Social media’s infinite, tailored algorithmic content is destroying our social lives and rewiring our brains. The Social Dilemma is a documentary that features interviews from important figures in the social media tech space and various social scientists. It also has really bad dramatised parts that will make you squirm uncomfortably, it’s at least worth a watch but I am hoping for a sanitised version that I won’t feel embarrassed for recommending to people. In case you haven’t watched it, that’s pretty much all you need to know for now.
So what is the dilemma? Essentially, social media is so perfectly tailored to prey on humanity that it’s completely consuming all our attention so that advertisers can sell us things more efficiently. Websites cost money to develop and maintain, and so a service which is “free” to use has to be monetised somehow. That’s where advertisers come in, ad space on a social media site is sold to advertisers and businesses who then do their best to grab your attention with things that you might like. Hints toward which things you might like are harvested from your profile information, communication activity, engagement with other users, attention time on various posts or ads, etc. The complexity of it has become an artificial intelligence at this point, and it’s one we have pointed back at ourselves to harvest our own dopamine. None of this is particularly new, it’s been known for a while, but the documentary wraps it up pretty neatly and makes it seem very alarming. The way it does this is what’s really interesting.
The interviewees are held up in this documentary as experts, pretty standard but it’s important to consciously make note of this setup. We are told how social media is negatively affecting society, and we are also told who is really driving this - capitalism, of course. Big bad capitalism that wants tax cuts and open borders, presumably, not mum and dad’s capitalism that just wants to run the family business with as little fuss and interference as possible. So capitalism is destroying our society and social media needs government regulation, but why exactly? The experts are all too happy to tell us.
Remember that our society (such as it is) has no objective morals. It barely even has subjective ones at this point, as it even refuses to defend itself against outside forces that will change those morals. Those few things it holds up as moral imperatives are themselves poorly cloaked opinions, often downright evil and anti-human. I defer to say all this since the reason we need to regulate social media, a cyborg Attila raping its way across the human race’s dopamine receptors, is because it’s distracting us from more important issues and is polarising us into fake news ghettos. The Social Dilemma conspicuously points out the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that developed as a result of John Podesta’s Wikileaked emails and information sourced from the FBI’s investigations into pedophile rings. Of course the documentary doesn’t really tell you anything about the theory except that it’s fake to the point of being dangerous, basically flat earth but willing to kill with black ceramic high-capacity semi-automatic machine carbine uzi bullpup AK Kalashnikovs. It mentions that a man went into a certain respectable pizza establishment and opened fire - it does not mention that his divinely guided bullets precisely annihilated the hard drives of the restaurant’s computers - all because of fake news that “the algorithm” (social media’s AI) pushed people into seeing and becoming involved in. It also mentions that we shouldn’t be staring at our phones because we should be more worried about climate change. There you have it, these aren’t shocking revelations really, it’s a Netflix documentary, it does make it harder to take seriously though when you’re being bombarded with leftist views on reality.
Here is the point - the whole documentary takes great pains to put you in a sense of helpless terror, the experts are telling you insider information, the dramatised parts are exaggerating the effects of social media, and then the hammer comes down - people are being given fake realities by the algorithm and subsuming them into actual reality! But it just so happens that this only happens to certain people who don’t get to see the real reality. You see, what really irks me is that NOT ONE of these experts go on to say that their own reality is, by necessity of everything they’ve told us, also hopelessly compromised. This is the information parallax. If social media has completely warped our view of the world and sensationalised current events, then it’s done that for everyone, even people who don’t use it, simply by osmosis. Even the experts getting in front of the camera telling us things are bad are just as deceived as the Pizzagaters supposedly are. All this documentary can really tell us is that there is a huge and increasing parallax - we can all see that something is warping our perception of reality, but we can’t see beyond that something. All we can agree on is that social media is bad. We cannot agree on why, we cannot agree on what we should be doing about it, and we cannot agree on what to focus on after it’s been dealt with. It has irreversibly broken humanity and we cannot put ourselves back together.
Say we regulate social media, what then? Was reality somehow less warped when we all watched one of half a dozen news outlets, whom we now know collude with each other to determine what is newsworthy? Was it any less warped when we listened to the same radio stations and read the same broadsheets? Click your fingers, alright social media’s gone, now we just revert back to the same centralisation of information we had before, but with all the polarisation and angst we have now, and no way to release the pressure.
It is telling that the angle this anti-social-media argument takes is totally in favour of the big media megacorps of yesteryear, regardless of how much social media’s self-regulation reflects the same worldview bias of those corps. It’s true that social media has fried normies brains and left them feeling isolated, but dissidents who use it smartly are feeling more vindicated than ever - people who look at the world and see something very wrong now know that they aren’t alone. That’s the point of this documentary. If Big Tech is ever reined in, you can be sure that will be the angle, and if you look at the way it’s tried to regulate itself that’s exactly what it’s done. All that talk of capitalism and ads and dopamine and depression and social isolation suddenly isn’t as important, because there are people out there challenging the whole paradigm of the modern world and they’re getting confident enough to act on it. If you’re reading this, you’re one of them.