Ok, Pull Requesters, I'm taking one for the team tonight and watching 'Social Dilemma'. I have first girded my loins, so to speak, with some Rioja and jamón. On to the show....

Be wary of people who insist on idiosyncratic ways of pronouncing their names.

As part of the self-promoting spectacle, this Tristan Harris guy corrects someone's pronunciation in the staged opening roll. Tryst-AHN. Is he going for the French pronunciation (which this isn't)?

Everything this person says is either patently false and/or phrased via the most awkward mixed metaphor.

"This world deals in certainty."

Then why am I building probabilistic models all day?

"This has never existed before."

I was there, at FB. We copied it from direct mail.

LIVE SHOT FROM THE FB TARGETING TEAM

Which apparently resembles some cross of Black Mirror, Minority Report, and the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

What's funny is that they're using misinformation and emotional manipulation to deliver a sermon about the very same.

Oh! Now they're staging the implications of social media via some updated 'Family Ties'-style sitcom melodrama.

It's the old media criticizing the new via the old tricks: Socrates orally condemning the alphabet, the monks hand-writing tracts against the printing press.

How did they get a serious intellectual like @JonHaidt to participate in this? He presents some interesting data on mental illness rates and smartphone adoption. I actually want to hear more.

They should spend 10x the time with Haidt as they do with Tryst-AAAHN.

By God, they should have just called this the Tryst-AHN show. If they blow any more smoke up his ass, it'll show up in the wildfire maps.

(And it's not overcoming human nature, you rubes, it's amplifying it. That's the issue. Nothing here is truly novel.)

Ok, I'm skip-watching using the 10-second FF button. The denouement (spoiler alert) is that regulation is the solution.

Like we regulated the alphabet. Or the printing press.

All these screeds alight on 1 of 3 solutions:
1. Luddism
2. Regulation
3. Anti-trust

That's it.

As soon as credits rolled, Netflix auto-played a trailer for something related. It was tempting to click play... https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1306946072481234946

In the film's defense, it very obliquely and briefly touches on issues (e.g. teen mental health and smartphone use, the Rashomon effect of contrasting mediated realities) that are legit. Shame it's packed in with so much fanciful FUD (not to mention way too much Tryst-AHN).

I'll close plugging this piece which (yes, really) I liked. If you remove a lot of the anti-tech BuzzFeed framing and read through to the events described, it's an excellent portrait of what life is like inside FB.

Will discuss both in Pull Request. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo