You can perhaps ignore the irony of intelligent people tweeting away, “Everyone, watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix right now!” These tweets each have at least 500 likes and retweets. You can ignore that too. But it does get to you when people start messaging you directly. So, I hereby inform the global non-bot community that I’ve already watched the documentary, and request the aforementioned community to stop spamming me with exhortations to drop everything and watch it.
Having seen the documentary, my first response is that it does nothing for my dopamine deficit. Yes, there were some memorable quotes. But the funny thing is I only remember that the quotes were memorable. I can’t remember the quotes themselves. Sure, there is value in stitching together a series of interviews with people who’ve made tons of money by helping entities like Facebook and Twitter make tons of money by turning you into a screen-pawed zombie. For instance, it enables another round of monetisation of the dwindling attention span of the swiping dead — this time for Netflix, the latest entrant to the elite club of Silicon Valley’s apex predators. But there’s little else on offer.
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It made much of what is already known: social media platforms are addictive by design, and not by accident; they are vile entities that exploit an evolutionary vulnerability in human psychology; spreading lies and dividing nations are a profitable pathway to dystopia that the global elite has embraced, just as it has embraced fossil fuels, a profitable pathway to climate disaster. So, in addition to climate doom and nuclear holocaust, we have one more option on the apocalypse menu. All this we know. And thanks to this film, now we also know that no one has any idea how to get rid of the Matrix. There is no Neo. Or rather, every Neo turns out to be a Trump or a
As of today, there are just two kinds of activities available to humans: screen-based and non-screen-based. The Social Dilemma tells us we should minimise the former and maximise the latter. Can we? Screen-based activities include work, study, socialising, leisure, entertainment, food-gathering, travelling, sports, exercise, meditation, prayer, etc.
As for non-screen-based activities, there is only one that is completely immune to screen infiltration: being in coma. Some people think sleep is also screen-proof but it isn’t. I know people — my wife, for example — who can’t sleep without a mobile. Her sleep comes tethered to an app, a ‘personal sleep assistant’ that monitors her sleep for quality control and gives her a report the next morning, with graphs and pie charts based on her sleep data. She says it makes a lot of sense even philosophically. If the purpose of life is to generate data for amoral algorithms and evil corporations, then why should you stop emitting data just because you are sleeping? In other words, we should officially re-classify sleep as a screen-based activity, which brings us back to coma.
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What if you’re not into coma, which, let’s be honest, is not everyone’s cup of tea? Are there other ways to stay off the algorithmic grid? Actually there are, and I’m mystified why the makers of The Social Dilemma are silent about them.
Lockdown of consciousness
Here’s a partial list of safe, non-screen activities that anyone can undertake with zero risk of being dragooned into data-extracting, zombifying social networks: for starters, you could give yourself an eye massage, gently pressing your eyeballs in clockwise and anti-clockwise direction to check if they are still there; you can use your reserves of bile to self-digest your food; you can circulate your blood, first in your arteries, then in your veins; you can play synaptic Chinese whispers, wherein you directly transport electrical impulses from one neuron to the next; you can participate in mitosis and/or meiosis, depending on your mood; you can lead your own paramilitary force of armed antibodies into battle against foreign armies of viruses that dare to cross the Line of Immunity Control (LIC) and intrude into your body; and last but not the least, you can grow organic fingernails.
The options are many. But sadly, most people have been brainwashed into finding them insufficiently stimulating, which then opens the door to the screen, taking us back to the social dilemma: to swipe or not to swipe. Perhaps I’m being over-optimistic here, but I think as a species we must seriously explore the coma option.
Tell me honestly. What would you rather have: seven billion humans aggregated into fiercely antagonistic camps and fed daily on a diet of hateful misinformation that could lead to massive strife and destruction, or seven billion humans in a peaceful coma (a collective lockdown of consciousness, as it were) that could potentially not just avert climate catastrophe but also save humanity from extinction? Call it the anti-social dilemma if you like. But to my mind, this is the real dilemma.
G. Sampath is Social Affairs Editor , The Hindu.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in