/the social dilemma

I could not finish this bullshit.

What is this bullshit, you may be asking? It's a "docu-drama" about the threat of social media. It's talking heads cut with an after-school special about a family dealing with the deadly vice of staring at their phones all the damn time.

At one point an ex-Google TED talk guy says social media isn't a tool, it's something else, because a bicycle is a tool and no one got upset about bicycles when they were first introduced.

Ex-Google guy should have googled that. The bicycle was revolutionary, giving Victorian women a cheap way to leave the home and see more of the world. In the 1890s doctors invented the malady of "bicycle face" to try to stop them. They said cycling would make you ugly. They also warned the sensation of riding would give women insatiable sex drives and make them lesbians.

I would enjoy a parody of this film, "/the bicycle dilemma", that interviews Victorian experts about the threat of cycling, intercut with the story of a family coping with their mom's bike making her gay.

Let's address that name. Why the forward slash? Why lowercase? Is this UNIX fetishism?

Early on, all of the heads are asked what's the one thing that's wrong with social media. Why has a tool that connects people been used for such horrible purposes? None of them answer, but I assume they have an answer later on, in the part I didn't watch. But I already know the answer.

The reason social media is used for horrible purposes is humans. Humans are horrible. We are selfish and fearful. Social media connects us to people who are selfish and fearful in our particular way, which amplifies our selfishness and fear. It emboldens lonely cranks to unite and be the change they want to see in the world, as Gandhi said.

We probably shouldn't be so quick to encourage that.

But the cranks aren't new. The fascists aren't new. Teens feeling horrible about how they look aren't new. These are all things that were here before social media. Social media just helps us find and connect to each other, which brings out the worst (and best) in us.

The talking heads are mostly people who used to work for tech giants to sell our eyeballs to advertisers, but are now working for startups to sell us a healthier, cleaner something or other.

My old thing was bad, sorry. My new thing is good, promise.

They talk a lot about how social media software is fine tuned to modify our behavior and steal our attention. They have Pete from "Mad Men" playing an evil AI that's spying on a teen boy to sell his eyeballs to advertisers. They act like this is new.

Books modified our behavior and stole our attention. Newspapers did, too. The telephone did. Radio stole our attention and gave it to fascist dictators. Remember that? When wackos with racist bullshit used a shiny new tech box in our house to hijack our elections?

I turned it off when I realized my TV was telling me to be scared of my phone. My TV thinks I forgot what growing up in the 70s was like. My family spent every evening sitting in the den staring at whatever one of three networks programmed for us. We ate dinner there, then sat silently the rest of the night and ingested it all. We watched every commercial. We usually stuck with one network the entire night, picked by one of the parents.

My eyeballs have been sold to advertisers since I was born. I loved "Freakies" cereal because they played ads on Saturday morning that looked just like the cartoons I was watching while high on the sugar I got from eating "Freakies" cereal. Facebook can't come close to that kind of dopamine release.

Is social media a threat? Sure. Everything that connects people is a threat. People are a threat. But we aren't going to get rid of people. Probably. So suck it up. Get a good ad blocker. Unfollow the wackos. Go for a bike ride.