Ok. So it will be what you make of it. There’s not going to be a seamless leap from a heavy web2 monstrosity like what Twitter has become to a clean alternative overnight.
It makes sense, though. A platform that’s built to monetize your life, and does so on a massive scale, can’t be replaced easily by an entirely different beast.
Mastodon is not based on blockchain, for a social platform that is blockchain based, check out Lens Protocol, but does have an open source, ad-free structure that is controlled by users. It is also a microblogging network based on a UX that somewhat resembles Twitter.
As a “Federated” network system, Mastodon has various servers, each of which run by users, and differentiated, for the most part, by affinity.
Basically, rather than having a centralized corporate entity controlling and monetizing your account and data, you trust a peer who has set up a server. You can choose and join a group (server) based on the theme, rules and configuration of that server / moderator. In some cases you will need to be invited or prove worthiness, but such stipulations are set by the moderator and group.
Are we, ex-Twits, sophisticated enough to take on digital self-determination?
The challenge lies in the trade off that is built into the systems, one vs. the other. On a highly commercialized, slick, UX optimized platform like twitter there are lots of addictive, albeit shallow, reasons to participate. And the downsides can be seen everywhere – massive bot harassment, constant DMs from unwanted scammers, hate and ugliness, you get the picture.
A user controlled, open source platform, on the other hand, requires more real engagement from everyone for it to work. This is a double-edged sword – all that extra effort can seem overwhelming, but the benefits, particularly longer term can be magical.
Imagine a place where you are free to communicate with others that share your interests, and those that may not, but without an algorithm to force you to see whatever it wants you to see, or to shadow-block you from being seen, only because you didn’t pay or play its preferred game.
Losing the algorithm that serves the centralized commercial platform’s agenda is, ultimately, the only way forward, but not an easy place to get to.
In the end it is a question of realizing the potential of the internet (web2, 3 or 4) for deeper and more effective communication, not just to create a hellscape of fluff and vitriol that benefits a Zuckerberg and now, potentially, Elon Musk.
By now the shortcomings of Facebook (Meta), Twitter and the various Google services are glaringly obvious and, for the most part, agreed on nearly as much as global warming. However, just like the solutions to that other soon-to-be hellscape, the possibility of millions or even billions of people (in the case of Facebook) spontaneously migrating to a new platform or platforms is slim.
Ultimately, it will take a change in the people that comprise the network itself, not a top down makeover or feature-set rollout.
That is the most interesting point that can be gleaned from the current Mastodon moment; those that have pre-migrated before the current Twitter melt-down era seem to be acutely aware of the challenges, but also of the potential benefits, of growing into the new experiences that are only available there.
This underscores the potential irony of the current Twitter meltdown, intentional or not. Is Elon Musk doing the world a favor by pushing many of the best and brightest communicators out of the nest at the precise moment that it might be possible for another platform to gain a foothold?
Or will this be more akin to the moment that Clubhouse had which was seemingly diluted and washed away by copycat offerings (like the audio services Twitter added) and demoted to near irrelevance?
As has been the case in the past, even with the initial adoption of Facebook and Twitter by the masses, it is user sophistication and need that drives huge new platforms and activities.
Whenever a new platform for online communication is able to meet the moment and the new needs of a critical mass of users, that will be the place and time for the past to fade and something, hopefully better, to emerge.
And, perhaps, learning how to better interact with one-another online, even at the cost of taking more responsibility for learning and co-managing the platform itself, will begin with Mastodon and the Twitter devolution phase.
The following excerpt from TheMarkup.Org, from an interview by Julia Angwin of Adam Davidson gives a bit of a view into what some might find worthwhile at Mastodon:
Angwin: What would you say your biggest takeaway from this experience has been so far?
Davidson: I would say the screaming headline for me is, “Wow, this was awesome. This was amazing.” The Mastodon community was amazing. The journalism community was amazing. It’s really one of the best professional experiences of my life. I just love it.
What I’m finding most satisfying about Mastodon, and I’m seeing a lot of other journalists feel this, is that it actually forces you to ask and confront some of these questions and to make active choices. Even if Mastodon were to remain Twitter’s very tiny stepbrother, I would still like to be part of a Mastodon journalist community because I think we got lazy as a field, and we let Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and, god help us, Elon Musk and their staff decide all these major journalistic questions. I don’t know for how many people that’s a good siren call to join Mastodon, but for me that’s been pretty exciting.
“Changing their name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate.”
Tech ethicists and branding professionals on Thursday said consumers should not be hoodwinked by Facebook’s name change, which numerous observers compared to earlier efforts by tobacco and fossil fuel companies to distract attention from their societal harms.
“Don’t be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook’s PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms.”
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Meta rechristening during Facebook Connect, the company’s annual virtual and augmented reality conference, explaining that “we are a company that builds technology to connect people and the metaverse is the next frontier, just like social networking was when we got started.”
“Some of you might be wondering why we’re doing this right now,” he added. “The answer is that I believe that we’re put on this Earth to create. I believe that technology can make our lives better.”
Many critics found Zuckerberg’s explanation unconvincing at best and, at worst, disingenuous.
“Changing their name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate,” the watchdog group Real Facebook Oversight Board said in a statement. “Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation, and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable.”
Us: Please stop destroying society
Facebook: Okay what if you just call us Meta now 😉
Vahid Razavi, founder of the advocacy group Ethics in Tech, told Common Dreams: “Don’t be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook’s PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms” over the negative press from recent whistleblower revelations.
Former Facebook employees-turned whistleblowers say the company’s profit-seeking algorithms—and its executives who know their insidious impacts—are responsible for the mass dissemination of harmful content, including hate speech and political, climate, and Covid-19 misinformation.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Antisocial Media, told Time that “the Facebook of today has never been the end game for Zuckerberg.”
“He’s always wanted his company to be the operating system of our lives that can socially engineer how we live and what we know,” Vaidhyanathan continued, adding that the new name is “not going to change his vision for his company—he’s never let anybody on the outside change his mind.”
Zuckerberg, he said, “wants to take the dynamic of algorithmic guidance out of our phones and off of our computers and build that system into our lives and our consciousness, so our eyeglasses become our screens, and our hands become the mouse.”
Some observers compared Facebook’s attempt to rebrand itself to what they called similar efforts by Big Tobacco and fossil fuel corporations.
“It didn’t do anything,” Laurel Sutton, co-founder of the branding agency Catchword, toldTime. “People still knew that Altria was Philip Morris and they didn’t rehabilitate their reputation simply because they changed the name.”
“There’s no name that’s going to rehabilitate the behavior that they’ve displayed so far,” Sutton said of the social media giant. “Maybe put that time and energy into rehabilitating their morals and ethics and business decisions rather than just trying to slap a new name on something.”
Originally published on Creative Commons by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
As the title indicates, the original review finds the documentary important and more than worth viewing, even to the extent that it should be considered as something that’s important beyond the entertainment value. And while nothing in that article needs, from our perspective, to be altered and still stands, there is an omission that has grown in importance over the intervening weeks and months.
The omission was not only in the review, and virtually every other review we’ve seen, but also is a glaring one in the film itself. As a matter of fact that omission is so large and so glaring that it warrants a deeper look. Hence the title of this piece: The Social Dilemma 2.0: Follow the Money Edition.
Why “Follow the Money”? Because the film, in its admittedly excellent execution, chose to follow a personal, social and psychological thread in its storytelling arc, and, out of necessity, since the subject matter is so huge and complex, took the comments from the “insider experts” who comprised the on-camera interview segments, and featured mainly those that reinforced the personal, family and social perspective.
Indeed, the film included a fictional family, presumably meant to show how, mainly social media platforms such as facebook, were negatively affecting individuals and society as a whole, through fake news and internet-addictions fostered by the software and algorithm designs.
And this “slant” was carried almost to the point, by the very end of the show, of connecting the software based social media designs and corporate behavior of Facebook and others, to the larger growing malaise in society and the world at large.
Unfortunately, by using the fictional family, trying to show how both young and old are impacted, the scope, depth and severity of the underlying problem was, in essence, minimized.
Based on online public comments people seemed to take away that the idea that the film was accusing social media and facebook in particular of, was of causing people to become addicted to social media, for greed and profit, and that this was pretty much the center of the problem.
Google, Amazon and others were only mentioned in passing and the greed and economic problems associated with big tech was touched on and passed over in order to make the case, inadvertently, but nevertheless, that this was an individual, social and personal problem, and one that could be blamed on social media technology.
Arguments and rebuttals arose over the finer points of addictive behavior in general and how social media or internet addiction was just one of many human foibles, and how no hard proof could be compiled to link facebook or any other online platform indisputably to any particular individuals behavior, blah, blah, blah.
All of this became an easy, knee-jerk way to dismiss, out of hand, all the deep and serious problems that were hinted at in the groundbreaking documentary and thereby stop, effectively, any possibility for the film to become a general wake-up call to all who want to isolate and identify the massive, expanding and world destroying effect these monolithic tech behemoths are having on life on this planet.
Which is what the film aspired to and had to potential to be a beginning of.
In our original review we made an attempt to shift some of the focus, away from the more narrow one of looking at individual personal problems and affronts that are being perpetrated, bad as that is, toward a more global and economically based set of concerns.
To that end we cherry picked quotes from the on-camera interviews in the film in order to point out that there was a larger, even more dangerous set of issues at stake that were only hinted at in the film. (We have reprinted a few of them interspersed below)
“Companies like Google and Facebook are some of the wealthiest and most successful of all time. They have relatively few employees. They just have this giant computer that rakes in money, right? Now, what are they being paid for? That’s a really important question.”
-Jaron Lanier, founding father of virtual reality, computer scientist
This quote is and inquiry into the deeper issue; one that is car larger than the question of whatever dangers there may be for individuals who may experience negative symptoms of “internet and social-media addiction”.
Focusing on the personal problems of users of social media in this context is like looking at a planet whose economic system is based on brutal exploitive human slavery and wanting to discuss the food, or living conditions or wardrobe choices offered to the 7 billion slaves.
“This is a new kind of marketplace now. It’s a marketplace that never existed before. And it’s a marketplace that trades exclusively in “human futures”. Just like there are markets that trade in pork belly futures or oil futures. We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale. And those markets have produced the trillions of dollars that have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”
-Shoshanna Zuboff PhD., Harvard Business School Professor, emeritus and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
Like tobacco companies in the US 50 or more years ago the tech giants need helpless, addicted, impoverished victims to hold up their empire. And, just in the same way, the cost of using the “product” of big tech is pain, suffering and eventually death. And ultimately, just like with Big Tobacco , when the customer base “wakes up” all the empires will collapse, seemingly in a heartbeat.
In the meantime, unfortunately, misdirecting the scope and center of the problem is helping to maintain the empires and poses no threat to them, managing only to confuse and obfuscate the size and severity of the real problem that has emerged.
Above: Photo / Netflix
The real problem with having four companies control a massive percentage of the economy with virtually unlimited profit margins and almost no employees
As the quote above states. These “internet” firms are raking in trillions of dollars in a business model that is based on various forms of exploitation and virtual human trafficking.
This is where we diverge from, and must go far deeper into the problems, than the documentary was able to go.
Firstly, it was left unclear who exactly the firms are that are being singled out in the film. By calling the film “The Social Dilemma” which echos “The Social Network” film based on the origin story of Zuckerberg and Facebook, there’s an implication that Facebook is the “main” problem.
Naturally this choice was logical given that ex-Facebook and ex-Google heavyweights were represented in the interviews. However this is a huge, misleading and erroneous perspective.
Of the huge tech monopolistic-monoliths Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are the most dangerous. (Apple, in an exception, however, for example, as it designs and builds actual physical products, although it is often unfairly combined with the other 4).
For the sake of simplicity, Microsoft, appearing, deceptively, like harmless-looking old grandfather by comparison, would be a complicated choice to tie into any exposé, therefore was never mentioned. (that we are aware of).
As a matter of fact, Amazon could have had a whole separate yet equally disturbing documentary assigned to its “alleged” crimes and misdemeanors, but ex-Amazon employees would be unlikely to come forward, potentially due to fear of retribution and possible bodily harm.
Thus, one is left with Facebook & Google and then Google becomes partially let off the hook, in the documentary, by focus on “social media”.
The Real Crimes are Economic and based on Inherently Evil Business Models that can not be Removed without causing the Giants Themselves to Collapse
And that’s why they can not be “reformed”. Like a somnambulistic slave population from some kind of dystopian sci-fi fantasy, within a short span of around twenty-five years of internet life, we have seen the emergence of an entirely new and, unfortunately ugly, economic system.
This new system created Jeff Bezos’ obscene, circa 200 billion fortune, as well as the behavioral diseases explored covered extensively in “The Social Dilemma”. The system has also created the sick twisted saga of WeWork and the exploitative business models of companies like Uber and Grub-hub and the like, thereby creating the “gig economy”.
The pandemic that began in 2020 has massively accelerated this highly problematic “new economic order” until Amazon is closing in on being the largest single employer in the USA. (currently #2 with over 750,000).
Why is that not something to applaud? Doesn’t that make them “ok” while Facebook is the real villain?
To the contrary, it can be argued that Amazon’s business model is even more destructive than Facebooks, with it’s vast system of not only exploiting workers but maintaining a serfdom of suppliers and small business “marketplace partners” who are eaten-up and spat-out with a viciousness no historical dictator could ever hope to match.
It is an historical fact that all of the (non-amazon) retail trade is seen by Amazon as an enemy to be eliminated, and that their explicit goal is to destroy the possibility of any economic transaction taking place, in countries where they operate, without Amazon earning a cut – a kind of Amazon-tax on all transactions. “Your margin is my opportunity” as Bezos famously cackled.
This mirrors, in products and computer services, the model of Facebook and Google have in online traffic and ad income, whose goals are to control and take a massive profit from at least 99% of all “digital” advertising revenues. These already represent the majority of all advertising and are growing in total amount and percentage every year.
“In 2019, digital will account for 50.1% of total media ad spending worldwide thanks to strong growth from major digital ad sellers like Google, Facebook, Alibaba and Amazon.” (emphasis mine)
The turning point we have reached, in other words, is one where the sheer size, power and dominance of these firms threatens to overwhelm our entire economy (what’s left of it after the pandemic).
And further, to succeed in controlling it, so totally, as to raise the likelihood that their cancerous behaviors and business models will ultimately cripple and kill the economy itself. Just in time for Global Warming to hit home.
The reason for such pessimism (shared incidentally by those insiders interviewed in “The Social Dilemma”)? Isn’t this all just “good ol’ capitalism”? Isn’t complaining about it just the “whining of losers”?
The problem lies in the self-destructive and totally out of control algorithmic dictatorship systems that these “genius” firms have built.
Take Amazon, again, for example. It’s power and dominance is based on bilking it’s marketplace parters (which have, during the life of the company, contributed the lion’s share of the revenue and an even larger percentage of the profits), and then using those funds to sell it’s own products at a large loss (an illegal activity, rarely prosecuted in the US, known as the loss-leader strategy), in order to harm and, if they succeed, destroy all external competitors (try selling products at less than cost at a massive scale with no source of funds to pay for the disparity).
This neat “fly-wheel”, which is the real one, not the one Bezos has bragged about for decades, is supplemented by enticing Chinese producers to further destroy the domestic market for any US competitors, and, voilà! this wonderful project is actually subsidized by the USPS.
When this monstrosity of a “turbo-charged-Ponzi Scheme” manages to starve its “partners” (millions of small business marketplace sellers) and enemies (everyone else) literally to death, customers will also die (financially).
That is if the government doesn’t intervene first.
The fear of government intervention at Facebook, Google and Amazon is palpable. The lost cases and launched actions are mounting month by month and year by year.
The worst case scenario is only possible if the connection is somehow kept “secret” long enough to deflect blame onto the government, addicted and victimized individuals and / or anyone one else they can attack.
Just like the whistle blower in “The Insider” who was threatened and forced to live in fear until Big Tobacco was finally held to account, we are all hostages of the largest most virulent form of anti-competitive-monopolistic behavior in history. And it is time to wake up.
Forget your internet addiction and all the smoke screens blocking the truth from being seen. The internet, and the communication and economic lifeline that it has become for all of us, is too important to be controlled by 3 or 4 obscenely massive companies.
The longer it takes to dismantle the current malfunctioning system and build a new one, the more we will all suffer and contribute to future suffering, at a scale that is impossible to imagine.
There is a bright spot in all of this! The corner has been turned on people taking notice that there is a problem with the way things are, regarding monopolistic control of the internet realm.
Companies that create build and actually provide and sell physical products, such as Apple and Tesla (and others) are, while far from perfect, not part of the gang that grows almost limitlessly based on exploitation. They do depend on prosperity to survive, since they research and design and innovate cutting edge technologically advanced products (expen$ive), that need to be bought by someone, at the end of the day.
That is why I believe that they, and others like them, will, more and more, become part of the solution, rather than trying to compete directly by being even more exploitative and evil than the others.
Next up: “The Social Dilemma 3.0” will be about business models that need to emerge if we are going to survive and prosper. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.
As you might be aware, a new documentary is on the top ten most watched list on Netflix and is getting a lot of attention. The Social Dilemma is a well made documentary, directed by Jeff Orlowski, that aims to reveal the problems, very very big problems that have arisen, mainly in the past decade in the way social media and internet platforms generally, are operating and prospering.
While that may sound harmless at first blush, it’s the sheer scale; trillions of dollars, and the lack of any product or service, other than to advertisers, that begs the question: at what expense to humanity?
This is a big, important subject and is one that is extremely difficult to cram into an “entertaining” documentary. Here, an attempt is made to tackle that difficulty in two main ways.
First there are many on-camera interviews with almost exclusively former and current Silicon Valley insiders, many of whom where partially responsible for the very systems and methods that are being called into question here, and second, the two inter-twined semi-fictional dramatic elements, clearly meant to help viewers that may lose interest in discussions of algorithms, machine learning and corrupt business models.
Choosing insiders is not an oversight but by design
The choice of such a long list of high level tech insiders as interviewees is important and meaningful. The very fact that people, most of whom profited and made careers out of building these systems and platforms, are willing, now, to passionately speak out about them, and agree that they are horrific mistakes that have the potential to destroy not just people’s lives but humanity and the planet itself, speaks volumes.
While there are many other scholars, journalists and witnesses that could, and should, have their ideas and opinions heard, it is the extreme fact that insiders are willing to address these problems so candidly and so passionately, that helps this to be a mind-blowing and impossible to ignore documentary film.
Companies like Google and Facebook are some of the wealthiest and most successful of all time. They have relatively few employees. They just have this giant computer that rakes in money, right? Now, what are they being paid for? That’s a really important question.
-Jaron Lanier, founding father of virtual reality, computer scientist
The film must be seen, and the information absorbed, to understand the true importance, but, in a nut-shell, what is becoming more obvious by the minute is that the combination of massive power based on worldwide near-monopoly status, and a business model that has no contribution to make or product to sell, has allowed these platforms to amass trillion dollar fortunes in a lethal mix that must be stopped at all costs.
”The first fifty years of Silicon Valley the industry made products, hardware, software, sold them to customers, nice, simple business. For the last ten years the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been in the business of selling their users”.
-Roger McNamee, Early Facebook investor and Venture Capitalist
Critics fail to see the film’s urgency and instead nitpick it as an imperfect entertainment product
There are layers of irony in the fact that the weaknesses decried by many critical articles written about this film are the same ones that the film is pointing to, and a major force, one that propelled these online platforms to positions of virtually unlimited power in the first place: human weaknesses and short attention spans.
”The classic saying is: “if you’re not paying for the product, then, you are the product”
-Classic Silicon Valley truism
The interviews are powerful and the quotes and alternately chilling and illuminating. So much so that it is actually difficult to absorb all at once. Many reviewers chose to simplify this reality by boiling the many serious quotes down to “dystopian” cliché, as if the end of the world is a topic for a cartoon movie review. Others harped on the weakness of the acted-out semi-fictional stories as not being the optimum way to get the real data and facts across.
The two narrative threads portrayed by actors revolve around an imaginary semi-suburban mixed family and their interactions with technology platforms and social media and a fictional visualization of the “back end” of the software systems used by the giant platforms (Facebook, Google, etc).
This back end software is elevated to a “triple-android” character, portrayed by Vincent Kartheiser, of Madmen fame, as sort of automaton-triplets that embody the actions of the software, AI and the integrated instructions, presumably from Zuckerberg himself (or the equivalent at Google or other platforms. (character name is, revealingly, “AI”)
This is a new kind of marketplace now. It’s a marketplace that never existed before. And it’s a marketplace that trades exclusively in “human futures”. Just like there are markets that trade in pork belly futures or oil futures. We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale. And those markets have produced the trillions of dollars that have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”
-Shoshanna Zuboff PhD., Harvard Business School Professor, emeritus and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
While these filmic-devices are not ideal or particularly precise in showing the problems with the entire complex system, they are, nevertheless, a good choice to find a way for the statements of the interviewees to be dramatized. They can help people who are not technical analysts to viscerally grasp the deep and serious problems being discussed. Without these elements the film’s audience would be, almost certainly, far smaller. This fact was not appreciated by many reviewers, however.
”Many people call this ‘surveillance capitalism’. Capitalism profiting off of the infinite tracking of everywhere everyone goes, by large technology companies whose business model is to make sure that advertisers are as successful as possible”
-Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and co-founder of The Center for Humane Technology
One reviewer even mistook the fictional anthropomorphic portrayal of software algorithms and artificial intelligence, all three by the same actor, as a real “unnamed” social platform and that these characters were supposed to be employees of the “unnamed” platform!
All of this confusion is directly related and lies at the heart of the eponymous dilemma being addressed. If the interview subjects, many of whom have become extremely rich from their contributions, are terrified of the evil power of these systems and platforms, what can be done to stop them from getting even bigger and more powerful and eventually destroying us all?
What chance of understanding and solving the problem to the rest of us have?
”How much of your life can we get you to give to us? We often talked about, at Facebook, this idea, of being able to just “dial that” as needed. And we talked about, you know, Mark (Zuckerberg) have those dials… “let’s dial up the ads a little bit”, dial up the monetization, just slightly… At all these companies there’s that level of precision”
-Tim Kendall, Facebook / former director of monetization, Pinterest / former president, CEO / Moment
Such a question sounds almost like a joke to anyone who has not followed and investigated the rise of these behemoths and the “legal” and yet criminal behaviors they perpetrate on a global scale, amplified by computing and financial powers that would have been unimaginable even 2 decades ago.
Therein lies the rub.
The beginning of the end of malignant big tech structures or of us?
The only criticism that stands out to this reviewer is that the message of doom was portrayed as an open question with not much in the way of suggestions for solution, or ways forward other than “delete your social media accounts”.
”there are times when there is a national interest, there are times when the interests of people, of users, is actually more important than the profits of somebody who is already a billionaire”
-Roger McNamee, Early Facebook investor and Venture Capitalist
While that, in and of itself, is a start, the reality is that governments around the world, particularly in Europe and Australia have convicted the giants of criminal behavior on multiple occasions and there are many pending anti-trust actions, not to mention grass roots support for radical change to laws and regulations as a response to the truly destructive nature of these platforms.
“These markets undermine democracy and they undermine freedom and they should be outlawed. This is not a radical proposal. There are other markets that we outlaw. We outlaw markets in human organs. We outlaw markets in human slaves. Because they have inevitable destructive consequences.”
-Shoshanna Zuboff PhD., Harvard Business School Professor, emeritus and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
In an odd way the truth of even the most hyperbolic statements is what makes it so hard to keep people engaged. If these platforms and, in particular the dangerous and destructive business models that they are allowed to operate under, are not replaced or at least broken up, this could represent an even larger threat to humanity than climate change or nuclear war, so where do we start to dismantle them?
”We could tax data collection and processing. The same way that you, for example, pay your water bill, by monitoring the amount of water that you use. You tax these companies on the data assets that they have. It gives them a fiscal reason to not acquire every piece of data on the planet.”
-Joe Toscano, Google / Former experience design consultant and author of “Automating Humanity”
This is where interviewing and asking some very distinguished people who were, in part, responsible for building these systems, falls apart. Why should they be expected to have a solution for a problem that they, admittedly, were a part of creating?
”What I see are a bunch of people who are trapped, by a business model, and economic incentive and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.
-Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and co-founder of The Center for Humane Technology
The answer is, of course, that they should not be expected to be the ones with the solutions – though their support of finding solutions and tackling the problems is very valuable, indeed. This is why this film deserves not criticism as an imperfect entertainment vehicle, but rather support and recommendation, as an important beginning in recognizing the threat posed by these business models; to mental health, economic prosperity and political stability of all nations.
”Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment…”
