Recently, I watched a documentary, which is very powerful.
After reading it, I was so frightened that I immediately threw away my phone (and then, hurriedly picked it up again).
Because, this is a movie about all the netizens who are dependent on social media, I believe that after watching this documentary, you will also have your own feelings.
As an Internet addicted teenager /girl, you must watch WeChat every day to brush Weibo to turn over the Douban, you have replaced social media with telephone text messages, have you ever thought that social media seems to be accompanying, in fact, it is monitoring?
Netflix's new documentary, "Surveillance Capitalism: The Social Dilemma," is probably one of the most exploratory documentaries to date.
Its indictment of the tech industry shows the damage that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter do through their social media platforms and search engines in addition to convenience.
It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and after the pandemic, there were some updates on this era.
The documentary is a dire warning that brings together former employees of tech giants who have jumped ship, as well as industry commentators and academics, to issue a warning about the crisis of social media.
Feel the lineup of interviews, are the backbone and former employees of well-known Internet companies, so their words are more meaningful.
This documentary reveals an important point that social media exposes and amplifies the worst aspects of humanity, and that this way and existence is our greatest existential threat today.
The documentary tries to find the root cause of all these problems, and it takes a different perspective to take a peek into the background.
In these interviews, we see experts explore how internet addiction and privacy violations are characteristic, not vulnerabilities, of social media platforms; and from those who have jumped ship from social media giants, they hear why they feel the harmfulness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a flaw.
Those social media employees are justified in claiming that social media companies' manipulation of human behavior has Machiavellian precision:
Predict user preferences with artificial intelligence;
Keep users engaged with unlimited scrolling and push notifications;
Influencing user behavior with personalized recommendation usage data;
From data collection to data buying and selling, all of this is subtly making users prey for advertisers and promoters.
"If the product is free, then you are the product." Social media platforms are designed to create dependency and addiction in the services of "surveillance capitalism."
Everything looks creepy, doesn't it?
After watching Surveillance Capitalism: The Intelligence Trap, the more we learn about the secrecy behind social media, the more we feel like the documentary is casting a cannonball on a nuclear war.
From this we learn that our brains are manipulated, or even reconnected, by algorithms that are designed to grab our attention and make us buy things, including distorted ideas about the world, ourselves, and each other.
In this way, the English literal translation of this documentary is "social dilemma", which can no longer be grounded.
Admittedly, this is not the first documentary to turn the camera to social media, tearing apart the dark side of personal privacy and so-called democracy.
Prior to that, Screened Out (2020), Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016), and Privacy Thief The Great Hack (2019) all smashed the mirror of the Internet at different levels and from different perspectives.
Screened Out (2020)
Like the previous films, Surveillance Capitalism: The Intelligence Trap brings experts forward to explain how we became the way we are and why we became the way we are, but the difference is that many of the experts in this documentary are the creators of this social media era.
These designers, engineers, and tech giant executives invented social media, but resigned when they began to realize the existential threat it posed to all civilizations.
Thus, from the beginning of the documentary, we will see that these experts who will tell the story are a little embarrassed and unnatural, and the words are frequent confessions and apologies.
Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook's most popular "like" button, is embarrassed to say that the feature was originally set up to "spread enthusiasm" and is by no means the current behavior tracking guide.
What's wrong with having your friends and their friends "like" what you post? It turns out that if people don't get the liking of others, their feelings are hurt. As a result, they change their behavior to attract more "likes."
Does this seem like a social problem?
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that the "dilemma" is that social media offers both utopias and dystopias.
They bring out the best and the worst in society, and do many things so simply, like the invention of the taxi application as magical as magic, but at what cost?
A large number of data show that a large proportion of the people who urgently need to get "likes" are teenagers. We all know the painful nightmare of school bullying in middle school, and I don't know when it began to determine your value by being thought cool by your friends at school, or that the recognition on campus will at least make you not a complete loser.
And when this mentality is placed in an Internet world that is ten thousand times larger than the campus and is still unregulated, this is why the anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide of teenagers are now rising sharply.
In addition to this, there are examples of the spread of disinformation, the radicalization of extremists in the Middle East, the radicalization of white supremacists in the United States, and the failure of political polarization and the use of authoritarian regimes in countries such as Myanmar and the Philippines.
There was a new clinical term called Snapchat Dysmorphia, which refers to people who use cosmetic surgery to make themselves look more like the kind of filter photos you see on the Internet.
All in all, when individual actions become group behavior and the situation becomes uncontrollable, people blame the Internet, saying that because the Internet environment makes people change their mentality, it has promoted the situation that is now out of control.
In the face of these doubts, in the documentary, Silicon Valley veterans tell the good wishes of the birth of social media, and they do not shy away from painting a bleak picture of the current situation.
But one of them also confessed that he spent the whole day trying to make his site irresistible, only to find himself unable to resist the algorithmic tricks he had created when he came home at night.
In today's world of the "attention economy," the documentary does offer some valuable recommendations, such as stricter regulatory measures to protect consumers and taxing the "data assets" of social media companies.
But whatever happens, stopping this trend will require a collective will to encourage change among all.
Likewise, it guides everything we should question about what we read online, especially if these things are presented to us in a way that allows us to learn more about our preferences and preferences.
It seems that the Internet can read minds, they know us better than friends than relatives, and can be seen on the dark side, but this refined penetration uses the brain's evolutionary needs for interpersonal relationships, making people unable to think about it.
In addition to this, a special point of the documentary is that it intersperses fictional scenes in animated, graphic and dramatic styles in interviews, overshadowing the story of a family of five negotiating in a chaotic digital world in order to more realistically illustrate the impact of social media on our lives.
The content seems to be just to fill the volume of the interview, but thanks to the addition of actors such as Vincent Kartheiser, Kara Hayward and Skyler Gisondo, these small segments resonate with the audience on an emotional level.
In the silent dinner, we see everyone in the family trapped in social media for their own reasons, so that the entire era is shrouded in the web of social media.
Most importantly, we can see that this embedded story pays more attention to the impact of social media on ordinary teenagers.
But this fictional narrative also indirectly reflects the limitations of documentaries that sometimes overemphasize the medium and ignore the information. For example, the film's interlocutors blame the increase in mental illness on the use of social media, but fail to acknowledge factors such as increased financial insecurity.
In addition, some of the dangerous attributes of poorly reproduced social media have also confused the documentary's criticism of it, and the practice of focusing our attention on what is outside the online world has made the documentary play the villain role of the story in the business model.
The most obvious controversy was that Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, said Russia did not hack into Facebook, but only used it.
Most respondents are reluctant to label Mark Zuckerberg or any individual as bad guys, preferring instead to portray these companies as victims of their own success, caught in a vicious cycle of needing to make more money to keep the machine alive.
In this regard, Disconnect (2012) and Trust Trust (2011) better illustrate these issues.
Disconnect (2012)
"Surveillance Capitalism: The Intelligence Trap" was written by Jeff Orlowski, whose documentaries we are doing to ourselves and Chasing Coral narrowed down to a reality that seemed too abstract and incomprehensible for a layman to the human dimension, dissolving the so-called viewing threshold.
The documentary, which can also be called "Chasing Us" in his series, re-depicts The Oldest Type of Terror in the Digital Age, Dr. Frankenstein, and raises some basic existential questions about whether we are really writing important decisions about survival for ourselves.
Jeff Orlovsky
Surveillance Capitalism: The Intelligence Trap shows the basic nature of social media experimentation from top to bottom, from the inside out, and uses them to stir up fear in your heart, very effectively sounding alarms about data mining and manipulation technologies invading our social lives and beyond.
As the documentary opens, Sophocles says, "Anything huge that comes into human life is accompanied by a curse." It uses a dialectical rationality to make the audience more aware of their own behavior, knowing that when we use the Internet, the Internet is using us.
On another level, our data is used as currency by tech companies, but our time is a more precious commodity – how many lives can they give us?
This elegant articulation of the relationship between technology and human behavior reinforces the argument that addiction is not a side effect of social media, but the business model of the industry, but does it awaken another directional postmodern consciousness?
We are so worried that technology will overwhelm human power that we fail to notice that technology will overwhelm human weakness.
In the film, professor and author Shoshana Zuboff refers to these data markets as "human futures" and argues that they should be outlawed.
But computer scientist, virtual reality pioneer and author Jaron Lanier says the risks of reform are high in themselves. If we continue to maintain the status quo, he said, in another 20 years we could destroy our civilization because of this deliberate ignorance.
When you're done watching capitalism: The Intelligence Trap, I'd like to hear your thoughts.
How does social media affect our perception of things like politics, race, and entertainment?
What effect does confining people to their own reality have on our beliefs in empathy, objective truth, and some shared understanding?
Does the siloed nature of streaming video and algorithmic programming make it a more alternative to theatrical experience?
These questions will only become more pressing when the future of humanity becomes a gift to humanity.
However, after all, what is really incomprehensible is that after watching such a documentary, we can still only spread and recommend this documentary through social media. Even his broadcasting platform, Netflix, is itself a company that recommends movies by algorithms.
This has almost become the most ironic and incomprehensible part of this documentary.
Fortunately, life is inherently insoluble.
I could only pick up the thrown phone and continue to refresh it mechanically.