The Social Dilemma (2020)

Here’s a bombshell for you.  Social media is the worst, most hedonistic piece of technology the world has ever known.  It sucks away your time, your attention and your awareness of the world around, and alters your conscious state into an addiction so powerful that it renders the way you think, the way you work, the way you date, the way see the world entire.  It is as addictive as cocaine because corporations like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat use statistics and algorithms to read your habits and desires and feed on them to play up to your addictive nature to keep you using their product.

That, in a nutshell, is the information the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma wants to impart.  Using interviews with tech insiders, psychologists and behavioralists, we are fed this information over and over and over and over again in every conceivable way for 89 minutes.  And just when you think the doc can’t repeat itself again, it offers the same information again in a different way and then intercuts it with a number of staged dramatizations of kids addicted to their cell phones that are wholly unnecessary.

Aside from being redundant, The Social Dilemma is a glass-half-empty look at the most important technological phenomenon since Gutenberg’s printing press.  But where is that story?  Where is the story of how it has altered our world for the good?  Where are the stories of how it has connected people?  The information imparted here is that we are turning ourselves and our kids into dribbling, addicts with no sense of each other or the world around us.