(THREAD) Here's a brief thread on THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, a documentary/drama now on Netflix that's getting a lot of deserved buzz. I strongly recommend folks watch this, though I do have mixed feelings about parts of it. I break down a few of my thoughts here. I hope you'll read on.

1/ I like that THE SOCIAL DILEMMA starts with people in tech trying to articulate what the problem is that the documentary/drama addresses, as I think the film both sort of answers that question while underlining that in fact many of those in the film haven't yet figured it out.

2/ There are four—at least—discrete "problems" dramatically different in scale, impact, and insidiousness that THE SOCIAL DILEMMA sort of runs together in a way that I find unfortunate and less illuminating than it could be. But the film—as I said—is more or less open about this.

3/ The problems:

The ad-based superstructure atop social media.
Social media's "addiction" model.
The idea that social media companies "know everything" about us.
The possibility that some of what social media companies know about us could fall into the wrong hands.

4/ I am very, very, *very* concerned about problems and . But I think that anyone who puts an equal focus on problems and —who considers them commensurate in scale, impact and insidiousness—is probably someone in tech who has lost some critical historical context here.

5/ Those of us in Gen X are lucky because we have abiding muscle-memory and deep knowledge of the pre-internet age. Which is another way of saying we have abiding muscle-memory and deep knowledge of the age of television. Which was—my god—*dramatically* abusive of its "users."

6/ In the TV age, ads were *endless*. And they were almost *universally irrelevant* to us. And they were *inescapable*. And they were *100% non-interactive*. And they were *100% non-integrated*. And were—not for nothing—*terrible*.

And we're to believe ads are the problem *now*?

7/ Yes, if you're getting a "free" service, you're going to pay in another way—anyone who doesn't learn that early on in life ("nothing in life is free," one of America's oldest cliches) is a fool. I don't automatically see insidiousness in the idea that free services run on ads.

8/ And *100 times out of 100*, I would choose the ad structure of the digital age. Limited ads, relevant to me, often escapable, fairly high quality, interactive as necessary, integrated into what I'm already doing. That is *so much better* than the age of television, I'm sorry.

9/ I don't mind algorithms turning the crappy ad experience I had watching (say) the Brady Bunch—dozens and scores and hundreds and thousands of inescapable irrelevant hamfisted ads that just *wasted my life*—into Lego ads or ads for other things I'm actually *interested* in now.

10/ *Ads* aren't the problem, they're just the focus of tech executives—who wish it otherwise—so of course when tech executives make a documentary/drama they're going to make ads sound insidious *in and of themselves*. But the ads are only insidious as part of a larger picture.

11/ By the same token, I am *not* concerned—in a vacuum—about this concept of "the social media companies know everything about me." No—they don't. Their *algorithms* do. An AI on a server somewhere does. What *matters* is (a) is that data secure, (b) how is that data weaponized.

12/ An AI could spend all day learning everything about me, but *that* isn't the problem any more than the ads are the problem—a distinction THE SOCIAL DILEMMA doesn't make well. The question is when and how can a *human* get my data—*or* how can the AI use my data to enslave me?

13/ If at any point a human at—say—Twitter can review *my specific personal practices*, that's an issue (just as it is if the network isn't secure so hackers can get that info). Just so, I don't much care if you use my data to craft my ad experience—I care if you're enslaving me.

14/ So if a watchdog ensures that my data is a) only processed by a secure AI, and b) a warning (like a Surgeon General's warning) is put on any new feature in social media designed to be addictive—so I can opt out—I'd probably be fine with the rest. Of course, that won't happen.

15/ THE SOCIAL DILEMMA and similar documentaries position us as helpless—literally analogizing social media users to drug-users. And I understand why that comparison is made. But it's made in part because those in tech are often postmodernists who put everything in a *dialectic*.

16/ A dialectic is a polar spectrum (picture a line with two endpoints or "poles") representing two opposing forces that will do battle until one destroys the other. In THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, one pole is the social media companies and the other is the user and it is basically a war.

17/ Dialectics don't exist in nature—we invented them. Before the digital age, they were very convincing.

But in the digital age, the foundational metaphor is the network—a four-dimensional space with fifth- and sixth-dimensional optimization possible—not a two-dimensional line.

18/ To give the simplest example: THE SOCIAL DILEMMA correctly observes that social media companies are trying to *hack our psychology*. But then we watch THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (or just read almost anything about the internet) and *we* platform-hack *Twitter*. Still a dialectic? No.

19/ It's not a dialectic because you refused the terms of the dialectic: social media company wins or I do. What you did—instead—was cultural judo: metamodernism. You accepted that the social media company was going to do what it does and then chose to use that to your advantage.

20/ The postmodern "tell" of THE SOCIAL DILEMMA is when Tristan sagely tells viewers that social media "isn't a tool." Well, of course it isn't—in the postmodern view. In the postmodern view, there's a dialectical struggle happening and you're either the one with the tool or not.

21/ In Tristan's view, social media companies are "winning," and it's a *dialectic*, which means the "user" has to be portrayed as unarmed. A victim. Helpless. Abused. That's absurd. In fact, the social media companies have "tools" (plural) and users have "tools" (again, plural).

22/ The first tool the user has is the platform—so *obviously* a tool it's amazing the doc tells us with a straight face it isn't. The user *also* has a meta-tool even more powerful than the tool itself—knowledge of what the social media company wants its platform to be used for.

23/ Metamodernism is identified with platform-hacking and game-breaking and modding and remixing and mash-ups not *because* metamodern digital creatives don't know they're being set up, but because they *do*.

They simply use that knowledge to do incredible, awe-inspiring things.

24/ This feed—the one you're reading now—was founded in 2015 as a platform hack. I wanted to *deliberately* misuse and abuse this platform to do things it isn't supposed to do. I ignored almost *all* the regular functionality of the platform and did what *I* wanted to do with it.

25/ Take any feature of Twitter that's supposed to make it a valuable platform—the "trending" tab; hash-tags; following as many people as possible; writing in short bursts of language—and I gave it the middle finger over five years ago. And what happened? Did Twitter "win"? Nope.

26/ The reason this feed became successful is Twitter *is* a tool and *is* essentially open protocol—meaning, it's *daily* telling us how it wants to be used and doing nothing to stop us from misusing it (I mean "misuse" in the *conceptual* sense, not the Terms of Service sense).

27/ If you look at many of the Twitter feeds with the highest engagement, they habitually *misuse* Twitter—that is, again, they (1) use Twitter as a tool for ends it wasn't intended for, and (2) use Twitter's obvious protocol biases *against* it by undermining them intelligently.

28/ So I worry that over-focus on (1) the mere *fact* of how ads are deployed in the digital age, and (2) the mere *fact* that in *theory* humans could access our behavior online (not just AI), is mainly intended to enervate—drain—us so that we'll hop onto a dialectic we lose in.

29/ Of *course* our data needs to be made secure. Of *course* internet addiction is real, which means components of social media platforms designed to addict should a) be labelled, and b) come with a mandatory opt-out. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA is dead on as to those two *major* points.

30/ But the larger postmodern worldview of the film, which erases the history of advertising in prior ages, miscasts platforms as non-tools and implicitly discourages platform hacking and game-breaking and modding and so on as pointless is—respectfully—absolute poison. Dangerous.

31/ Baked into the "blue ocean" philosophy of the internet are certain harms that can be mediated and minimized but never eliminated. We do *much* better to empower ourselves to transcend imaginary dialectics—a skillset that *can be taught*, which I do at UNH—than submit to them.

32/ Part of what ails THE SOCIAL DILEMMA is the understandable moral angst of people who have been in the tech bubble too long. They've marinated in the awesome power and capacity of the social media companies so long they of *course* see the other side as defenseless. We're not.

33/ We should *teach*—yes, for college credit—generative, creative, lawful forms of platform-hacking, gamebreaking, modding, remixing, mashups, misappropriations, intelligent misuse, and (above all) the understanding of how "poetics" enables these digital creative modes and more.

34/ If you've studied any of these things, and especially if you've done that while being a post-postmodernist who has internalized postmodernism and then asked "what's next"—how do I stay hopeful? how do I keep creating?—a film like THE SOCIAL DILEMMA is deeply *harmful* to you.

35/ Learn what the social media companies are doing, then use that knowledge not to wage a war of destruction but to simultaneously do *two* things: (1) demand ethical change in the tech industry, *and* (2) use the immutable "bad" in the concept of an "internet" to *make things*.

CONCLUSION/ THE SOCIAL DILEMMA gets one half of a key equation half-right: half of the four things it obsesses over are really dangerous, and must be fought via activism. But it over-hypes the other two problems and leaves half the story of social media entirely untold. Grade: B-

PS/ Also, while the tech company-drug dealer analogy is tight—and obviously what a tech exec would focus on—the tech user-drug user analogy is *absurd*, and I say that having worked with drug and tech users extensively.

Your boss never tries to contact you via a line of cocaine.

PS2/ So when a tech exec says in the film, "I can't quit my social media use—despite knowing the tricks being used on me!" my reaction was, "Obviously?" Thinking otherwise is like saying you understand how drug trafficking works so you *really* should be able to quit using paper.

PS3/ It's facile—and insulting to viewers—to say that just because tech execs see the drug-dealing side of the equation, it must mean tech users are drug users. If there are 500 potential points of analogy between social media and dangerous illicit drugs, maybe 50 are convincing.

NOTE/ This thread sets aside the fifth key issue in the film—juvenile social media use—as from a field-of-inquiry standpoint it's a different topic. There's a neuroscientific argument to be made that those whose brains haven't fully formed yet shouldn't be on social media at all.