The Social Dilemma (2020) * *

 

Directed by:  Jeff Orlowski

So how am I supposed to feel while watching The Social Dilemma?  Outraged?  Angered?  Foolish?   I strangely didn't feel any of these things.   My overriding question was:  And?  There is very little information expressed here we didn't already know or at least suspect, and yet we don't care either.  The cat is long out of the bag and the horse is long out of the barn by now to do anything meaningful to curb people's obsessions with looking at their phones or computers.   The best one can hope to do is moderate it somehow, and it then becomes a matter of personal choice.  Let's face it:  Some of these things are pretty cool and technology isn't always a negative.   The folks at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. won't make it easy.   Their livelihoods depend on users continually checking in, and they won't allow you to put the phones down without a fight. 

The interview subjects of The Social Dilemma are those in the know.   They are former executives and programmers at the various social media giants who tell us how and why social media companies do what they do.   Some are still CEO's of tech companies today, which depend on mass advertising and perhaps social media influence to stay profitable.   I'm reminded of Facebook posts where one laments the passing of the "good old days" when kids didn't play a lot of video games and drank from garden hoses.  For the record, I don't recall ever drinking from a hose.   But where are they ironically lamenting their yearning for the past?  On Facebook.   

The Social Dilemma then dramatizes what the interviewees are saying in ill-fitting scripted sequences in which a high school student is seduced by right-wing misinformation and Vincent Kartheiser (from Mad Men) works a control panel directly controlling what information should be sent to whom in order to either increase usage or keep it at its current level.   Kartheiser actually plays three different versions of the mad genius pulling the strings from an anonymous lab, but no matter.   It is all unnecessary.

The interview subjects are indeed experts in their field, and what they have to say is credible and occasionally eye-opening.   They do their best to discuss the social media company strategies in layman's terms, and while I admire their candor and their individual meas culpa, their information, like The Social Dilemma itself, feels too little and too late.   Here is a documentary we wish were made five years ago, and perhaps that would've increased the impact, or at least given us a chance to mitigate the downside.