It turns out Big Brother really is watching

At the heart of ‘ The Social Dilemma ’ is a paradox: the screen is warning us about … the screen

Five years ago my wife and I deleted Facebook and Twitter from our phones.

I know this sounds like virtue signalling, the technological equivalent of telling people you bake your own cross-fit equipment out of matted alpaca hair and bespoke kale mulch, but the truth is it couldn’t be further from a boast.

In retrospect it was a conscious decision, but at the time it felt like pure reaction, a desperate lunge for serenity and health, and an implicit acknowledgment that this couldn ’ t go on.

This” was a morning ritual. Barely awake, our unconscious minds still floating close to the surface, we would grope for our phones.

Just to see, you understand. Just to check in. To be informed. To be ready for the day.

And then, before we were even fully aware of how we felt about our own lives that morning, we would inject, straight into our still-vulnerable eyes and minds and hearts, the anxieties, neuroses, bad relationships and self-serving fictions of complete strangers.

So, no, I’m not boasting that we finally figured out that pumping other people’s excretions into your brain isn’t the optimal way to start your day.

I am, however, grateful that we reached a sort of digital rock bottom and got past it. Because two years later The Guardian revealed just how sinister and cynical the design and effect of social media are, especially on a smartphone.

The piece, titled “Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia ”, was an alarming read but also deeply familiar.

As employees of Google, Twitter and Facebook spilt the beans, I started to understand why my morning ritual had felt both so compelling and so awful. These systems, I read, might sell themselves as a way to connect people, but ultimately they contain many triggers deliberately designed to operate like slot machines at a casino, exploiting our vulnerability to random doses of dopamine (instead of small wins on the slots, think of a hundred Facebook likes) to trap us in our chairs, utterly alone even when we’re surrounded by other gamblers, endlessly yanking on that lever in the hope of one more hit, one more illusion of connection.

The facts outlined in the feature shook me, but to many activists and academics working in the technology space it must have been frustratingly old news.

The mind-altering power of technology, and the commercial possibilities of “persuasive design”, weren’t even a particularly well-kept secret: Nir Eyal ’ s 2014 book, Hooked: How

To Build Habit-Forming Products, offered exactly what it said on the box and duly became a best-seller and something of a holy text in Silicon Valley. (Eyal seems to have tried to atone since then, in 2019 publishing Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention And Choose Your Life.)

I’ve been thinking of those activists and academic lately, as Netflix ’ s documentary, The Social Dilemma, continues to be greeted with shock and surprise. It must be difficult for those experts not to throw their coffee cups at a wall, rush to their windows and scream: “But I told you this 10 years ago!”

Professional egos aside, however, I’m sure some of them are pleased that

The Social Dilemma is being seen, even if it does largely omit their work.

If the film persuades just one person that Facebook isn’t a news site and that Twitter holds no more insight than a flock of pigeons, then perhaps it is worth a hundred smashed coffee cups.

Still, I can’t help feeling there is a slightly uneasy paradox at its heart, and I don’t even mean the obvious one, whereby a documentary about the dangers of behaviour-changing algorithms is broadcast on a platform that uses behaviour-changing algorithms.

What stays with me is the realisation that, for all its worthy warnings about the dangers of letting tech-bros control our thoughts, The Social Dilemma is only making waves because it is coming through a screen.

When academics published these findings, or when journalists translated them into lay prose, nobody blinked. But put it on TV and suddenly it’s real and urgent.

Ultimately, The Social Dilemma is a warning against Big Brother and a defence of emotional and intellectual independence; and yet it achieves these things by getting us all to watch the same images, be seduced by the same editing techniques, moved by the same music, and, in the end, to believe the same things.

Idealists and writers insist the pen is mightier than the sword. I think that’s debatable given how many boots have goosestepped over treaties and worthy ideas.

But if we are to keep ourselves intact we should admit that neither pen nor sword can match the power of the plausible human face on the expertly framed screen.