More resources on the movie’s official website here.
Manila, 20 September—The Social Dilemma landed in my radar at the right time. Last week’s post was all about reclaiming the internet and tending to my own patch of the internet like I would a garden—something that resonated with a handful of you (Thank you so much for your email replies! I appreciate them so much), so I guess it’s just fitting to continue exploring this space.
WATCH: The Social Dilemma, now on Netflix
I don’t know if I should tag this with the usual SPOILERS ABOUND warning before proceeding—there is no way you would be surprised by what the resource persons interviewed in the hybrid documentary-drama film would reveal.
But by far my favorite tidbit is from Jaron Lanier, founding father of virtual reality, who put it this way: Think about Wikipedia. Publicly editable as it is, when you land on a page in Wikipedia, you see the same content that everyone sees, and not a page tailor-fit to you, your preferences, your location, your previous purchases in Lazada, your most common likes on Instagram, what you just talked about twenty seconds ago, etc.
READ: What turned Jaron Lanier against the Web via Smithsonian Mag (from 2013!)
To think we spent years demonizing Wikipedia for being unreliable (anybody can edit it!), while putting actual newsroom resources into monitoring social media as a legitimate news beat and making headlines out of netizen reactions. I think that was a net-negative, friends. As the resource persons pointed out, if you’re not paying anything for a service, it’s because you’re probably the product. And since newspapers weren’t paying anything to get their content syndicated via social media, well—we all know what became of that.
Anyway, social media has eroded pretty much everything that has value in the real world—including our ability to agree on universal truths. The very promise of social media—to give anyone with access to their platform a ‘voice’—is ultimately canceled out because they are complicit in attempts by authoritarian governments around the world to silence their critics and amplify government propaganda via inauthentic activity.
READ: “I Have Blood on my Hands”: A Whistleblower says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation via BuzzFeed News
The resource persons interviewed—executives who helped build social media platforms in their early years—said they truly believed that what they were doing was a “force for good”. But something so deliberately engineered and designed to manipulate people can hardly be called a “force for good.” And they’re the first ones to point out they’d been pretty naive about the ‘flip side of that coin’.
And now here we are. It is no coincidence that the likes of Duterte, Bolsonaro and Trump are incumbents at the exact same time. This is the darkest timeline and it’s all because of Facebook.
But then again: We all already know that.
Personally, I think at this point, I have already overstayed in my anger; now is the time for action. Some things I am currently doing:
Minding my scrolling. Lanier’s first tip: Reject the algorithm recommendation, and always fight for the chance to choose the content you engage with. This is especially hard on Facebook and Instagram since they already line up your posts and insert all those budol ads, but you can always choose not to autoplay YouTube’s recommended video (which is also hard to do, especially kung kabisado ka na ng YouTube, but you can always try.)
Decentralizing my content and opinions. I house my content in spaces I own, and share on social sparingly, if at all. Twitter is by far my hardest divorce. I understand some of us need to do some of our work facing stakeholders on social media, so I’d like to offer up this framework about how you could think about the online spaces you move in, in terms of fast/slow spaces and cozy/open spaces. (via Tom Critchlow):
Planting my own garden by seeking out information on my own, instead of waiting for information to come to me—just like the old times, eh? Facing the browser with a question, instead of just accepting what the recommendations are for the day, etc. As before, I come to the internet as an active participant—the internet does not come to me as if I were prey. I engage when I want to.
Turn off my notifications.
A caveat: I don’t mean to say nothing good could ever come from social media. I think when used deliberately and consciously, it can be a good resource. For example, I have found a lot of great essays and poetry from Facebook and Twitter. (Related read: FOMO can be good. Staying plugged in can be good. There is valuable information everywhere—but only if you can manage your attention well enough.)
Anyway, since we’re talking about gardens (albeit digital ones), let me end this with this quote from Austin Kleon on Planting Iris, which is about Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband, and Hitler:
“One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.”
I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.”
And so we shall plant our gardens, and start things that will outlive all of this.
Thanks for making it this far.
Have a great weekend!
Xo,
K