This Netflix film deserves your immediate attention

Dave Carter, a retired lawyer in Anchorage, wants Alaskans to watch “The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix, a 2020 documentary-drama hybrid that premiered at Sundance.

Having watched the film twice, I agree that this is a worthy and urgent crusade. Drowning in social media, we have no idea what it is doing to us and our children.

Traditional means of sharing information have been destroyed or weakened, replaced with systems that are not what they appear to be on the surface. We are being bombarded with information, disinformation and misinformation at the speed of light.

I think that most of us who engage in social media have no clue that we are subjects in an uncontrolled experiment conducted by tech companies competing for our attention and driven entirely by the profit motive. Designers from Silicon Valley are reprogramming civilization and we aren’t even aware of what’s going on.

The platforms are “an invisible force that is shaping how the world gets its information and understands truth,” the film’s creators say.

This film should make you question what is running through your brain and what information you and others are using to make important decisions.

The main message of the film is that the business model the companies use to keep people online as long as possible as often as possible—tailoring content to users to achieve those goals—is all about attracting more advertising revenue by keeping users clicking for more.

“One of the interesting things about the documentary is that it explains how these algorithms are designed to keep people from accepting information which is somehow different than the information they want to have,” said Carter. “It really is deep brain stem, emotional, fear and fright based, but imperceptible to users.”

“Engagement time is key to profits, as the documentary explains,” he said.

“One can only imagine what Facebook/Twitter/Google use has done to every legislator, and reporter who use these private for-profit internet businesses,” he said.

I suspect the Facebook feeds of Jamie Allard, David Eastman and Lora Reinbold amount to daily affirmations that solidify their extremism.

This is a pertinent topic for every legislator and reporter in Alaska, given the personalized thought bubbles created by the preferences that send users the content they are likely to look at longer and more often—content that signals the recipients are right about everything.

“Hopefully you can run these points by some friends interested in journalism and how best to inform the public about these matters. Before doing that, please just do an article/blog letting people know they need to watch The Social Dilemma documentary to help them understand why so many things are different now from before social media existed. Which really was just in the last 12-14 years, when Facebook and Google arrived on the scene,” Carter wrote me.

Jeff Orlowski, the director of “The Social Dilemma,” said the film began with an idea he had after watching Tristan Harris on “60 Minutes” say that tech companies were manipulating people by design. Harris, a former Google employee, is co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

“Never before have so few companies had such control over us. In many ways, social media companies like Facebook are more powerful than most nation-states,” the center says on its website.

Orlowski said the hidden intentions of the creators of social media companies are not understood by people who use them. It’s all part of what he and the other creators call the “attention extraction economy.”

“The attention extraction economy refers to technology platforms that profit from the monetization of human attention and engagement. This includes, but is not limited to, Facebook (which owns Instagram), Twitter, TikTok and companies like Google (which owns YouTube) that profit from keeping users hooked on their platforms because more engagement means more advertising dollars.”