An alarm for a world in dopamine?

The social dilemma: an alarm bell for a world in dopamine?

The new Netflix documentary is a courageous attempt, even if it is imperfect, to face our complacency towards capitalism and the surveillance which stems from the world of social media.

Imagine spending a few centuries. A small group of sociologists who survived the climate disaster examines the documents and documentaries of what we currently call our civilization and meets some former films.

After being able to find a device to see them, they realize that these two films could provide a cross section of a large enigma: how and why prospera and apparently peaceful businesses of the early 21st century imploded?

The difference between the social network and the social dilemma

The two films are the social network, which tells the story of Come Mark Zuckerberg, a former student who has not completed his studies at Harvard, created a powerful and very profitable business; And the social dilemma, which concerns the way in which the business model of this company turned out to be an existential threat to democracy whose human beings enjoyed the 21st century.

The two films are instructive and fun, but the second (which we remember just out on Netflix) leaves something more. Its objective is admirably ambitious: to provide a convincing graphical report of what the commercial model of a handful of companies combines for us and our company.

The director’s intention, Jeff Orlowski, is clear from the start: to reuse the strategy adopted in his two previous documentaries on climate change – well summarized by a critic like «bring a new convincing vision to a familiar subject and at the same time scary to death».

It is fascinating to observe how a talented director manages to carry out the task of arouing the public’s interest in what is happening in technology.

Orlowski adopts a two -track approach. In the first, he brings together a team of engineers and managers – people who have built the dependence machines that are social media, but who have now repented – to speak openly about their feelings of guilt for the damage they inadvertently inflicted on society and explain certain details of their algorithmic perversions.

What should we think of the social dilemma?

Is the film ridiculous? The dramatized segments include an imaginary trio of sociopaths that work in an unnamed social network to design custom push notifications to distract their users. They show an anxious family who is fighting to convince children to store phones during dinner. And the disturbing score of the piano that permeates each scene, instead of increasing tension, gives a whole feeling of strangeness.

This is the case, but Orlowski welcomes these «repentants» with open arms because they adapt to its objective – that it is to explain to spectators the terrible things that the capitalist companies of surveillance such as Facebook and Google do to their users. And the problem with this is that, with regard to the point where we need ideas on how to repair this damage, the boys turn out to be a little – how to say – incoherent.

This is the way of orlowski to persuade unofficial technology viewers that the documentary equipment is not only real, but inflicts tangible damage to their adolescents. It’s a way of saying: Be careful: this thing is really important and dangerous!

And it works, up to a point. The imaginary vein is necessary because the greatest difficulty with which the criticisms of an industry must be confronted which deal with users as laboratory mice is to explain to the mice what they are taking place while they are continuously diverted by drinks (in this case, the summits of dopamine) provided by the smartphone controlled by the experiments.

Where is the social dilemma bad?

The point where the film fails is unable to carefully explain the engine which guides this sector which exploits applied psychology to exploit human weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Sometimes he focuses on Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the scientist who gave a name for this activity – «surveillance capitalism», a mutant form of our economic system which extracts human experience in order to produce marketable forecasts on what we will do / read / we will buy / we will believe later.

Most people seem to have understood the part of the «surveillance» of the term, but have neglected the second word. Which is a shame because the activity of social media is not really a mutant version of capitalism.

It is only capitalism that does its course: finding and exploiting the resources from which profit can be obtained. After looting and stripped the natural world, he now turned to the draw and exploitation of what is in our heads. And the great mystery is because we continue to allow it to do it.

The peer press

The documentary, however, ends with a slightly more optimistic note, transforming it into «our social dilemma» and encouraging spectators to claim its use of technology, stressing that real change is often the result of «peer pressure», called SO, or the pressure of our peers. Each of us can make the difference and make choices, we are definitely still in time.

Maybe this documentary is the start of a wider alarm that will guide towards a more positive innovation?

But for the moment, let me ask you quickly how many notifications have you received on your phone while you read this article?

See!