I just saw The Social Dilemma on Netflix. A very important docudrama (with some annoying faults). I’ll include my criticisms below if you’re interested, but I think it important to see it.

 

The irony of the docudrama’s playing on Netflix is that Netflix is guilty of all the same stuff. I guess they feel that if people dump their social media, they’ll spend more time watching Netflix movies. 

A few criticisms: I could have done without some of the melodrama of the simulations. And I have to say that in the section on fake news, while what the tech speakers were saying was very convincing, the simulations and news bits were mostly left-leaning. I know I sound one-sided, but I don’t really believe that the threat from the few right-wing white supremacists is nearly as significant as the threat from the well-funded left-wing Marxist/anarchists because the latter have a huge following of Lenin's "useful idiots" which the former have not had for a long time. That's because of the last fifty years of the slanting of our educational system away from racism (a good slanting) and toward leftism (a poisonous slanting). The video of the riots seemed to make extreme right and left equally responsible, which itself is a fake picture. And big tech’s own left-leaning algorithms, in addition to their money-generating ones, were not addressed at all.

I also thought some of the speakers needed to be more careful to distinguish the tech financial incentives from financial/business incentives generally. Though I agreed with what most of the speakers said, one or two seemed to be edging into anti-capitalism, which ought not to have had a place in the discussion. It’s not capitalism or financial incentive itself that is the villain but wealth pursued in the absence of virtue. 

And one more cavil—in the Buckminster Fuller quotation we are given the choice between utopia and disaster. That’s dangerous nonsense. The middle path of Aristotle and Confucius is a better guide. Utopia means “no place,” and to aim for it is to deny human nature. The only sensible path is to acknowledge human nature and then try to address the issues in the light of it. That's what the Founding Fathers did so well. The tech giants are using human nature to their financial advantage, as the film shows. There is no reason that the healers should be blind to human nature in trying to correct the abuse.

On the upside, I was glad to hear that some of the tech people are hopeful that we can turn things around. It’s hard to see how there will be a huge upswell of resistance, but perhaps actual boredom will help—so much of the addictive candy of the screen is so boringly shallow. (It’s probably a good time to reread Jerry Mander’s book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.)