The Social Dilemma

You are right, people were misinformed from the dawn of history. But never before in history has the real information been so available.

If you believed that pharaoh was a God, well there was no way to know otherwise. Not only you didn't know how to read, but if you did, all the writing did confirm he was, in fact, a God.

Today, information about counter arguments is available for any claim. If it sounds suspicious, you can use the discretion of your mobile device and look up 2 or 3 different opinions. You can read the study. You can listen to experts in the field. You can do all that before the king finishes his speech.

> What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior.

But will the filmmakers profit if they succeed? They don't make any money by successfully changing your mind.

The only thing worse than a free product that manipulates you, is a paid product that still manipulates you. The height of irony in The Social Dilemma was the shot where LinkedIn and Google (separately from YouTube, which is fair game IMO) were listed among these evil addictive technologies and somehow Netflix, a pioneer of autoplay and binge watching, didn't make the cut.

That aside, the insidious thing about this movie is that many of the issues in brings up are real. There are real problems with social media addiction, ad tech, and filter bubbles. Changes do need to be made. Some might even need to be forced onto the big tech companies. However, these problems are not the root of all evil, as The Social Dilemma would have us believe.

They are certainly not the primary cause of societal upheaval we've been seeing. Political polarization in the US has been rising since the 90s, well before social media became dominant. Racism and police violence have never really gone away. Blaming tech for everything both makes it harder to fix the real problems with tech and easier to ignore the problems that exist elsewhere in society.

Off the top of my head, some things that deserve just as much blame for the problems this movie pins on technology:

1. The death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)

People can see distorted views of the world without the help of social media. One can argue that even now, Fox News and other mainstream media have a greater role in shaping public opinion than social media does. Not to mention the conglomerization of local news (driven by capital rather than tech) and the nationalization of media (enabled by tech, but driven by the MSM).

2. The slow death of the middle class, in the US and elsewhere.

An underlying assumption of The Social Dilemma and its line of argument is that people are dumb and easily manipulated. I suspect the educated elite, well-represented in the movie and over-represented here on HN, are particularly succeptible to this kind of thinking, myself included. But I think the reality is that most people care about their livelihoods more than anything else, and the polarization and upheaval we've been seeing (from Brexit to Trump) can largely be attributed to different reactions to this erosion of the middle class. The left might attribute it to unregulated capitalism and a failing social safety net. The right might attribute it to globalization, immigration, etc. The underlying phenomenon is the same, and has very little to do with tech, unless you're talking about factories and shipping costs.

3. Some problems have always been around - social media just makes everything more visible.

The last century saw two world wars, plenty of revolutions and armed conflict outside of that (which seems like a gross understatement, but there are too many to list), the death of the British Empire and the rise of many new nations, lots of social upheaval in the US... the list goes on. There's plenty to say about the 21st century as well, but looking back on history, I don't know if things have really gotten that much worse.

To put it differently, many on HN (myself included) love to tinker with tooling - editors, note-taking apps, what have you. But at the end of the day, we have to get back to the real work, and use those tools to accomplish meaningful things. If you look at social media and Internet technologies as tools for society, then yes, it's valuable to scrutinize them and see how they can be improved. But at the end of the day, we also need to get out into society and get to work, with whatever tools we have at hand.

I'm a techie who indirectly makes money off the explosion in AI so I can't say how to fix this problem. It's good people are talking about it. There are many problems with social media and tech addiction, some of which were partially or totally covered by this movie. It was a nice production and should get people talking.

I hope we all, as HN commenters, take a moment to consider our participation in social media, including this site. Please be aware that your online communities are not the real world, that people are human, and those upvotes do not validate your opinions. I apologize for all the pointless, angry arguments I've participated in, and hope you do as well. Let your humanity shine through everything you do.

I have a lot of great conversations on Facebook, typically better than the conversations my blog posts elsewhere. It's a matter of cultivating a good community.