Day 29 : A Social Dilemma
It’s day 29 of my digital declutter and recently I watched the Netflix documentary titled The Social Dilemma.
Over the past few weeks I’ve had quite a few people tell me I need to watch this film — but what has been most interesting to me is that it wasn’t just those people who I would have guessed to already be aligned with my ideas around digital minimalism and the drawbacks of a hyper-connected lifestyle.
It appears that the questioning of social media and more broadly the role tech plays in our individual and collective lives has started to go mainstream — I would imagine in large part due to (or evidenced by) the popularity of this film.
In this post, I’m not going to recap the film. You should go watch it for yourself and form your own opinions. Rather I will share some of my own thoughts and opinions on what I found to be most relevant in the film to this month-long digital declutter experiment I’ve been conducting on myself.
Preaching to the choir
As someone who already likes to draw clear boundaries around the role technology and especially social media play in my professional and personal life I did not need much convincing that there is an issue worth exploring here.
What did still raise my level of concern considerably as an individual, parent, and member of society, were the rate of change and degree to which some of these platforms have affected outcomes in everyday life as well as the methods by which these outcomes are achieved.
Methods
It should come as a surprise to no one that social algorithms are designed to maximize user engagement and ad revenue above all else — including human wellbeing.
One thing that did surprise me however is how significant the role of geography is in determining not just your Facebook feed and Youtube recommendations, but even Google search results. It’s no wonder blue states are getting bluer and red states are getting redder.
What was also a bit scary to see is the level of sophistication with which machine learning algorithms are able to not only predict user behavior — but also influence human behavior to achieve certain outcomes like the viral sharing of a post.
Outcomes
Even if maximizing user engagement (i.e. time and attention) and ad revenue (i.e. profits) are the primary objectives of a recommendation algorithm this does not mean they are the only outcomes that will be produced. Secondary outcomes and side-effects also need to be accounted for.
Data presented in the film support a correlation between a sharp increase in rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide with the rise in popularity of social media. Political surveys have also shown the divide between left and right of the political spectrum to be at all time highs partly due to the fact that fake news spreads at a rate 6x faster than real news on some platforms due to its sensationalistic and divisive nature.
I’m left with no other option than to agree with the premise that these platforms may represent an existential threat to democracy (elections), society (civil unrest), and the human species (nuclear war, climate change, and contagion) due to an overall decline in critical thinking, nuanced opinions, thoughtful analysis of complex issues, and moderate public policy.
Metrics-driven development
In recent years there has been a trend in the software development industry around metrics-driven development. Teams are encouraged to define “success metrics” as a way to plan and prioritize their roadmap. These metrics are then used to determine the success (or failure) of individual products and features as well as to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the employees who worked on them.
The advantages of this approach should be clear. Ideally it’s an unbiased method to evaluate performance of engineers against a set of objective criteria. Who can argue with the value of that? However there is a flip-side to that same coin.
In Manifesto for a Moral Revolution by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen, the author makes a compelling case about the danger of rewarding only what is easily measured:
Twenty-first-century capitalism rewards money, power, and fame, not the immeasurable impact we have on a person’s confidence, their courage, or their ability to, say, remain in school or even to make it through another day. This failure to recognize important work imperils us all.
— Jacqueline Novogratz, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution
This quote reminds me of a 2018 interview with Kent Beck where he talks about parting ways with Facebook over a disagreement on how performance evaluation of engineers was handled at the company.
Every 6 months, you need to prove what “impact” you had on Facebook as a whole. That word “impact” is a really important, kind of magical word, that has a very special meaning inside of Facebook. So you should be able to say “Here’s the metric I cared about, and here’s what I did, and here’s the effect I personally had”. That focuses everybody on the upside of what they’re doing.
But what if there are downsides? Like that feature makes it easier for someone to social engineer extracting private information, what if it just makes the app more cluttered?You have no incentives to look at the downsides of what you’re doing.
At some point Facebook needs to switch to focusing on impact to focusing on the quality of decisions. People should be rewarded for making good decisions, regardless of personal “impact”.
— Kent Beck, Being Human Podcast #23
It’s human nature that your behavior both professionally and personally is going to be influenced by the incentives that exist in your environment.
But where and how can it be changed?
The incentives for engineers at a company are set by their managers.
The incentives for managers are set by senior leadership.
The incentives for senior leadership are set by investors, members of the board of directors, and shareholders that are bound by fiduciary responsibility.
Systemic change is hard. And likely will require some combination of government regulation, grass-roots organization, and personal reflection by every consumer and individual working in the industry. That includes me.
Parenting by example
Interwoven between the interviews and public speaking clips in the film is a fictional narrative about a family and the role of technology in their lives. In my opinion this is the weakest part of the film, but I get what they were trying to do with it.
In one scene, the mother in the story collects the phone from everyone in the family before dinner and locks them in a time locked plastic container that cannot be opened for an hour until dinner is over.
Soon after, the 11-year old daughter gets up from the dinner table and smashes the container to get her phone. In the process she also smashes the screen on her brother’s phone. The daughter then marches off to her room to resume posting selfies and chatting with friends on an Instagram-like service.
This scene though slightly over dramatic does highlight an important point that technology is no replacement for good parenting. Why was she allowed to take her phone? Why wasn’t she punished for breaking the rule of no phones at dinner? Or breaking the screen on her brother’s phone?
As a parent of a 14-year old daughter myself I try to lead by example when it comes to the role of technology in my everyday life through things like this digital declutter experiment, leaving my phone at home when possible, or making an effort to use it as little as possible when we are spending quality time together.
I even managed to convince her to get a Light Phone with me so we could try out spending more time less connected — a plan we sadly chose not to follow through with after the final product, delivery date, and price tag were a bit disappointing compared to the original designs.
A bit of perspective
This past weekend while driving home from a backpacking and camping trip traffic was brought to an abrupt halt on the highway due to a serious accident not far ahead of us.
I knew it was serious when traffic was completely stopped in both directions so a medical helicopter could land in the middle of the highway to airlift some of the individuals involved to a nearby hospital.
While this was happening, a large crowed started to form of people that had now stepped out of their vehicles to watch the scene unfold. By and large almost everyone in the group was primarily doing one thing and one thing only… recording a video on their phone.
When I was a young kid attending catholic school we were taught to pause and say a silent prayer anytime we heard a siren from an emergency vehicle. I wouldn’t consider myself religious these days by any stretch of the imagination, but I can’t think of anything further away from that sentiment than recording an actual emergency to later post it on social media.
By rewarding only what we can measure, we perpetuate systems that fail to honor that which we value most — and the price we pay is nothing less than our collective soul.
— Jacqueline Novogratz, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution
