What Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” Got Wrong
By: Valerie King
Tags: Politics, Netflix, Facebook, Technology, Social Media

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

What Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” Got Wrong

Capitalists don’t care about the social effects of machines — and never have.

The Social Dilemma is one in a long line of shows Netflix has put out in 2020 that make me wonder, only half sarcastically, if AI is trying urgently to deliver us a message. Netflix’s latest doc shows, with the use of classic reality TV-style confessional booths, the leaders of Silicon Valley looking back in horror upon their Frankensteinian monsters. Just in time for Halloween.

These confessionals make for a frustrating viewing experience, as a parade of tech big-wigs address the symptoms of the real problem — the inherent nature of the profit motive — without ever naming it.

Tristan Harris, a former Google employee nicknamed the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscious” fails to articulate what this “social dilemma” is. He lists some issues technology causes — interference with elections, selling data, political polarization, but never arrives at the root of these problems. As he says in his interview:

“But is there something beneath all these problems that’s causing all these things to happen at once?… There’s a problem happening in the tech industry and it doesn’t have a name…” He trails off and we cut to the next scene.

Let’s be clear: there is a name for this problem. It’s late stage capitalism.

Former Facebook and Pinterest exec Tim Kendall says:

“Everyone in 2006, including all of us at Facebook, just had total admiration for Google and what Google has built, which was this incredibly useful service that did, far as we could tell, lots of goodness for the world. And they built this parallel money machine. We had such envy for that, and it seemed so elegant to us. And so perfect…”

Kendall emphasizes the positive aspects of technology, but this capacity-for-good is always in direct relationship to technology’s capacity-to-profit. The unnamed problem in the social dilemma is that we are incapable, under late capitalism, of thinking the capacity-for-good independent of the capacity-to-profit.

This problem did not come from nowhere. The longest chapter in Marx’s Das Kapital already tells us that profit, not capacity-for-good, is the reason machines exist.

Marx on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”

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The first thing Marx does in chapter 15 of Das Kapital is dispel naive technological optimism with a JS Mill quote: “It is questionable if all the mechanical invention yet made have lightened the days toil of any human being” (492). Machines don’t make our work easier because that is not the job they were meant to perform; they were meant to make it easier to produce commodities. And capitalists don’t care about the social effects of machines — they never have.

When workers used simple tools, they were the primary agents that produced goods. Then machines replaced them. A human being can only knit one line at once, and they need to acquire the skill to do so. Machines can easily knit multiple lines at once, producing products exponentially faster than we can. Under capitalism, skilled laborers gradually become unskilled automatons, pulling levers, pushing buttons. Marx’s theoretical contribution is less about political economy itself and more about how changing material conditions affect social conditions.

Marx on the social conditions of capitalism

There are two antithetical qualities that govern our social and economic relationships: conflict and cooperation. Conflict emerges in the form of class struggle. Capitalists, in order to maintain their status, need to constantly accumulate capital and expand their business. They are constantly in competition with other capitalists, trying to force them out of the market.

Laborers, too, are in constant competition with each other. Material conditions affect how these class conflicts emerge. Material conditions include how a good is produced, what goods are produced, the machines used to produce it, the natural conditions enabling its production, and socially necessary labor-time.

We’re forced to compete in the capitalist economy; we’re also compelled to cooperate. In the Industrial Revolution, multiple people needed to work together to operate heavy machinery. Today, wage earners come together and collaborate on projects in the workplace.

These two forces, competition and cooperation, cause the cycle of production to continue ceaselessly. But Marx can’t give us a full picture of this ceaselessness. Our economic and material conditions have significantly changed since his time. Now, the worsening conditions of workers worldwide is not a reflection of our material conditions at all.

Is Marx’s analysis of machinery still relevant in the 21st century?

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Yes. Marx already warned us about The Social Dilemma in 1867. He already told us that more machines, better AI, and more ethical technologists will not solve the problem. Nor will less screen time and social media usage!

Placing the burden of responsibility on consumers rather than corporations is as criminally negligent as pretending we can solve the climate crisis with metal straws rather than large-scale economic reform.

Marx critiques the myth of the single inventor. He says that machines are products of a historical moment in which countless people make miniscule improvements upon a machine. This important idea gets lost in The Social Dilemma, as names and faces are associated with by-lines such as “inventor of the Facebook like button,” or “gmail chat function.” To view these Silicon Valley technologists as evil scientists, or naive geniuses would be a mistake. Don’t make the technology problem the responsibility of individuals. It is neither the technologists’ fault nor the Facebook users’ fault that technology-use is out of hand. That’s a feature of these devices, not a bug. Developers have been pressured by competition and cooperation to make these things as addictive as possible or suffer the consequences.

If the main message you get from this documentary is that you need to reduce your consumption of social media, you have missed the forest for the trees. Sadly, that’s how Netflix frames the ending of this documentary. Placing the burden of responsibility on consumers rather than corporations is as criminally negligent as pretending we can solve the climate crisis with metal straws rather than large-scale economic reform.

The solution is neither demonizing Silicon Valley technologists nor shaming people into deleting Facebook. The solution must be systemic economic and political reform. We need to hold the Zuckerbergs and Bannons of the world accountable for their actions. We need a more robust notion of the right-to-privacy. We need to combat surveillance capitalism and disaster capitalism. We need to destroy an economic system built on oscillation between competing for our livelihood and cooperation for survival’s sake. We need to question a system which holds “growth” as the highest good.

More than anything, we need to value people over profits.

Sources

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. Penguin Classics Edition.

Orlowski, Jeff. 2020. The Social Dilemma. Netflix.com.