Review of The Social Dilemma (2020) by Jimmybaginski — 03 Oct 2020

This documentary perfectly articulates several nagging points of paranoia I have felt in the last 10 years of social media use and expansion. 1. Our daily consumer habits are being watched,tracked and monitored in order to sell to advertisers. Advertising uncannily responds, seemingly, to our most private of consumer impulses, to the point of it feeling like it can read our minds. Every platform, WhatsApp included, appears to be harnessing digital algorithms to triangulate our next purchase and take money so that advertisers can reach us and entice us towards their products. 2. Politics has become shockingly polarised due to social media's endless solipsistic feedback loop of confirmation bias and obfuscation of countervailing opinion. We are being radicalised by social media's promise of cosseting us with what we already like. Hence why the world is collapsing as the ideological battle for culture and political power is being waged at cross purposes on social media. Everything everywhere is partisan and our tribal instincts are being played out online and in the real world, whether you are left wing or right wing.

3. Mental health has been hijacked by the engineered addiction cycle big tech has baked into social media. And, this has lead to massive increases in depression, anxiety and suicide. Social media is not good for our health as it has atomised and personalised our human interactions into abstract pavlovian rewards on a smart device. We are spiritually lost the more social media we use and the more our world becomes reliant on it to remain socially relevant and mobile. Things like Instagram, where we are confronted by daily reminders of our own shortcomings foster a sense of lack and low status. 4. We are poised on the precipice of some kind of social tipping point where the over saturation of social media is at the centre of our existential crisis. The projection is that things are only going to get worse. Hysteria, outrage, fear and disunity will only deepen as we move forward, as our collective neurosis mounts on top of us. And, the way out of this lay not just in our sense of individual responsibility but also in the hands of big tech itself, and any political oversight that can be leveraged to regulate the ill effects of unbridled silicon valley advancement. So, how do we solve it? The documentary is flawed, and succumbs to some level of contradiction by engaging in a biased political view of the problem. It has selective focus. However, it slightly overstates, oversimplifies and disproportionately attributes cause to silicon valley in my opinion. Some human problems lay at the feet of our own human algorithms, built of our evolutionary circuitry. However, our incentives may be human and inalienable to some degree, but our social policy need not be so willing to play to those most base of human impulses for profit. Not all human problems can be solved but some problems are created and exacerbated by the systems we create and maintain. The film suggests we delete our social media as a way to curtail its spread and effect on our daily lives. It's not offered as a fix all or panacea, but as a starting point. I suggest that, as a person who routinely deletes apps, accounts and is constantly monitoring their usage, the most pernicious aspect of social media is that our very economic mobility is intricately tied to our social media presence now. By outright quitting social media you are effectively opting out of a public utility used as a standard highway to navigate modern life. Digital objectionism is the modernised equivalent of moving to a mountain shack and living off the land, a step made more extreme by our increasing reliance on technology for basic survival. In conclusion, the documentary is spreading awareness and attempting us to ask bigger and deeper questions about how our reality is shaped by our technology. That's a good thing.