I have a confession: in my younger years I was a devout conspiracy theorist. My political leanings were also hard left in my late high school and early college years. It’s a bit ironic but this was at a time when these things were not really popular themes. It was the late 90’s and early 2000’s during the first tech boom and most of America was worried about the latest technology and getting rich. I guess looking back on it, I was ahead of my time.
Since then I have become an avid anti-conspiracy theorist and a a bit more of a centrist except for some social issues where I remain towards the left. My lifestyle remains spartan like a good communist but I am well within the capitalist camp, despite that term being a dirty word in many circles today. What produced this change was knowledge and training in critical thinking.
This is not to say that critical thinking will align your political views with mine but critical thinking will make you skeptical of initial claims and assertions you take in, be they from people, news or books. Questioning the questioners is also part of this process of being critical of everything to arrive at your own truth.
I couldn’t help thinking of this when I took time out of my studies to watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix recently.
The Overall Theme
The questions posed by the documentary are relevant not just to us as citizens and society in general but to our bottom line as well. Bank of America has tabulated that US tech stocks are now worth more than the entire market capitalization of all European stocks, including the U.K. and Switzerland at $9 trillion. The FAANG stocks now dominate the US stock market representing over 20% of the entire market capitalization of the S&P 500. Our pensions, 401k accounts and savings are increasingly intertwined with the fate of big tech and their prospects for making even more money.
Some of what the tech companies do is rooted in advertising and gathering data on users to aggregate and provide targets for advertisers. This is the focus of the documentary. Once they had the scale to devote resources to it, big social media companies like Facebook and Google we’re able to hire top minds in the scientific community to break down the psychology of humans rooted in our most basic need to socialize and seek group acceptance.
The documentary goes on to break down how social media behemoths have figured out ways to monetize our attention and incentivize our subconscious to seek out more social media in order to maximize our time spent on their apps.
The creators and many of the speakers on the documentary posit that this can have devastating and negative effects on our young people, on our self esteem and on our national politics.
Suicide Rates
Probably the most sobering and worrying statistic shared in the documentary is the suicide rates of adolescents. Suicide rates of adolescents 10-24 has reached its highest level ever in the past 10 years and the rate among 10-14 year olds more than doubled during the decade.
Source: CDC
A professor from NYU who commented on the data noted that the increase seems to have coincided with the advent of widely distributed smart phones with social media apps that first started to appear in 2009. Contributors note that humans are biologically programmed to seek the approval of others for acceptance in a small social group like those that formed hunter gatherer communities millions of years ago. They note our brains are equipped to handle the approval or disapproval of a few maybe tens of people but not hundreds or thousands. They hint that it could be the phenomenon of cyber bullying that is contributing to an increase in low self esteem, depression and suicide rates in adolescents, who tend to be more strongly influenced by the views of their peers.
This is where the documentary does a good job at pointing to the pitfalls, especially for developing minds in regards to social media, however some of the contentions when they try to move the topics to adults and politics are contradictory and less convincing.
Polarized Politics
This brings us back to conspiracy theories. The filmmakers note that conspiracy theories seem to be spreading wider and faster than ever before. They cite studies that show that the US is more polarized as a nation politically than it has ever been. They point to the “rabbit hole” of social media suggesting similar content to that already consumed by a user as a strong contributor to the “echo chamber” politics and a lack of understanding of the opposition that we see today.
Here however, is where the documentary seems to veer off course. The filmmakers point towards the profit motive of social media companies and lack of government oversight are at the core of social media companies fomenting public unrest. This argument comes off as flimsy because it’s premise seems to rest on the idea that the masses are not smart enough to think critically and it is up to us, be it government or the tech elite, to police tech to save the masses from themselves.
They even point towards the increasing international reach and power of social media to effect elections and changes in government in other countries. One commentator explains how a small canal of individuals with the power to control social media could topple governments in places like Kenya and Cameroon. Again here the documentary seems to run into a central contradiction: it dismissed conspiracy theories like flat earth and pizzagate as silly and without merit but then subtly posit their own conspiracy theory that social media companies are an evil force that secretly controls the world and sows foment across the globe.
These divisions were already alive and well within American culture long before social media came along and the term conspiracy theory often tends to only apply to the way the other political party thinks, not one’s own viewpoint. Although the documentary may have a point that social media may help amplify these differences, at the end of the day the responsibility lies with everyone to be better critical thinkers and not blind partisan followers.
In fact there is a very long history of conspiracy theories in both public beliefs as well as political jousting going back hundreds of years in the US. A recent op-Ed in The Washington Post by Rachel Hope Cleves, professor of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, provides some insight on this. Note that the term Republican below refers to those who were anti-loyalists and anti-monarchists at the time, not the Republican Party we know today.
Republican fears of power’s expansionist tendencies spurred the revolutionary generation to regard British taxation after 1763 as not simply a deviation from prior norms, but as the first step on a swift descent toward political enslavement. American revolutionaries were not simply whiny about taxes; they were paranoid.
The first bipartisan political divide in the United States emerged from conspiratorial anxieties. In the 1790s, conservative Federalists worried that their more democratic Jeffersonian rivals wanted to bring French-style revolution to the United States. At their most extreme, archconservatives such as Timothy Dwight warned that Jeffersonians were under the sway of the Bavarian Illuminati, an international conspiracy aiming to overthrow Christianity.
In this tradition, the documentary attempts to dismiss conspiracy theories but then posit their own that big tech and autocratic actors are working to destabilize democracy around the globe, which I found alarmist and conspiratorial in itself.
The Positives
The documentary also ignores all the positives of social media. Niche marketing is one of the most empowering things for those with diverse skills and interests. If you have a product that requires you as a small business to sell to middle aged men in the northeast with one leg, you can reach that demographic with a precision like never before.
Individuals have the power and the potential breadth to create their own brand and cut out the middle man to distribute that brand globally.
Information can spread faster via these networks than even the light speeds of large media outlets can produce. In fact it changes the nature of what is consumed and you often see traditional media outlets looking to social media for noteworthy topics or discussions to broadcast. It’s likely that much of the social unrest and pressure for change in regards to policing and race relations would not have come about recently without the dissemination of information among minority communities in the US. These are examples of where these social media outlets can be forces for good.
Networks have gone global where they were once almost impossible. I keep in contact with people across the globe from Oman to India, Japan and Colombia. Although some of these connections are more reactive and casual, the connectedness on social media makes us feel as if those people are closer than if we had to take the time to look up their number and call them. Photos and videos of people we know allow us to experience more of the life of people in our network which allows us to feel closer. This can come in handy later when moving, traveling or looking for a new job.
Conclusion
Although The Social Dilemma is worth a watch and has some interesting insights the idea to limit social media is still being argued and there is a case to be skeptical. Once we start to manage what we think people should see, we open the door for censorship and stifling dissent. We are already seeing this in the way social media feels it should arbitrarily police people’s speech on their platform, not just the content they consume. This topic is ignored completely.
It also ignores any sense of personal responsibility people should be taking for what they consume and arriving at their own conclusions. The case for limitations for younger people may have some legs. Give it a watch and feel free to share your thoughts below.
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