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I watched the first 37 minutes and 37 seconds of The Social Dilemma and here are my initial thoughts. For reference, this is a docu-drama that focuses on the dangers of social media and the ways in which it exploits us in order to capture our attention and manipulate us for profit. It suggests that the profit comes from paying advertisers whose product can be political, as well as commercial.
So far, it seems to have been well done. There has clearly been a lot of thought given on how best to convey these complex ideas to a non-technical audience. The approach taken is one of layers - say it simple, then give more detail, then give examples through the use of drama.
The interviewees are mainly ex-employees of the big social media companies, and are given a fair and forgiving treatment, more or less absolving them of any hint of malicious intent, going so far as to suggest they're victims like the rest of us. In any case, I think that avoiding the blame-game is a good move right now, because an amnesty could help more insiders to speak out. There are also academics and industry 'experts' sharing their views.
The main drama centres around a very relateable family, with the script well judged to subtly introduce recognisable traits and behaviours.
One of the drama threads is a sort of imagined futuristic 'Dr Evil' scenario where people representing the artificial intelligence are controlling an 'avatar' of a real person, thereby controlling aspects of his real life.
It's an excellent metaphor, and really well executed, but I have a concern that it's perhaps a bit too far fetched and may be ridiculed my people taking it a little too literally.
I won't write more yet since I still have an hour left to watch, and in any case I don't want to interfere with independent opinions too much yet.
I hope it continues at the same standard. The distrustful side of me worries that they'll screw it all up sometime in the last 30 minutes, and discredit all that went before. It just seems too heretical to have been allowed to broadcast.
So, picking up where I left off...
Next section moved on to Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning - their explanations were good enough, focusing on what they essentially do, rather than how they do it. There is mention of A/B testing, extrapolation of results, predictive models, and data-harvesting. Most importantly, I think, they showed video of vast data centres!
The film moved on to echo chambers and tailored feeds, asserting that our view of the world is governed by algorithms that simply show us more of what we tend to view longest. Unfortunately, they make a comparison between cable TV and Internet social media (i.e. that the advertising model is just an evolution of TV) *after* the echo-chamber bit, not before. This weakened the message, since the level and effects of targeting change the model entirely. It's no longer public broadcast, but personalised messaging.
One of the strongest messages that I picked up on, which coincidentally suggests that this film was made in good faith, was an emphasis on the tiny sums of money we're being manipulated for. At least three times, they drove home the cost of a manipilation (e.g. "we just made 3.47 cents!"), which in the context of the main message is quite a powerful contrast.
The film seemed to be moving towards a closing message that regulation is the goal, and perhaps this is the motivation for the film. If so, I'm not convinced that this is enough, since it could simply be misused to entrench the status-quo. The closing credits are full of interesting soundbites that hopefully catch people off-guard and encourage them to do the sane thing and wean themselves off their virtual smack.
That's all I'm going to write. It semmed like a pretty well made film, worth watching in my opinion. If you're reading this via Gemini then you'll likely get a sense of vindication, and you'll be more confident in your resolve, but you probably won't actually learn anything new.