Driving the point of internet’s dangers home

When the Internet started out, it was an inspiring thing, something that was to change humanity for the better, like the printing press and electricity before it. Ideas could be conveyed to more people and in less time than ever before. The Internet is not that anymore. Believing that it is can be fatal. ‘The Social Dilemma’ is a polemic trying to shake us into that realisation before it is too late.

‘The social dilemma’ is what you call a ‘docudrama’. As the name suggests, it is part documentary. The other part is a fictional narrative that elaborates on the dangers that the documentary side puts forward. In the fictional side, you see the breakdown of a family after Big Tech has extensively manipulated them through their phones. And within the fictional story, we have a figurative Sci-Fi-like world, where personified Artificial Intelligences diligently and amorally dictate the lives of people. Three of these AIs are played by William Kartheiser from ‘Mad Men’.

The documentary side features interviews with people who were formerly associated with Big Tech companies, but who left them, mostly over ethical reasons. The interviewees are experts, but they are not just that. They and their family members have experienced addiction first-hand. It just so happened that unlike most of us, who do not even realise our addiction, they knew enough to see what was happening and whom to call out. Some even called themselves out.

What they go on to describe is a nightmare, albeit not a totally unfamiliar one. If you know about Edward Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, the exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar and the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, the topic is not alien to you. What will surprise you are the depth and details to which surveillance capitalism goes to keep you looking at advertisements.

The film's most interesting bit is right after the young man in the fictional family gets his phone’s screen broken. The mother tells the boy that if he manages to stay off his phone for a week, she will have it repaired. He agrees. The boy staying off his phone drives the AIs crazy. They try everything to get him back online, but nothing works. Finally, the AIs chance upon something that is bound to work: the boy’s ex has just got into a new relationship. The AIs pop that up as a notification, and the boy breaks his vows of disassociation.

Nothing in ‘The Social Dilemma’ hits as hard as the realisation that artificial intelligence can stoop to that level, and that there are things even the most iron-willed among us will let go of our discipline for. And that is your reason for watching the show. It is not a masterpiece of craft, and you may know many of the things that it has to say, but ‘The Social Dilemma’ goes out of its way to drive its point home.