This is a trap that everyone knows but is powerless to fight against fall

Norval 2022-04-22 07:01:39

Generally speaking, it is a good documentary. I have been criticizing the phenomenon before, and many parts are the same as some of my previous thoughts, such as:

It is believed that once an algorithm is linked to commercial interests, it will never have the possibility of complete self-correction; the algorithm expands the possibility of women being stared at by society and accelerates women's self-anxiety; people are naturally attracted to mysterious/stimulating/suspicious information, which It is also the reason why fake news/conspiracy theories spread 6 times faster than the truth; algorithms are evolving and information is exploding, but our brains are not evolving, too much information stimulation can make people lose their judgment; we all seem to be getting more and more The more personality you have, but this personality is formed by algorithms that continuously strengthen you against the weaknesses of human nature (the so-called personalized recommendation is to constantly push you in the direction you believe or like. manipulated to feed)

There are also some constructive comments in the back: for example, suggesting that the government legislate; or let the platform take responsibility; or self-control (turn off notifications, use search engines without search records, actively pay attention to people with different voices, control daily device use) time...); or delete social accounts;

But in general, it is rather reluctant to think that it is impossible to successfully counter the expansion of social media caused by technology companies. Because the capital needs it, the government also needs it, and those who hold most of the resources can easily manipulate it and become a powerful tool for profit-making and manipulating the majority of people.

It is undeniable that technology has brought a lot of convenience to most people, but once technology is controlled by interests and resources, it will not fundamentally serve most people; it is a pity that domestic technology companies do not have this kind of thinking and error correction ability. , the vast majority of product managers have brought the book "addiction" to the altar and become a must-read in the industry; there is almost no position as a design ethicist, and even if someone proposes this, it will not be really taken seriously. Values ​​have no place in business goals

At a time when most products are grabbing your attention, the more you should take it into your own hands

As a practitioner, I can only do my best to prevent the product I handle from becoming a member of the executioner. If I can't stop it, at least I can choose not to become an accomplice.

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Extended Reading
  • Elsa 2022-04-23 07:03:01

    Social media builds predictive models of your behavior through algorithms for monetary gain, influencing and even shaping your mind, making you anxious to get "compliments"; eating away at your concentration, unable to focus on anything; further loss of The ability to think independently, to think that he has the absolute truth, and social contradictions to be more and more difficult to reconcile, is tantamount to a mental drug. What's even more frightening is that technology is still growing at the technical level, while the human brain has long stopped evolving...

  • Letha 2022-04-23 07:03:01

    too poor. Edited and visually very typical Netflix documentary, made into Black Mirror. Given that Black Mirror has already hit the streets, the effect of the documentary can be imagined, not to mention that it uses this presentation method over and over to talk about issues that have long been criticized by scholars, think tanks, and the media, even to the point of being a bit quirky. , doesn't give me any inspiration. This is not to say that problems such as algorithm control, social network addiction, and digital footprint do not need criticism, but now, what is needed is more enlightening criticism, how to solve the fundamental contradiction between technology ethics and business value, and if it cannot be solved, what are the The buffer means, if there must be a tradeoff, where is the acceptable boundary. These issues have not been fully discussed. Cool visuals and slogan-style interview clips can bring a temporary impact. The audience will still fall into the realities that the film "criticizes" the next day, so Netflix actually created the A new type of documentary: the (softened) popcorn documentary.

The Social Dilemma quotes

  • Justin Rosenstein - Facebook, Former Engineer: We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we're seeing the results of that. We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.

  • Tristan Harris - Google, Former Design Ethicist: How do you wake up from the Matrix when you don't know you're in the Matrix?