The Social Dilemma (2020)
We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media?
As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.
"If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product."
At a lot of technology companies, there's three main goals:
- Engagement goal : To drive up your usage, to keep you scrolling.
- Growth goal : To keep you coming back and inviting as many friends and getting them to invite more friends.
- Advertising goal : To make sure that, as all that’s happening, we’re making as much money as possible from advertising.
- Advertising goal : To make sure that, as all that’s happening, we’re making as much money as possible from advertising.
We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary.
We’ve created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to,
Algorithms and manipulative politicians are becoming so expert at learning how to trigger us, getting so good at creating fake news that we absorb as if it were reality,
It’s as though we have less and less control over who we are and what we believe.
"How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in matrix?"
This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result.
This has been affecting the environment for a long time.
What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place…
