The Social Dilemma

It was towards the end of October when I received this blog post from Erin Kirk's "Girl Catch Fire" regarding the "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix.  Micah and I met Erin when we joined Mercy Ships in Tyler, Texas in 2014.  That same week, one of my co-workers at the Y was talking about it and encouraging us to watch it.  Today I did.  I encourage you to do likewise.  Here's a bit of Erin's post:

Then last night I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix. 

People have been talking a lot about it because it answers, in an informed and intelligent way, the question: How did we get like this?

The fake news. The division. The polarization. The out-of-hand election behavior. The astonishment you feel when talking politics with your relatives at Thanksgiving: Wondering where do they get this nonsense information and how can people be so deceived? What is even true anymore? 

The Social Dilemma asks those questions of the programmers and the early-stage developers of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat etc. - the people who accidentally accelerated and amplified an existing problem with human nature. 

Now they are sounding the alarm in a big way, saying the technology has gotten away from us and is making the world worse and more dangerous in demonstrable ways. 

The key takeaways are these:

1. Any platform that’s free to you, is not really free. YOU ARE THE COMMODITY. Not your data or personal information, like people think. It’s your attention and suggestibility that’s for sale. We’re happily sold into this market without realizing it, or the impact it has at scale. In other words, what happens when 2 billion people are unwittingly manipulated by giant commercial interests or foreign and domestic powers with nefarious agendas. That’s what’s happening when you post a selfie. Really, watch the documentary.

2. The designers who created the “like button” and “suggested videos” did so without ill intent. They were doing their jobs: Building the most efficient systems they could to keep users on the platform longer. When they figured out how to monetize and manipulate that time, without you knowing it, the business model was born and spread throughout the entire industry.

3. Those engineers got trained in human psychology and how to manipulate pain and pleasure pathways in the slowly-evolving human brain. With that knowledge, they created an electronic drug, gave it to us free, called us “users” and now that we can’t look away, they sell our eyeballs. That concept isn’t new, what’s new is the scale and speed at which it’s operating and the damage it’s doing to particular demographics, like teenagers. 

4. These electronic drugs are unregulated because regulators don’t yet understand the risks they pose, but the people who created them do, and they’re are having a collective holy shit moment. In other words, this model has created the most profitable companies in the history of mankind, so it will be tough to get the genie back in the bottle.

I’m writing about this because before watching The Social Dilemma I unplugged from about 80% of my regular FB/Insta/Google time. I missed nothing, I felt better and was freer than I’d been in a long time, but I couldn’t articulate exactly why and how.

The Social Dilemma articulates it precisely. It’s intelligent and authoritative because it features the only real authorities there are - the people who built the tech.