Review: The Social Dilemma (2020), written and directed for Netflix by Jeff Orlowski.
A Netflix docudrama finally speaks frankly about that peculiar sickness of modern life: our addiction to social media. This film claims not only that this addiction is wrecking our personal lives, but it is also on the brink of destroying the fabric of society as we know it. It is a message that resonates deeply with people, because it truly does feel like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are taking over our lives and those of our children; The Social Dilemma avoids preaching to those who use social media and instead points the finger at the corporations themselves. It is a subject that anyone who opposes capitalism must pay attention to – the social media giants are among the largest companies in history, and they also form a huge part of the ruling class’ means of communication, surveillance and propaganda.
However, this film is not good at clarifying the issues it purports to explore. In fact, it mystifies and distorts social media, downplaying some aspects and exaggerating others. It conceals the true nature of the problem and diverts our attention away from the alternative.
Slave new world
According to the documentary sections of the film, society and democracy are under threat because social media, originally created for good purposes, is transforming into an artificial intelligence (AI) which harvests masses of data from every aspect of our lives to predict and subtly influence our behaviour. It then sells us bit by bit to private interests. In their quest for profit above all else, social media companies have lost control of this ravenous AI. It is making us ill and opening the floodgates to extremists, fake news and Russian or Chinese cyber-spies. The drama sections of the film unfold through the perspective of a middle-class family whose social media addiction leads to disasters: their young daughter is cyber-bullied; and their teenage son is seduced by online propaganda, then arrested at a protest.
The dilemma presented by technology clearly needs answering. Enter Tristan Harris, former Google employee and founder-president of the Center for Humane Technology. He leads a procession of reborn social media insiders who have seen the light: they are the soul of a soulless industry, the sigh of the oppressing classes. They imagine their own tragic genius is responsible for frightening changes which are gripping the entire world. They reassure us, ‘nobody intended any of these consequences’ of social media for mental health, society and so on. Harris is fighting for the soul of the industry, one TED Talk at a time. More importantly, his Institute is lobbying the government, and the film is part of a public relations campaign to provoke a much-needed debate around reforming the US tech industry.
A captive market
Frustratingly for those who want clarity in this debate, the documentary gets down to muddying the waters from its very beginning. Social media companies are among the most lucrative in history, so it must stand to reason (especially if you enjoy a share of the riches) that they are selling some fabulously valuable product. The US internet services and social media industry enjoyed gross profit margins above 60% each quarter in the last year. Google is worth over $987bn, Facebook $725bn, Instagram (owned by Facebook) over $100bn, Twitter $37bn.
Nestled within the perspective of the class which runs this industry, the film’s talking heads repeat the common fallacy: ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’. Social media companies are trading in ‘human futures’ (according to Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School) or selling ‘the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product … that’s the only thing there is for them to make money from’ (Jaron Lanier, former Atari programmer and ‘computer philosopher’). Is social media a slave market where our attention spans are auctioned to the highest bidder? The film bolsters this terrifying notion with science fiction scenes, where AI villains invade the personal life of one character, devilishly predicting and influencing his behaviour while selling off each moment of his life for a few fractions of a cent.
This fantastic tale is the first major conceit of the film. Getting beyond appearances, social media is far more mundane. The companies do not produce anything, and they certainly are not trading in human lives. They sell market data services to other companies seeking to advertise their own commodities and services. The commodities themselves (clothes, cars, make-up, electronics, etc) are made by the productive industries which exploit human labour, the source of all wealth in capitalist society. Social media is entirely parasitic on those industries, and its growth into such bloated proportions is a symptom of capitalism in crisis. Facing a secular declining rate of profit, monopolies must invest colossal amounts of capital to keep accumulation going. As the magnitude of investment increases, so the risks increase, and the need for closer monitoring and management of consumption to guarantee that capital is invested profitably. In this crisis, the services provided by social media companies are indispensable, as their aggressive growth has hooked huge swathes of humanity into one big marketplace. Facebook has 2.5 billion monthly active users, Instagram has 1 billion.
This marketplace is indeed highly invasive, collecting data on users’ every interaction, predicting broad consumer behaviour patterns with unprecedented accuracy, and deploying ads and notifications to influence users, all with the help of algorithms. Yet the business of social media marketing itself is not as intelligent as the film boasts. It relies on brute force and sheer numbers of consumers, not a fine-tuned understanding of every individual’s personality, to be profitable. According to Viral Nation, ‘Though it often differs from business to business, a successful conversion rate for a social media ad campaign is often somewhere in the range of 2-5%.’ Those small percentages are the proportion of those who see an advert that click on it, and of that proportion only a fraction may even end up spending their money. Such tiny margins are meaningful to corporate clients that must spend vast amounts on social media ad campaigns, data and analytics services to reach billions of potential customers. This is the source of the tech giants’ spectacular profits.
Class antagonisms
This brings us to the second major conceit of The Social Dilemma. The film shows us scenes of growing political unrest and crisis, which it explains with a mixture of Russian influence and ‘polarisation’: social media herds us into bubbles of like-minded users, isolating us from people we disagree with, leading to less talking and understanding, and more fighting. ‘Two sides didn’t want to hear each other anymore’, says Harris of the rising vitriol in US politics. Hence the Black Lives Matter movement and white supremacy are presented as products of social media itself: ‘Society is incapable of healing itself and just devolving into a kind of chaos.’ Even ultra-right-wing Senator Marco Rubio is quoted approvingly as a voice of moderate reason. Harris et al imagine they are inadvertently responsible for the breakdown of social peace. But beneath the ruffled surface of society is the movement of history: ‘Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto). Polarisation is not an explanation, but a superficial description of the capitalist crisis which is drawing opposing class forces into belligerent positions.
The fictional part of the film distorts the social forces making up today’s movements, reducing them all to a sinister violent group called the Extreme Center. The Extreme Center uses the symbol of a raised fist and the slogan ‘don’t vote’ (scary!). It spreads conspiracy theories about the ruling class online. One Extreme Center social media post shows a young black woman with a megaphone – ‘We need you…become part of this movement’. The Extreme Center is a confused symbol of both fascism and anti-racism, because the film’s liberal creators cannot tell the difference, let alone understand the roots of these ideologies. They do not imagine that the US ruling class itself, not Russia or AI, has provoked massive upheaval and resistance.
What they do not talk about
The questions which The Social Dilemma fails to explore also reveal its bourgeois perspective. Harris holds up the fact that he can order a taxi and ‘a car shows up 30 seconds later’ as part of the ‘utopia’ created by the tech industry, with its data on every phone user’s location. It is not just a car but a precarious worker who arrives. This is not utopia but unprecedented labour discipline: like Amazon factory workers or Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers can thank Silicon Valley for surveillance of their every move by their employer.
The film does speak about the growing epidemic of suicides: in the US, for girls aged 15 to 19, there has been a 62% increase in suicides since 2009; aged 10 to 14, the increase is 189%. However, correlation is presented as causation; there is no mention of the alienation experienced by young people in a society where there is growing unemployment and underemployment, declining quality in schooling, the threat of climate change, not to mention decimation of mental health services.
‘Imagine what [mass persuasion] means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian’, warns venture capitalist Roger McNamee in the film, as the figure of Vladimir Putin looms over footage of protests in the US. Is the Russian state trying to influence US elections or stoke social unrest? Whatever the answer, the US ruling class takes this threat seriously because it has its own long history of interfering in, and overthrowing, the democracies of other countries. As revealed in September 2020, Washington-based thinktank CLS Strategies, staffed by former Obama administration officials, fell afoul of Facebook’s own rules on foreign political interference when it created thousands of fake social media accounts to influence public opinion and elections in Bolivia, Venezuela and Mexico. US intelligence agencies have created entire social networks such as ‘Zunzuneo’, an attempt to foment counter-revolutionary sentiment among young Cubans.
The data harvested by social media companies has granted unprecedented potential for surveillance by the capitalist state. US and British intelligence agencies themselves collect vast amounts of data from compliant internet companies to spy on the population, such as in the Prism surveillance programme exposed by Edward Snowden. But in The Social Dilemma, the US government is ignored: only the Myanmar government comes in for criticism for the way it used Facebook to incite a pogrom against Rohingya Muslims in 2016-17, or Russia and China for allegedly spreading disinformation about Covid-19.
The film has a blind spot for the US government, because its interviewees want the government to listen to them and regulate the tech industry while preserving US imperialism on which their privileged existence depends. They call for stricter online censorship of foreign ‘bad actors’ and (those judged to be) domestic extremists, changes the ruling class could gladly accept. The Center for Humane Technology also calls for reforms such as increased competition, effective privacy laws and greater protections for children online – surely good ideas, but the capitalist state will not put any fetters on the growth of the tech industry, which has become vital to US monopoly power, as well as to the surveillance state.
The promise of the internet
The internet allows people to communicate near-instantly across the whole world, to make copies of information and media abundantly at the cost of electricity. This is something of enormous educational, cultural, political and scientific value. Yet the only way that capitalism can seem to develop this technology is by turning it into a vast 24-hour shopping mall, complete with security guards and CCTV. ‘We are more profitable to corporations if we are staring at a screen’, software engineer Justin Rosenstein rightly warns in the film. However, social ills such as the epidemic of suicide, fascist violence and decaying democracy are not the fault of social media alone; they are symptoms of capitalism in crisis. Capitalism, the disease behind all the symptoms, must be abolished along with the state that protects it.
Will Harney
