Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube

The “Social Dilemma” of Capitalism in Decline

The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma offers a jarring look at the addictive nature of social media. But its attempts to be “apolitical” make the film’s insights ultimately toothless. A socialist critique.

Nathaniel Flakin

November 19, 2020
Facebook Twitter Share
Netflix

The Social Dilemma, which appeared last month on Netflix, does not contain a lot of surprises. It features critics of social media companies — like Tristan Harris, once an ethics officer at Google and unironically called the “conscience of Silicon Valley” — who have already been interviewed in countless liberal publications.

The documentary’s innovation is that it features fictional interludes. The algorithms that run your feed on Facebook or Instagram are portrayed as three uniformed agents standing at control panels like ensigns on a Star Trek bridge. Seeing tech personified like this gives us a feeling of just how nefarious the feed is. The actors give the algorithm a face: one that is clearly evil.

We know that every time we pull out our phone, we are served an endless supply of cat pictures and hot takes. Yet this content is not random. A supercomputer is learning, with billions of experiments per day, what to show us in order to maximize the time we spend with that particular app, and thus maximize the number of ads.

This machine learning system, with no understanding of human society, might have helped create flat earth theory or QAnon. Not that a computer was needed to come up with dumb ideas — but the algorithm determined, via endless trial and error, that these particular dumb ideas would glue a certain number of people to their screens if “recommended” to a mass audience.

Addiction

Everyone is familiar with the addictive nature of social media — who can get through a screening of the film without at least a quick glance at their notifications? So it is fascinating to see the former head of Pinterest talking about his unsuccessful attempts to leave his phone out of the bedroom. The inventor of the “Like” button recognizes that, trying to spread joy in the world, he unleashed a monster.

Truly, the sorcerer’s apprentice has lost control of all those broomsticks!

Elsewhere in the film, experts explain what social media has done. A dramatic spike in depression, anxiety, and suicide among teenagers, for example, correlates fairly closely with the spread of social media to our phones around 2010.

But these same experts doggedly ignore any phenomena besides social media. Was 2010 not also during the period where a historic crisis of capitalism robbed young people of any sense of security about the future?

The film blames social media for “polarization” and “radicalization,” and this is illustrated with mini-snippets of protests. We see masked demonstrators waving signs or throwing molotov cocktails. The images are from the U.S., France, Hong Kong, and anywhere else. The demonstrators might be protesting against vaccines or for autonomy from the Chinese government or against social cuts — the filmmakers are telling us that all political conflict in today’s world is the result of social media.

Left vs. Right

One of the fictional interludes — featuring a protagonist who attends high school despite clearly being in his mid-20s — shows a young man getting drawn in by “extreme” content. We all know the possibilities: incels, the alt-right, or countless other right-wing movements recruit like this.

But the filmmakers want us to know that “extremism” exists independently of political content. The not-so-young man is thus attracted to a movement called the “Extreme Center”! The film shows images that supposedly could be from the Right or the Left. But looking carefully, we see the posts contain a socialist fist, a Black youtuber, and thoroughly left-wing aesthetics.

When the protagonist eventually joins an “extreme” demonstration, the multiethnic composition of the mob lets us know this can’t possibly be a right-wing rally. In other words, these “experts” on the dangers of social media are showing us the horror that a white “teenager” could get angry about racism and join a protest against police violence. Oh no!

This “apolitical” stance is shored up by politicians calling for civility. Which politicians have been chosen? Marco Rubio and Jeff Flake! Two champions of racism, imperialism, and neoliberalism in the most aristocratic body of the U.S. regime.

As absurd as it might sound, the film is arguing that any form of social conflict is caused by social media. They are just a step away from arguing that the U.S. Civil War could have been avoided had Abraham Lincoln not gotten embroiled in an epic Twitter battle with Jefferson Davis. Have they ever considered how the Civil Rights movement emerged? And more importantly: Do they think this kind of “unrest” was a bad thing?

Perspectives

Against its intentions, the film shows some of the wonders of technology. Social media undoubtedly played a role in a whole generation in the United States increasingly coming to understand that capitalism offered them no future, and that socialism would be a vastly superior social system. This is the kind of “extremism” that the film’s “ethical” capitalists are ultimately worried about.

They acknowledge that social media companies have no reason to put the brakes on this addictive technology, as the market demands that they increase profits every year. The solutions they propose — “regulation” in order to “realign fiscal incentives” — are comically inadequate for the scale of the problem they are describing.

There is in fact quite a simple “regulation” that could give humanity all the benefits of this amazing technology without the devious mechanisms designed to make people addicted. That is: public ownership under worker’s control. The users of social media — which is basically the same as all of humanity — need to decide democratically what happens on these platforms.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Holocaust denial would be allowed on the virtual version of the public square. And then from one day to the next, he reversed this call. Why should a young gazillionaire be deciding on what kind of opinions are acceptable in public? In order to shuck his responsibilities, Zuck has said that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of arbitrating truth. And in a sense, we agree with him here: Facebook needs to be in the public domain.

In other words, we need to nationalize the social media companies, and put them under the control of not only their workers, but the entire working population.

Will this stop “polarization” and “radicalization”? Well, the organic crisis that is engulfing bourgeois society is not some “technical” issue that can be solved by altering a few lines of code. Yes, social media companies are doubtlessly accelerating the spread of morbid symptoms of capitalism’s decline. But the crisis is ultimately a result of the ruling class’s inability to address the most urgent problems facing humanity. This is why they escape to ever-more-distant fantasies — as far as Mars! — as the planet burns and their “democracy” becomes increasingly clownish.

The demand to nationalize Facebook and the rest of Big Tech is not just a reform program. Rather, it is a step toward putting all of society’s wealth under the control of working people. This would not only give humanity control over the means of production — it would, as a pleasant side effect, also remove the social basis for the terrible ideas that spread across social media.

Facebook Twitter Share

Nathaniel Flakin

Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.

Instagram

Arts

Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer stares into the camera with a hat pulled over his eyes and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth

“Oppenheimer” Shows the Betrayals of Stalinism and the Dangers of Lesser Evilism

Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is a striking tale of a man who leaves the Left because of the betrayals of Stalinism. The film is also a warning about where lesser evilism in the face of the Far Right can lead us.

Sybil Davis

March 10, 2024

Exploitation in Storytelling: The Conditions of Manga Artists in Japan

Anime and Manga are popular forms of storytelling from Japan that are becoming more and more popular in the West. Here we observe the labor conditions of Manga authors themselves as well as the general labor conditions in Japan.

Carmin Maffea

August 14, 2023

Turning the Greatest Anti-war Novel Ever into Bourgeois Propaganda

All Quiet on the Western Front won four Oscars, and it’s not hard to see why. The production — depicting the horrors of World War I — is spectacular. Yet the producers did not at all understand Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. Spoilers follow.

Nathaniel Flakin

March 16, 2023

Five Years after Ursula K. Le Guin’s Death, We Need Her More Than Ever

Ursula K. Le Guin tended the embers of revolt in a new age of imperialism and counterrevolution. She tasked us with stoking them into a blaze.

Jason Koslowski

January 22, 2023

MOST RECENT

A square in Argentina is full of protesters holding red banners

48 Years After the Military Coup, Tens of Thousands in Argentina Take to the Streets Against Denialism and the Far Right

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Argentina on March 24 to demand justice for the victims of the state and the military dictatorship of 1976. This year, the annual march had renewed significance, defying the far-right government’s denialism and attacks against the working class and poor.

Madeleine Freeman

March 25, 2024

The Convulsive Interregnum of the International Situation

The capitalist world is in a "permacrisis" — a prolonged period of instability which may lead to catastrophic events. The ongoing struggles for hegemony could lead to open military conflicts.

Claudia Cinatti

March 22, 2024

Berlin’s Mayor Loves Antisemites

Kai Wegner denounces the “antisemitism” of left-wing Jews — while he embraces the most high-profile antisemitic conspiracy theorist in the world.

Nathaniel Flakin

March 22, 2024

What “The Daily” Gets Right and Wrong about Oregon’s Move to Recriminalize Drugs

A doctor at an overdose-prevention center responds to The Daily, a podcast produced by the New York Times, on the recriminalization of drugs in Oregon. What are the true causes of the addiction crisis, and how can we solve it?

Mike Pappas

March 22, 2024