I don’t get it. So many people are expressing their disgust with social media — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, YouTube, and the like. And generally they are people I hold in high regard. True, these Internet giants have their faults. The most grievous one is collecting huge amounts of data about us and using it to manipulate us, or selling it to third parties who want to do the same. But they also do us a lot of good. We can use them to connect with long-lost friends and relatives, re-educate ourselves, awaken happy memories, find new hobbies, discover travel destinations, do scholastic research, and enrich ourselves with contacts and entertainments that would have otherwise eluded us. Surely the downside can cast no more than a small shadow on the upside.
A week ago, Mel, my dear niece, proposed to put me straight. She vigorously recommended a Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma. Having watched it, I can see how it would cause anyone with an unguarded mind to run screaming from their communication devices. The film’s thesis is that we are not only manipulated by collected data, we are made addicts to social media, which then collect even more data about us, which leads to greater addiction and more efficient manipulation.
Our craving for social interaction is such that we are helpless to resist the puppeteers who dictate our opinions and buying habits. Of course, all our personalities are not alike, so our “masters” have to profile us differently. They discover what differentiates us and use feedback to reinforce our opinions and habits. Notice, for example, that as you use Facebook and YouTube, you get more of whatever you’ve been looking at. The film blames this practice for sharpening the divisions in our society.
The film’s producers know all about manipulation. They are expert manipulators in their own right. They know how to turn a phrase that pushes our buttons. Social media give us digital pacifiers. Their M.O. is the same as selling cereal to kids on Saturday morning. The computer algorithms that control us are nothing less than artificial intelligence, and its mastery has become so powerful that we’ve almost lost control of it. This AI is overpowering human nature. It creates markets that trade on human futures. Yikes, we’ve become mind slaves without realizing it!
To make their point, they use dramatizations. We see a troubled mother collecting her family’s smart phones and putting them in a lockable jar. One of her daughters promptly goes nuts. She can’t open the jar, so she smashes it and runs off with her phone. In her bedroom, she doctors selfies and posts them. The comments from friends flatter her — all but one that wisecracks about her ears. She goes into a tailspin and cries.
Her brother also fares badly. He pledges to go without his phone for a week, not knowing that a soulless computer system, portrayed by a trio of actors, has been controlling his life. They — the system — have been “observing” him in real time. (Stay with me.) They had already set him up with an attractive girl by manipulating their message traffic. Now he’s not on their radar. Untenable — they have to get him back. So they send a picture of another girl, presumably an old flame, with a new boyfriend. He hears his phone buzz, sees the picture, and cracks. The entire episode is preposterous, but it doesn’t stop there. Later this trio manipulates him into going to a rally of political haters and thugs. He’s only curious, but he’s mistakenly arrested! For users of social media, everything ends badly.
There’s no missing the message: this family of good people are reduced to pawns, and in that reduction, they suffer. But of course, they are ourselves. We are being reduced, and we are suffering.
The film isn’t showing us a “social dilemma.” We’re seeing a human catastrophe. If true, canceling our social media memberships would be only a pitiful gesture. Immolating ourselves at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus would be more proportionate. But please don’t set yourselves on fire, because in truth there is no catastrophe. “Dilemma” is the appropriate word after all. It’s just that the film’s producers got swept up in a tempest of hyperbole.
When they started making the film, they were far more clear-headed. In fact, even before a word of dialog is spoken, a quotation from Sophocles appears in large letters: Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. This is profoundly true.
Consider what happened after Rome made Christianity the official religion of the empire. Minds snapped shut all over Europe. What happened when the printing press was invented? Literacy leaped, Christianity fractured, religious conflict exploded. How about the Age of Discovery? Immense European wealth, colonialism, slavery. And when capitalism was invented? The rise of the middle class, the rise of greed, exploitation. Then the Enlightenment came along. Social contracts, bloody revolution, social instability. What of the Industrial Revolution? Great productivity, crowded cities, poverty, slums, pollution, disease. The double-edged upheavals go on and on. Nighttime illumination, the internal combustion engine, rocketry, television, nuclear power, miniaturized circuitry, computer networks, artificial intelligence, gene editing.
Vast changes in the lives of mortals is an old story. They always bring disruption, suffering, and the imperative to adapt. In the 19th century, this phenomenon became uglier than ever. The gaps between convulsions began to narrow. Today, something new and immense is thrown at us in less time than it takes for a new generation to mature. Now on our plates are climate change, nuclear annihilation, worldwide disease, a re-awakening of nationalism, and the replacement of all human labor by machine labor.
These are existential threats, and existential threats are necessarily global threats. No single nation, not even a world power, can disarm them. They require a level of human cooperation that doesn’t exist today. That is a mega-curse.
What of the collection and sale of personal data? What of cyberbullying and cyber-manipulation? They can be controlled by regulation, currently a dirty word in America. All we need is legislation that empowers the FCC to regulate social media. It’s a matter of political will.
The Scratching Post 