This is the most important film of the year. If you take nothing else from The Social Dilemma, understand the following: you are the product. You are being bought and sold and bought and sold and bought and sold by FaceBook, by Twitter, by Instagram. It’s not incidental; it’s not accidental; and it is precisely what happens in a society where profit matters more than healthcare.
The Social Dilemma is a documentary about the mechanics of social media search engines. It sounds boring; it is anything but. The messages that appear on your social media feeds are run by artificial intelligence so advanced it will work on the people that designed it. And none of it is intended to do anything other than generate profit for social media companies. Why is this so important? Because we have entered a stage of humanity in which falsehoods are more powerful than truths. And it’s not just a little more powerful…a false statement will generally get six times the attention of a truth. And people are getting hurt as a result. I’m not just talking about how FB manipulation put a fool in the White House (though one really cannot underestimate that result). Suicides, self-mutilation, increased feelings of alienation are on the rise -exponentially- all because your attention to social media is the objective.
The other part of this horror is the fact that you can’t tell you are just a pawn; you think what you see is real; you think “there’s no way a computer can tell me how to think, what to say, whom to vote for…” Lemme tell ya, the algorithm knows what you’ll like before you do. And that goes for everybody. It is also uniquely designed for you to spend more and more time on the platform itself, so as to keep feeding your bias beast, be it unicorn or Godzilla.
The film itself is narrated as a tell-all interview-fueled exposé of social media computer engineers and architects. This shocking reveal might qualify as a warning bell given other set of circumstances. The problem here, not unlike global warming, is that the damage has already been done; you simply do not know how alarmed you should be at this moment. The answer: fairly alarmed … enough to rethink everything you do on social media.
Along with the scary overview from our would-be overlords-turned-informers, The Social Dilemma counterpoints with a dramatic recreation of an average kid (Skyler Gisondo) getting sucked into the world of social media. The filmmaking does a clever trick of mixing real with dramatic here to make it seem as if our subject is just another tell-all story – this will be a turn-off to some. (Geez, don’t we have enough problems already deciding what’s true and what’s not?) When Skyler voluntarily gives up his phone for a week, the computer algorithm is personified to show us how it behaves in order to lure Skyler back … and then capture him for good. It’s dinner time and your kids are staring at their phones… does that sound familiar? How about staring at their phones during school? How about staring at phones instead of homework or sports or –God forbid- talking to friends, This kid is addicted to his phone. And addicted is the only word that describes it adequately. But is the kid any different, really, than you or I? The more input we consumers deliver, the better the algorithm knows how to make us stay. And that’s the agenda. It has no intention of doing anything else. It makes money by garnering our attention. That’s it. It has no moral compass; it cares not if it pushes lies or hate; and -on occasion- it is entirely moved by a private bidder.
“So wait,” you ask, “how do I know if I’m being a tool?” Ummm, do you own a phone? Then you are. The only real question is how many strings do the puppeteers hold?
Let’s play a game. Study the chart below, then open your preferred social network engine.
Do you recognize ANY of the names in the chart among your posts? In that case, you’re already getting your news from social media and you’re probably a lost cause. Is it hopeless? Well, are your sources outside the green box? How about the yellow box? If stuff shows up on your news feed that can be sourced to anything below the yellow, you are a complete tool, not unlike a rake or a hoe. You have been manipulated beyond comprehension. I don’t think there’s any way of getting you back without a serious detox.
And it’s not just that you’re a tool; you don’t even know you’re a tool. You think the shit that pours from your mouth has some basis in fact or reason. It doesn’t. What others guess is that you’ve bought into the dark side; what they don’t know is the reality – you have become a commodity. How do I know you’ve become a commodity? Well, tell me this— after four full years of our national downward spiral into the abyss, do you honestly “believe” that Trump is the best person to improve the lot of Americans? 
Have you convinced yourself that Joe Biden and the Dems will “destroy America?” That “nothing could be done” about COVID-19? That Barack Obama is the one who sowed dissention in the United States? Let me spell it out –if you’ve paid attention to American politics since 2016 and social media has convinced you, somehow, that Donald J. Trump deserves your vote in 2020, then you are no longer a thinking, reasoning human being; you are a garage sale toy with a 5¢ tag attached. You have been bought and sold many times over. And this will continue until your –quite likely- premature death.
As for the film, I haven’t been this moved by a documentary since Blackfish. The Social Dilemma is a must see for every single person in the world, bar none.
Social media has become a large game
Where paid sponsors tell you whom to blame
The rabbit-hole direction
Can cause self-deception
And the algorithm accounts for all shame
Rated PG-13, 94 Minutes
Director: Jeff Orlowski
Writer: Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, Jeff Orlowski
Genre: Real life horror
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: “Automatic like” bots
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who pay money for you not to get wise
