5 /10

In "The Social Dilemma," some of the same Silicon Valley techies who unsuspectingly created the social-media problem offer a belated and obvious diagnosis, some ahistorical context and more naive and vague prognostications. Intercut between these talking heads and their power-point presentations and TED talks in the vein of saving the world from their own hubris is an even more patronizing and ridiculous drama involving the dangers of radicalization by the "extreme center." LOL, as they say.



Having not been raised by a computer that fits in my pocket, I'm nostalgic for the days when people using "your" as a contraction seemed about the biggest menace emerging from the internet. Talking about myself isn't something I usually spend much time on in reviews, but in the spirit of the age of social media under discussion in this documentary, I'll break protocol a bit. I've always been weary of social media. My mobile phone was secondhand and several years old before I got it, and while it's, perhaps, technically "smart" in the sense that it has Wi-Fi capability, it's usually turned off. At some time or another I have to inform most of my contacts that my phone won't show pictures or emoji they text me. The only internet communication I regularly contribute to are these reviews. I don't upload photos or post on Facebook, and I've never had a Twitter account. (Google and other search engines are problems, though.) Believe it or not, "Cineanalyst" isn't even my real name. Indeed, my disinclination to forfeit my privacy to become addicted to advertisement-geared algorithms would seem to indicate I'd give "The Social Dilemma" a like, or forward it, retweet or what have you. But, if we're going to become increasing divisive, one might say that I'm an aestheticist rather than an ethicist, which is to say that whether I agree with the standpoint of a documentary isn't my primary concern--especially when it isn't very informative because one should already know most of this stuff. If I wanted to sit in an echo chamber, I would have a Facebook feed.



Not to downplay the dangers of social media and other technology (although the "existential" scaremongering may be going a bit far sometimes), but Mark Zuckerberg and whomever-else tech wiz didn't invent employing fancy tricks and formulae to attract attention to media, nor with sometimes disastrous effects. Movies such as this one have been doing it for over a century now. Likely the most influential film ever made, "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), revived the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Netflix itself has revolutionized the industry and how we see motion pictures, including by suggesting what we watch based on data they collect on us. Or remember "Citizen Kane" (1941) and the implication that William Randolph Hearst was responsible for getting the U.S. involved in the Spanish-American War. Going further back, the printing press may not have started the Reformation, but it certainly helped. And the talking heads here are worried about contributing to civil war? Whether the Rohingya genocide mentioned in the doc or, say, the Arab Spring, it's already happened. Huge technological advances always contribute to upheaval of some sort. Computers, the internet, mobile phones, social media--they're not, as compared to multiple times here, the bicycle. More so, they're automobiles and trains. It's motion pictures and television. It's paper and the printing press. Kudos, though, to some of the subjects for somehow managing to both appear overly alarmist and to underappreciate the vast transformational significance of their innovations. To top it off, the picture concludes with vague optimism of society overcoming the dilemma that seems more naive than their intentions in creating that dilemma in the first place.



For such a revolutionary topic, it would've been apt had the filmmakers not relied on such familiar tricks and formulae of the cinematic platform. Besides the interviews, there's the manipulative score to ratchet up the drama. Worst of all, though, has to be the fictional, I guess you might call it "illustrative story," edited between the documentary footage of interviews, lectures and newsreels. The fantasy of imagining code, or "artificial intelligence," in the form of three humanoid Silicon Valley bro stereotypes manipulating the actions of their user from behind some "Inside Out" (2015) control panel is hokey. And that his rabbit hole of a feed leads the user to nonsense content regarding the so-called "extreme center" inciting him not to vote is contrived equivocating and ends up with nothing more arresting than supposed protesters and police officers bumping in to each other in a confused mess of stupid docudrama. Sure, there's a good and repeated Tweet-sized message or two in "The Social Dilemma," but there's a lot of junk, too, and not even any cat videos.