THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

The whole world is talking about the hit documentary: 'Sorry we deliberately turned you into addicts' Should we trust the people who built Facebook and Google when they regret because they manipulated us for profit? Writes: Pavica Knezović BelanPosted: September 17, 2020 8:21 pm 8763233 Vladislav Chernov / Alamy / Alam Facebook Twitter Messenger E-mail When we refresh Instagram or Facebook, in our (addictive) psyche, the same receptors of excitement and expectations ignite as when we play slot machines in a casino. Maybe this time we will "get" something especially interesting, important, the main prize, bingo, which will make us happy, at least for a while. What is the (again addictive) mechanism that drives us to reach for our smartphone at night, when we wake up, which, of course, sleeps near our headboard, and immediately check our mail and messages on Viber or WhatsApp? And why do we live in the delusion that all these channels of communication and social networks are free or almost free for us? When we actually give ourselves to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, we allow ourselves, just like in the Matrix, to become a product that they rule and deal in, as a currency, it would be more accurate to say - a commodity - big technology companies that purposefully control our lives and influence our decisions and behavior. Traffickers These are some of the questions and theses that are being bombastically posed by the new Netflix documentary that is currently talked about a lot - "The Social Dilemma" by Jeff Orlowski. Premiered at this year's Sundance, "The Social Dilemma" wants to show us a world of technology entrepreneurs, innovators, geeks and nerds who have begun to suffer, faced with a technological Behemoth over which no one seems to have control. Not even the big, sickly rich companies that, this documentary tells us, have made all of us a value that they constantly trade. In addition to first-class interlocutors, professors from Stanford, Harvard, co-creators of the Facebook like option, former CEO of Pinterest, an engineer from the beginning of Instagram Or, Orlowski shows us the scale of the manipulation we all agree on and the feature part of the film - a fictional family manipulated by AI (Artificial Intelligence). The film’s main star is Tristan Harris , a former head of moral design at Google and co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, a nonprofit that seeks to influence technology companies to be more legally regulated. Now, what would be the moral in design? At one point in the film, Harris warns that no one was aware that the decisions of several hundred engineers and designers at Google in designing a solution to our favorite search engine or email would irreversibly affect the daily lives of billions of users. Is it good, is it just designed to benefit technology companies - it collects our data and predicts our behavior and in the end - it causes some form of addictive behavior in all of us? Harris, another technology genius from Stanford, got a job at Google after the company bought one of his applications. Is what a large company is doing morally right, he began to wonder in the middle of the last decade, when he sent a warning about the need for serious consideration of further development of this technology company - to which, except the initial hat, no one actually responded. Therefore, he is leaving the company and today he is on the bumper of end users who are already deeply, if not irreversibly, stuck in the jaws of large technology companies. But it’s hard to shake the impression watching that chivalrous Harris that he, too, was just designed to convince us that somewhere someone cares about us. Strict control One of the most interesting and antipathetic interlocutors in the film at the same time is Tim Kendall , the former CEO of Pinterest, an engineer with a degree from Stanford who was brought to Facebook in 2006 to monetize the company. His idea was banal, simple and - successful. Facebook needs to become a platform for advertisers. The pompous, handsome Kendall talks unusually openly about what he did, only to inform us at the end of the film that he strictly controls the use of smartphones for his children, that no one in the family should sleep with his gadget by the headboard, and that children should not use social devices. network before his 16 years. Before that, revealing to us that he himself is the biggest addict of his - mail.