Patron Pick – The Social Dilemma

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Social Dilemma (2020)
Written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, and Jeff Orlowski
Directed by Jeff Orlowski

In every person’s mind lives three Vincent Kartheisers, at least according to this “documentary.” This might be the worst documentary I have ever seen. I was baffled from the first ten minutes and kept sitting there, unable to get over how amateurish and poorly edited the whole thing was. It’s also one of the most redundant films I have ever seen. The picture’s central thesis is explained in the first five or so minutes, and the rest of the runtime is just people saying the thesis in different ways over and over again. Oh yes, and using poorly thought-out metaphors. Two people used magicians as metaphors to explain social media, which was kept in the final cut rather than the director noting that this was unnecessarily repetitive. It’s also a film about a problem in which the people who caused it try to convince you that only they can solve it.

Did you know corporations use social media to manipulate users? Insert a shocked Pikachu image here. Through a litany of Silicon Valley talking heads which appear to have taken their first Psych 101 class, they tell us with shock that users are tracked and that data is used to market things to them. Companies want to predict users’ actions to make money. You don’t say? Former Google design ethicist Tristian Harris leads the charge in this picture (no relation, thank god). Harris explains the three goals of social media companies are to increase user engagement on their platforms, cause current users to recruit new users, and make money from advertisements. There’s a brief acknowledgment that none of this is unique and is, in fact, based on techniques used in every other form of media ever invented, but that’s rushed past so they can engage in spooky talk about algorithms. 

The Social Dilemma fails in its adherence to centrism as a “solution” to any of this. They continually tell us that we are polarized more than ever in America. We were more polarized when a civil war happened, but they are right that things are bad. The problem with posing centrism as the solution is that it means compromise. But compromise is good, you say because most of us have been conditioned to be avoidant when it comes to conflict. Okay, well, let’s say one side of the argument believes that LGBTQ & BIPOC deserve full human rights & dignity because they are human beings. The other side argues that these people are not humans, and they want them eliminated from public life (This is a view that has been continuously & explicitly stated by the American right wing, Michael Knowles’s speech at CPAC comes to mind off the top of my head). I don’t believe that compromise has any value in this situation. There is, in fact, no compromise to be had with reactionaries on deciding whether or not any group of people has human rights. 

You won’t get a solid argument out of the makers of this film because the entire thing completely avoids unpacking political ideology. It’s pure neoliberal tripe that simply wants everyone to stop being so angry & mean. According to this film, it doesn’t matter what the conflicts are over. The unspoken message is that social strife and possible collapse means the economy is harmed, and the talking heads that populate this film are not “reg’lar folks”; they are wealthy tech bros & gals who want the flow of money continuing into their accounts. They, in fact, aren’t that mad that social media is primarily used to manipulate people into unnecessary and destructive consumption, but they will pretend to be upset about it.

The central conceit: “social media is making people worse,” is valid. The problem is that with most neoliberal & reactionary discourse, there is an embedded refusal to unpack and truly understand a concept. Early in the film, as they tease the problem, the narration comments that it can’t be summed up in one word. In fact, it can actually be summed up as capitalism. Social media that loses money doesn’t have long to last (looking at you, Twitter); the entirety of its existence is tied up in selling people shit they don’t need. How do you do that? 

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord outlines that you sow seeds of dissatisfaction with a person’s life. You tease them with unnecessary, superfluous objects they will need to labor to get, you pay them a low wage and dangle the things like carrots, and when they finally manage to scrape together enough, they purchase the item. They find almost immediately that it doesn’t do anything about their dissatisfaction, so they look for something else they can buy. The same discomfort with one’s life has helped right-wing politicians gain power, including the conservatives that run the Democratic Party. 

Here are the problems the film points out:

“The problem is unchecked growth at all costs.”

“The problem is the priority of the shareholders.”

“The problem is these big companies want to regulate themselves.”

“The problem is the users are viewed more as the product or just-necessary cogs in a machine than as people or customers.”

Yes, that is all called capitalism. Those things are central components of the economic system that dominates the planet. People have been articulating why this is bad for centuries, but they are pushed aside because the inevitable solution would be to form new economic systems that create egalitarianism for workers, and the people in charge can’t have that. Doing such a thing would mean they couldn’t have excess to waste and throw away. Infinite growth in a finite world is an impossibility, and to continue to behave in a way that views limited resources as finite is why the planet is dying all around us now. 

What solutions does The Social Dilemma pose for this existential problem? Not much, really. The only concrete thing I could make out was a half-baked data tax concept that wouldn’t come close to solving the issues outlined in the film. Instead, they spend the last third of the movie trying to pretend political violence isn’t the exclusive product of right-wing rhetoric because, ultimately, the liberals will side with fascists as they have historically in every instance where reactionary thought has overtaken society. The groups most likely to be persecuted by political speech regulations will always be the Left because their movement poses the greatest danger to capitalism’s continued gluttonous feeding frenzy. 

You could eliminate social media tomorrow, but these problems would still exist in one form or another. They go to the roots of how human beings have been forced to live. Solidarity is discouraged among workers when that is the very solution to the problem. If I see the people around me, in my community, in my workplace, etc., as human beings with similar life experiences, then the divisions begin to fade. But if the divisions disappear, the workers become a formidable force that will undermine the interests of the business class. Social media is a perfect tool to keep people at each other’s throats, and that isn’t changing as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force that shapes all aspects of our lives.