The Social Dilemma — A Review
After watching this movie, and marinating on it for a few days, I realized I had a lot more to say about it than I thought. As someone who has been in this tech and design space for several years, the information presented in the movie was not new. If I watched the movie for face value, it was essentially a bunch of white male engineers explaining how they made a lot of money solving cool problems while simultaneously screwing over millions of people by making them addicted to technology.
Although I do not think these engineers should be praised for telling their stories, I am appreciative of them admitting their failures and wants to improve the monster they created. Overall, I think that this movie was a good start to explaining this massive problem that we don’t really know how to define. For those in the tech industry, this movie was probably not the most groundbreaking, but for those who may not have known about these problems, it is a good introduction.
The movie did a good job explaining exactly how tech companies track their users. For someone unfamiliar with this field, they gave direct examples to explain how you are being tracked. For example, companies know exactly how long you are spending watching an image or a video. This kind of information is very obvious to someone like me who is well versed in the tech space, but there are plenty of people who don’t know these things, and this information is eye-opening.
In terms of the actual movie, there were several things I really did not enjoy. The inner movie was highly dramatized and honestly, took away from the story. Additionally, this movie made it seem like the only way to fix this gigantic problem is for the government to put limits on these companies, and I do not think that is the case. Hypothetically, the government could fix part of the problem, but it cannot fix the root of the problem that is a combination of unethical data gathering, addictive interface design, white, male engineering majorities, and business models where making money is the only goal.
I’ve seen this movie get a lot of flack because the entirety of interviewed people are white, male engineers who made so much money either intentionally or unintentionally screwing over lots of people. Now, after doing all of this damage, they are trying to “fix” things. Again, although I don’t think they should be praised, I do think it is a step in the right direction, and it has inspired me to want to question the design decisions I do end up making one day when I start working.
As someone who is a user experience designer, I am definitely annoyed because a lot of companies claim to hire designers to improve the user experience, but at the end of the day, UX designers are actually just people who are helping the company make more money, without putting the user or the user’s long term interests first. This model is what thrives under capitalism, but is extremely unsustainable and harmful to all of humanity.
To conclude, this movie is a good start. At the end of the day, we need radical change in the design and engineering life cycles at tech companies to create sustainable products that may not make as much money. Under capitalism, it is almost impossible to ask a company to make less money — it literally doesn’t make sense — which is why we need government intervention, as well as individuals stepping up to create better products for users.
