say that without intervention outside of the market we would have as quickly addressed things like leaded gasoline, CFCs, and pesticides such as DDT. Obviously it did not happen until there was government intervention. It took 50+ years of leaded gasoline use and research showing that 10s of millions of children were being exposed to toxic levels of it before the EPA was established and mandated that cars be able to burn unleaded fuel in 1975. And finally in 1996 unleaded gas was banned for almost all land vehicles.
This is getting a bit long-winded, and I don't want to divert the discussion away from the documentary.
But the point I'm getting to is that, compared to the negatives and potential for misuse that we are starting to see in social media and technology, we have had much more easily identifiable negative impacts from using certain chemicals or compounds.
We've seen how things have changed so rapidly in the US by looking at the last 4 presidential elections and the perception of them in the media. Not-so-coincidentally this lines up with widespread smart phone and social media acceptance.
So, I think The Social Dilemma is trying to spur the conversation of the negatives of social media forward a little faster.
Tl;dr -
We live in a world in which a tree and a whale is worth more financially dead than alive. For as long as corporations act in this way and are unregulated, these corporations are going to continue to destroy trees, to mine the earth… Now humans are the trees and whales. We are more profitable while we are spending time staring at a screen and consuming advertising and providing data to these big unregulated companies like Facebook, Google and the like.
Justin Rosenstein – Co-Founder of Asana and One Project; Former engineering lead at Facebook; Former product manager at Google
