So I watched the new hyped Netflix doc "The Social Dilemma" & it amounted to a radical centrist propaganda film (which is ironic considering a fictional subplot that ties the movie together features an "Extreme Center" group that are meant to be evil "populists" lol)

Almost everyone in the movie formally held influential positions at all of the tech companies being criticized. Several of them all work together at a think tank called the "Center for Humane Technology" which is featured in the film multiple times. Its found is Tristan Harris

Harris is a former "ethicist" for Google who started the Center to combat what he says in the film is an "existential threat" from social media's business model. Yet his website says multiple tech CEOs have been influenced by his work, including Mark Zuckerberg

Aza Raskin is an entrepreneur& co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. He coined "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" which Jack Dorsey echoed as he tightened censorship on Twitter across the political spectrum. He sits on the World Economic Forum's AI Council

"Political polarization" & "radicalization" are a huge fears of the interviewees in the film. The recent loss of the centrists in the European Parliament to both left & right "populists" is given as an example, as is Pizzagate

Immediately after this pearl clutching about the slow death of centrism a clip of Marco Rubio lamenting that nobody can talk to each other is played. Rubio is of course a viscous neoconservative warhawk & free-market fundamentalist, but this apparently doesn't make him a radical"

As if the Rubio clip wasn't enough they immediately play another, which is exactly the same, of Jeff Flake, who was rated as the "fourth most conservative" Republican senator by the New York Times in 2017. Curiously neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders are featured once

Multiple times there is a reference to a "global assault on democracy" & "social implosion" with nothing but social media, particularly Facebook, as the culprit. There is no economic analysis whatsoever except to tell us what we already know about ad revenue & data collection

At one point Tristan Harris proclaims that social chaos, alienation, tribalism, a rise of mental illness, & addiction are all rooted in or exacerbated solely by the way technology is currently being applied. For these people there is no 2008 crash or its consequences

"Conspiracy theories" are portrayed as all essentially being as stupid as "flat earth" (which is the only one other than Pizzagate that is mentioned by name) At the same time, the Russiagate narrative is deployed without criticism, in vague terms near the end of the film

The centrist incoherence of the film comes in when either Harris or Raskin (can't remember which) say, "Nobody wants polarization to happen." Yet near the beginning it was explicitly stated that social media is by design to give people their own personal reality. Which is it?

Harris says social media is an example that tech has "moved away from" its use in improving the world to one of harming it. Raskin likewise says "The idea of humane technology is where Silicon Valley got its start." Both are simply untrue

The modern Internet itself was developed by APRA specifically to be a tool of surveillance & data collection to undermine subversives, mostly those on the Left. Yasha Levine goes into this in his book "Surveillance Valley." More info here: https://twitter.com/iamthewub/status/1301911992421298176?s=20

Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist & early investor in Facebook, who compares social media to "everyone having their own Truman show." This film is then like if only the producers of the Truman Show were interviewed about its ethics & how bad they supposedly feel about it

Jonathan Lanier is also featured. He isn't really special aside from being a VR pioneer and another boring bourgeois techie "philosopher", but I wanted to include this picture of him

Last one I felt like mentioning is Cathy O'Neil, who portrays herself as a former Occupy rebel despite having a career in finance for years. She was influential in the "Alternative Banking Group" at Occupy, which was full of supposedly "disenfranchised" Wall St. hacks & lawyers

Facebook's former director of monetization, Tim Kendall, says "meaningful systemic changes" happened due to social media, which obscured the potential downsides. He doesn't specify but I assume he means something like the Arab Spring. Pic related

Finally, in the film's dramatized scenes (which have the quality of a D.A.R.E film you would watch in high school except for social media instead of drugs) the evil "Extreme Center" (another sign of the film's unintelligible lib politics) carry signs saying "Don't Vote" lol

I know that it is strange to cap a thread shitting on centrism off with an article from the New Republic, but I thought this piece summed up the film & bigger problems with recent Netflix documentaries well https://newrepublic.com/article/159657/social-dilemma-rise-clickbait-documentary

At the end the only solutions are literally all focused on things you can do as a woke consumer to make social media more "manageable." The only thing demanded of government is "reforms" & "protections." Shoshana Zuboff grumbles something about banning the sale of "human futures"