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Monday, October 5, 2020

The Social Dilemma: Social Media should be Governed!

 The Social Dilemma, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Documentary, Movie


The documentary “The Social Dilemma” is a less than captivating film that doesn’t clearly deliver its message, but even a botched delivery job has caught a lot of well-deserved attention.  The message at the heart of the film should have been:  “We are both social creatures who crave connection AND we are anxious creatures who deeply fear the problems that inherently accompany connection.  The Social Media Nerds set out to create an Eden – a social world where we only get good connections.  But it turns out that this turned out to be a feeding feast for predatory advertisers and for predatory idea mongers who happily build worlds that are enthralling and apparently risk free, all the while tipping us into the trap of being addicted to apparently risk free contact that is actually bleeding us dry.” 

 


The film labors to get the message across in what seems like a very long hour and half of talking heads and a really bad dramatization of this with a suburban family being played like puppets on a string into getting arrested for the protests by the Extreme Center (!).  (Who in the center is Extreme?  Why did they put in a politically correct and therefore oxymoronic set of evil characters – and bleed the characters in the dramatization of what little humanity they might have had at the beginning of the film?)  The writer’s apparently didn’t trust the talking heads to convince us and they thought that seeing this “dramatization” would help us.  Oddly, the image of a lifeless puppet being manipulated by mechanical miscreants is haunting, but the general tenor of the story seems lifeless and unbelievable to me...  

 

The writers and director, by including this dramatization, don't seem to trust us to apply what is discussed to our own lived experience.  Don’t we know that we are being eaten alive by our devices?  Don’t they think we are horrified by ways in which we have become fractionalized in the last decade?  Don’t they think we would actually resonate more with the graphs and data they present?  Or do they think that would be too nerdy?  That we would turn away from something that is so clearly based on thinking, data, and logic.  Do they think that we need a particular dramatization to bring this to life?

 

In my own world, I am more than aware of how much work I put into getting readers and how driven I am by writing posts that are likely to draw readers versus those that I know ahead of time will not, but that I am passionate about writing about.  The numbers matter to me way more than I am comfortable with.  I certainly have railed elsewhere about advice I have been given to put more white space in my blogs and make myparagraphs one sentence long so that I can appeal to readers who are on cellphones and don’t want to be troubled to think.  I take some comfort from thinking that the producers and writers of this film believe that we are further gone than I believe us to be – at least at this moment.  I also think that their lack of belief in our ability to track what they are saying – to withstand controversy – is symptomatic of what they fear Social Media is doing to us.  And it may mirror how the speakers built the internet in the ways that they did and the criticisms that they now have of it - and that they are reluctant to articulate as clearly as they might.

 

A central analogy in this film that is that the capitalist need to continuously expand access to capital – which has driven us to deforest vast stretches of the earth, harmfully burn irreplaceable resources, and voraciously consume scarce minerals – is leading us to taking the same approach to our minds.  As capitalists, we want to inhabit an ever greater quantity of our minds – we want to mine the mind.  The way we do this is to expand the time that we spend with our devices and therefore with the products we would advertise – whether they are commercial or ideological – that we are promoting.

 

It is not just that our devices are sucking up more time, but the means of mining us are scary.  The greatest fear that we have for our sons and daughters is that some suitor with recognize what is good in them and will pretend to love them – will shower them with attention and affection and gifts – not so that they can live together happily ever after, but so that the suitor can control our child – so that the child will become the puppet of the suitor and vulnerable to being used or enslaved by them.

 

The human suitor that we fear for our sons and daughters is the toxic narcissist.  The person who is so damaged that they feel they must have the attention of everyone around them or they will be destroyed.  So they sweep others into their maw the way that strip mining cranes suck entire farms into their shovels in a single sweep.

 

But the predators in the social media drama are not human beings who might come to realize that they are, in fact, dependent on the creatures that they would dominate and control.  The predators in this drama are mechanical – and they have not been curtailed by the moral code written into every one of Asimov’s creatures in I Robot.  The mechanical predators are run by the naked rules of acquisitive capitalism – get more time – this will turn into more advertising clicks which will turn into more revenue.  Behind the capitalists who are seeking more time and clicks stand more capitalists who are happy to pay the revenue because this process has delivered the perfect buyer to their marketing.  They don’t have to buy Super Bowl Ads that have to captivate everyone.  They just have to write an ad to capture the imagination of the used car hobbyist who is looking for a vintage Holley Carburetor.  Not hard to do!  And much cheaper.  All is good – or is it?

 

The movie points out that the advertising of products (and ideas) should be being regulated by the government.  While they don’t talk about how dysfunctional our government has become, they do point out how the government used to protect children watching Saturday morning cartoons from predatory advertising.  They don’t point out that our government, as it focuses on defense and not education has lost an appreciation of how complicated – and how valuable – it is to create a citizenry that is capable of belonging to a Democratic Society.  And the Social Dilemma of the title can be characterized in part that Social Media is accelerating the failure to adequately protect and socialize our young citizens.  Instead it is promising them fame and power that is unreasonable – and creating a space where the lack of opposition to the ideas of the children prevents them from learning to craft arguments that make sense – and to be reined in when those ideas are too extreme and/or self-centered.

 

As much as we fear social engagement because it might include others who differ from us and therefore might hurl insults – or spears – in our direction – it is essential that we engage in the process of having our ideas given a trial by fire.  We need to hear opposing positions – in order that we can craft/hone/sharpen (so many of those words bring up images of warfare) our own ideas so that we can attack back – or recognize that it is time for a truce so that we can come up with a compromise solution.

 

What the talking heads in the movie don’t seem to me to recognize is that this system of Social Media was created by Nerds.  And Nerds have some characteristics that get played out in the Social system they create.  Nerds were not well received, by and large, on the playground (or at least I, as a young Nerd, was not).  But the world of computers is very different.  Computers do what they are told – and, when you tell them nicely and write your code clearly, they do your bidding.  The Nerds – and I don’t mean to be disrespectful – want to create a world that is as responsive as the computer is.

 

One of the characteristics of Facebook initially was that you could only approve of the posts that your friends put up.  It was to be a place of happy affirmation, with all of your friends “liking” what your posts.  But the computer itself does let you know when the program you have written has bad syntax and.  Similarly, other people do this.  The most loyal reader of this blog, my enthusiastic mother, who taught English for years, points out my syntax errors.  I hate this.  And I am greatly appreciative of it.  Some of the chronic mistakes that I make have changed a bit as a result of her (and the reluctant son) explaining how to spot those errors.  And when she points out that there are multiple errors in a particular post (more than usual), it is useful to go back and edit that post rather than having those errors continue to glare (even though some other readers have had to slog through them – and anything you have had to slog through here is entirely my fault, btw). 

 

The point here is that social interaction is messy and uncomfortable and difficult.  And I, every bit as much as the next person, wish this weren’t the case, but we can’t constructively engage with other people without risking the possibility of criticism – and thereby allowing the possibility of growth – no matter how painful that might be.  In an adult interaction, people learn to be tactfully responsive in ways that recognize the positive intent, but that also point out our failures to achieve that intent.  They suggest means of achieving success without too deeply wounding the person who is being critiqued – a word that rests right next to criticized. 

 

The Reluctant Wife has just started watching the new season of The Great British Baking Show.  The feedback that the judges give is direct and clear.  "This tastes good."  "You failed here."  The contestants work both with and against each other.  When they say they are pleased to just to have been on the show, you believe them.   They have been treated with respect, including with the negative feedback – and it is not offered to harm, but as a measure of achievement or lack thereof.  Just this week, sitting in as I sometimes (OK, maybe often) do, we both disagreed with who should have been kicked off the show – but we did agree on who the two to choose between were – and we don’t doubt that both of them would have been gone soon (though I think that my disagreement was the one who left wasn’t teachable and the one who did leave was – unfortunately we’ll only know if that is the case for one of them…).

 

Social Media has created a monstrous world that is playing on our wishes to be loved, to be a member of a community, and to care about others.  These wishes have been responsible for our rise to the top of the food chain and, when manipulated, have caused us to go to war, to exterminate species and, now, threaten the survival of the species on the planet.  The rules of social engagement – necessary rules that help us constructively engage and allow us to build tremendous works – including the interconnected world that Social Media exploit – have not been applied to Social Media.  This movie, flawed though it may be, makes a much needed and evidence based plea for us to do that. 


We need to be forced, a la the old public service message, to sample things that are outside of our narrow purview.  We need to know that there are other perspectives.  We need to get into the "Artificial" Intelligence and include morality as subroutine.  This will be messy and imperfect.  Sometimes the wrong person will be thrown off the show.  But if we don't take up messy tasks and work on them, we will have far bigger messes on our hands.  This movie articulates a few of them; increased suicide, violent supression of minorities, skewing of our personalities in subtle and imperceptable ways.  As scary as the articulated ones are, I fear there are far bigger ones ahead.  The speakers in this film have taken powerful psychological principles and put them in the hands of ruthless entities with essentially infinite resources to exploit them.  We are thus using our knowledge about ourselves against ourselves in ways that we are not controlling.  A recipe for disaster if I ever heard one.



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