SF tech execs apologize for addicting features in Netflix doc

Social media has given the world many wonderful things, and in exchange it has shattered our attention spans and turned us into tech industry cash cows. For many people, myself included, daily life has started to feel like a series of push notifications. Some of my workday social media fidgeting is necessary to do my job, with companies like Facebook squeezing dollars out of me even as I research stories. And these apps have so many potential distractions that oftentimes I’ll forget why I even went to them in the first place.

The new Netflix doc “The Social Dilemma” positions itself as an antidote to this modern affliction with a cast of reformed tech execs explaining how their platforms prey on their users’ weaknesses to keep their heads in their phones, and ads in front of their eyeballs. The producers hope that it serves like a 2020 version of “Scared Straight!” the 1978 documentary that introduces juvenile delinquents to convicts.

It’s not a horror film, but it may be the scariest movie of 2020.

If you even passively follow tech news, you may feel you don’t need to spend 90 more minutes learning that social media is dangerous. At first, I didn’t either. I understood that I was addicted to my phone, but what I learned from “The Social Dilemma” is the how and the why.

Tristan Harris, the S.F.-based founder of a tech ethics foundation called the Center for Humane Technology, serves as the film’s primary source. He left Google while working on a Gmail redesign after realizing that every decision was made with the intent to keep users looking at their inboxes. “There’s an entire discipline and field called growth hacking,” says Harris in the film. “Teams of engineers whose job is to hack people’s psychology so that they can get more growth, so they can get more user signups, more engagements.” Sure, this may not be revelatory and everyone knows the quote “if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product,” but one I hadn’t heard until this film is that the only two industries that call their customers users are illegal drugs and software (via Edward Tufte).

Like illegal drugs, there are serious health consequences. The first generation to begin using social media in middle school are particularly at risk. Hospital admissions for nonfatal self harm are up 189% for preteen girls since 2009, the movie says, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicides among preteen girls are up 150% compared with the 2001-2010 average. These are the middle school social media lab rats, and they are literally dying. And the documentary states that regulations protecting this age group from subversive advertising in older modes of entertainment like Saturday morning cartoons don’t apply to Youtube for Kids, compounding social dangers with commercial one.

Some of the most powerful addiction-driving features, such as the Facebook "like" button and infinite scrolling of web pages, can actually be traced to specific people who are featured in the film recanting for their creations. Notable Silicon Valley figures featured include former Pinterest President Tim Kendall, as well as executives and engineers from YouTube, Google, Instagram, Firefox, Facebook, Twitter and Uber. As the film digs into the driving forces behind people’s behavior, it becomes clear that even innocuous features like text message autofill are intended to keep people absorbed in their device and tailored to the specific user.

One of the most interesting revelations in the film comes from Berkeley-based virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who uses Wikipedia as an example of one of the few online resources where everyone who visits sees the exact same thing. By contrast, things like Google search autofills and results change based on location and user data. He proposes the nightmare scenario of Wikipedia giving everyone else different definitions, and receiving advertiser dollars based on how well they optimize the results.

What makes the film so eerie, and far more entertaining than a typical talking head tech documentary, is the addition of a narrative thread that’s essentially an afterschool special. Skyler Gisondo (“The Righteous Gemstones, “Booksmart”) stars as a teen who descends into a spiral of conspiracy theories. The algorithms guiding him are personified by a council of three actors at a command center (all played by Vincent Kartheiser from “Mad Men”) who study his feeds and adjust what he sees for maximum engagement and profit. Eventually these algorithms isolate Gisondo from his friends and family and steer him towards a QAnon-ish web of YouTube personalities that draw him to a protest, which turns violent.

Like any afterschool special, it’s a little cheesy, but it was actually the first piece of media that made me genuinely concerned about the confines of my own internet habits. No matter how sharp you think you are identifying the walls of your echo chamber closing in, the algorithm knows your weaknesses and has been optimized to groom you into a perfect product for the highest ad bidder.

As for its effects on my social media consumption, I wish I could say that the documentary scared me into deleting my Facebook account and leaving my favorite cesspool (Twitter). Even with my phone in grayscale mode to decrease screen time (Apple hides this in Accessibility>Display>Color Filters), there’s still just so many unavoidable reasons for me to descend into the ecosystems of my devices. I may be milked for ad revenue in the process, but I do get something in return.

However the film did give me one important insight, which I feel has dramatically improved my relationship with my phone: Notifications are the true evil.

I have conceded that once I’m looking at social media, I am essentially a hooked fish being reeled through a sea of advertising. But more often than not, the push notification is the bait that gets me there. Even if the notification isn’t anything enticing, the nudge brings my attention back to my phone, and at that point the algorithms give me plenty of reasons to stay awhile.

A week after digging into my settings and disabling every notification that isn’t a text message or call, I don’t miss a thing. And I’m still on my phone more than I’d like, but at least now I know I’m in better control of how I get there in the first place.