If you watch this movie, you will have a different eye on your mobile

Never before in history have fifty designers, white men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, in California made decisions that will affect two billion lives. The thoughts of two billion people will be affected just because a Google designer told me how the notifications we wake up to each morning will work. And as Google employees, it is our moral responsibility to solve this problem.

– He says Tristan harris, former Google designer in an interview with the film. Harris is known as the Silicon Valley conscience anyway. At one point, the man, who once worked for Gmail, began to get annoyed that the services were being designed to be increasingly addictive, so he asked for a presentation that included the idea cited above, which he distributed to the employees of the company. company, hoping to make changes from within. However, the expected revolution fell short.

He built his film on the problem raised by Harris Jeff Orlowski director who previously filmed on the topic of climate change Chasing ice and Chasing Coral dokukat. HE The social dilemma perhaps the most comprehensive image documentary for mass consumption to date, on the far-reaching effects of social media, by removing clichés and explaining the main mechanisms and contexts in an interesting way. How likes and innocent posts infiltrate the fabrics of society to the point where platforms can influence elections, polarize societies, or even real-life acts of violence such as the Myanmar massacre.

The obvious goal of the entire film is to initiate a dialogue: what are we going to do to not keep ourselves further apart as our own realities and truths collide? And what does that have to do with sometimes we like and share something on Facebook?

This is what former employees of large technology companies talk about through interviews. Those who have served as leaders on Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter, but have been highly critical of the products since their departure, in which they also played a role. Justin rosenstein For example, he was present at the birth of the Like button and admits: the original goal was to give the user of the button positive feelings, but no one yet foresaw the negative side. To understand the context, the film lays the foundation to explain the reasons behind our addiction to social media.

The human brain is a hardware of thousands of years and we cannot change the desires encoded in us: we need to connect with others, provide feedback, attention.

All of these weaknesses are exploited by services that communicate with us with notifications, chat pop-ups, and likes. And our attention is the value itself, so we will get as much publicity as possible, since in data capitalism the user is the product.

It is said that the purpose of our data collected and analyzed by algorithms is actually to let us know our next step and to distract us for as long as possible with the recommended content to satisfy our taste. We are making a kind of digital voodoo doll, more and more precise thanks to our interaction. It’s a thought-provoking moment when tech industry interviewees themselves honestly admit that they themselves depend on certain actions: who’s on Twitter, while others are on Pinterest, even though they know it themselves.

this is the service-conscious design trap.

It is in the minds of professionals to see the life of a fictitious family several times describing the main problems, joining the framework of the interview format. How does a dinner party turn catastrophic when kids lose their cell phones, or how loneliness and anxiety take over a teenager when they are notified that their ex’s have a new connection and eventually how they begin to radicalize with the videos of Youtube? When the teenager cries in the bathroom, after a series of kind messages, he is told about having elephant ears. Chances are high that the viewer himself could mention such disturbing examples from his immediate surroundings.

“I fear a civil war more”

Even during the coronavirus epidemic, it became clear how powerful fake news is in information overload, which can also lead to violent movements in real life, such as the destruction of 5G broadcast towers. But it is equally problematic that some parties can attack misinformation through social networking sites according to their own goals. While Facebook is trying to combat this with algorithms, a data scientist says it won’t be a solution either.

In this regard Roger mcnamee, an early Facebook investor, mentions that when Russia targeted American users through Facebook, it was not a hack, as they only used the tools that Facebook legally allowed. The responsability Harris therefore, this is why platforms need to take on, and there is an increasing urgency for decision makers to address this issue as well.

Harris says it would be too blunt to say that technology is an elemental threat, it’s more about being able to bring out the worst in us.

When we start to think about what we can do about it, experts say there are two main areas to be done: Services need to be designed more ethically, and the advertising-based business model needs to be rethought. For example, taxing companies for the data they collect, which would be a kind of restriction. And they can give the user himself a path to follow, with each click of ours representing a vote. In its most extreme form, perhaps Jaron Lanier, A pioneer of virtual reality, believe TI: it says, among other things, that you should not only choose the videos recommended by YouTube, but that it is better to delete yourself from the system.

A The social dilemma It is available on Netflix from September 9, although it is very likely that users interested in the subject have already been driven by a referral system that knows their tastes.

Illustration: social dilemma