5 things The Social Dilemma forgot to mention
Netflix’s The Social Dilemma builds on a conversation that’s growing globally: what are we trading when we use technology for free, and what can we do about it? With a viewership of 38 million, the documentary reached an impressive audience. But despite its scale, it failed to address some important topics…
I work as a consultant in Digital Ethics, so having an opinion on Netflix’s The Social Dilemma feels like part of the job description. To be honest, my judgement was a little clouded before I started watching — I’d already heard criticisms of the show over-dramatising aspects of technology development, and I’m always wary of hearing the same people who developed this technology telling us how to fix it. But I tried to put this aside. Many people were discussing the issues I talk about every day at work — surely that’s a good thing?
It’s necessary to acknowledge the documentary’s positives. I think it’s great to critically analyse the technological tools we (increasingly) use every day, and the documentary has clearly encouraged many people to start doing this. This type of analysis helps us to surface the exploitative patterns that Big Tech has been benefiting from for decades, and which we’ve already seen industry responses to. Growing awareness of the addictive dynamics of social media has already led major device manufacturers such as Apple, Google and Huawei to develop screen-time management tools. Perhaps The Social Dilemma will force industry to take these changes even further. So yes, the documentary did generate an important conversation, but it missed some essential details:
1. Who gets to make decisions about technology?
The documentary focussed on humane technology ‘expert’ Tristan Harris, who flippantly described the power of the decisions made by “a bunch of 25-year-old white guys”, in a documentary that (mostly) centred the voices of those same people. What he forgot to mention, was that you cannot adequately understand the issue of diversity in Silicon Valley without analysing the myriad ways that racism and sexism is embedded in the sector. What about the impact of the biased technology he helped create? What about the diversity of data they used to train their algorithms? What about the ways that these organisations have typically excluded ethnic minorities from their recruitment processes? The over-representation of “25-year-old white guys” in tech didn’t happen by accident, and it’s astounding to see ex-Google Technology ‘Ethicists’ continuing to flout the fact as if they had nothing to do with it.
Secondly, the issue of (mostly) white men making decisions about people’s lives is not unique to the technology sector. To take an overused example, only 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are black, only 6% are women, and none are black women. Many of the major institutions in the US which already make decisions about people’s lives — be it in politics, insurance or finance — are overrepresented by white men. So, while some might seek comfort in self-flagellating ex-Silicon Valley types weeping into their expensive handkerchiefs about the bad they’ve done to the world, it might be worth asking: why is it still their voices we’re hearing? And why are they continuing to make decisions about how technology should be used? As Max Masure says:
“People with lived experience of being oppressed inherently have a better understanding of what is needed. Yet, I never heard in the documentary someone say they will consult any external support from people with less power than them to build different systems.”
2. What are the incentives at play?
It’s no surprise that Google makes a lot of money from selling data. But watching The Social Dilemma, one might think that economic exploitation began with the advent of the Internet. Whilst it’s important to understand the market dynamics of the sector in itself, it’s impossible to truly understand all the factors at play without a wider economic analysis. The growth in advertising revenue is directly linked to a growth in consumerism. To listen to the documentary, one might think that people are agent-less users who swallow whatever the social media companies force down their throats. But the rise of consumerism comes from a rich social and political context: from increasingly hyper-capitalist political agendas to the growing wealth gap — where marketing of luxury goods promises an escape from poverty. To completely overlook these factors is a misleading representation of what’s going on.
Furthermore, the fact that it’s commercially beneficial to show diet ads to children, as shown in the documentary, or to sell ads based on racist keywords is not just a problem for the tech sector, it’s a cross-sector catastrophe. Economic exploitation and surveillance didn’t begin when the Internet was invented, but the Internet does allow those dynamics to be scaled on an unprecedented level. So instead of focussing on the ‘mutant algorithms’ that oversee us, why aren’t we questioning why economic exploitation is still a symptom of ‘success’ in our markets? And who, across both industry and politics, is perpetuating these dynamics?
3. The limits of their analysis
Time and time again, we see fantastic, in-depth research about the impacts of social media technologies in the US and Western Europe. But while we often hear about the dramatic scale of Big Tech, like Facebook’s 2.7 billion global active users, research about Facebook’s global impact tends to be far more limited. On this front, The Social Dilemma follows the trend. The studies it presents about issues like teen suicide and low self-esteem are all based in the US or Western Europe. This narrow scope of research makes it difficult to understand whether these crises are due to social media itself, or due to other cultural factors. By presenting two facts in tandem— growing social media use and growing teen suicide —the show implies that one must cause the other. However, even those with the most basic grasp of statistics know that correlation ≠ causation. So, we’re left with two important questions. Firstly, is technology the sole contributor to these problems? If not, what other mechanisms are at play that we should be aware of? And secondly, how do these issues look in other regions with high social media use: say in Africa, where 139 million of Facebook’s users reside — and what could we learn from the impacts there?
It’s essential to understand how social media contributes to these issues, but The Social Dilemma’s analysis is a lazy one. Without a wider examination of the cultural context, we cannot understand where social media is simply compounding the effects of pre-existing issues, and therefore where policy and organisational change should be addressing the root cause. Using studies from a wider range of countries would allow us to make this comparison.
4. The ‘agency’ of algorithms
The Social Dilemma is not the first place where people have spoken of ‘mutant algorithms’ — even Boris Johnson used that same term when describing the A-Level results fiasco, which I talk about in more detail here. Calling an algorithm ‘mutant’ is a very easy way to avoid responsibility for its consequences. We don’t call a governmental policy decision ‘mutant’ because it has a negative impact on people, even if it is complex. Yes, AI is created with a level of complexity unmatched by many other technologies, but is it wholly autonomous? Or, has somebody chosen the variables it’s based on, decided on test data and a testing strategy, and analysed the results of those tests? The technology sector has a bad habit of hiding behind complexity, excluding others on the basis that the work we do is ‘just too hard to explain’. But unpicking a few of those layers not only helps us to understand the dynamics we’re subject to, it also helps us think about who should be accountable for its impact. On the one hand, the ex-Big Tech workers in the documentary want us to think they were all-powerful: carefully controlling your life to nudge you subconsciously towards their designed purchasing decisions. On the other, they want you to think that they unleashed a mutant algorithm which they shouldn’t take any blame for. It’s easy to show off about the complex technology you were part of developing, but not take accountability for it. Unfortunately, The Social Dilemma lets its protagonists do just that.
5. The truth of the parallel story
The documentary interlaced its interviews with a narrative about a family whose relationships were destroyed by social media. I’m a massive advocate of storytelling, so I was excited to see a documentary which could creatively illustrate the topics at hand. However, The Social Dilemma fell back on lazy tropes to try to make that narrative more interesting — thus completely misrepresenting the influence these algorithms have on people’s lives. The story showed a teenage boy who ‘lost out’ on a girlfriend because he wasn’t on Facebook. I could rant for hours about the lack of imagination in that storyline, but to highlight a couple of issues: 1) It completely removed the girl’s agency from the story. ‘Missing out’ on a girl because you weren’t on Facebook, rather than because of her preferences and your personality, is the kind of line peddled by the incel community. 2) It’s playing into people’s fears that the only thing that matters is their online persona — something that the documentary is supposedly trying to counter. Not only is this narrative misleading, it downplays the important consequences of the way technology is currently used and developed. Instead of resting on dystopian exaggerations that clearly contradict the true experience people have online, why not focus on the issues people are facing today? Don’t get me wrong, technology can have hugely negative impacts – from gender and racial bias in criminal justice algorithms to difficulty accessing immigration services because of the colour of your skin — being dumped because you’re not on Facebook just isn’t one of them.
I’m glad to see the conversation about technology and inequality growing — not only because it’s something I care about, but also because technology is climbing up political and corporate agendas across the world. From the Google Anti-Trust lawsuit to the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, news about technology ethics is consistently hitting the headlines. But if documentaries like The Social Dilemma are those with the largest viewership, we risk omitting important nuances about technology and who it benefits. Analysing what they’re not talking about can help to fill some of those gaps.
