The former engineers, computer scientists and financial-optimisation managers who left Google, Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Pinterest after helping to build their power are called “the repentant”, having supposedly realised one day that they had created the devil (you can see their profiles here: https://www.usine-digitale.fr/editorial/tristan-harris-sean-parker-renee-diresta-qui-sont-les-repentis-de-la-silicon-valley.N653649).
They are the stars of the film available on Netflix, The social dilemma, whose French title became “Derrière nos écrans de fumée” (“Behind our smokescreens”). It deals with social media, which are said to have the power to drive us apart, to manipulate us without our knowledge and to have become, over the years, an enormous enterprise of surveillance and control of each individual, serving an ever more voracious capitalism. The expression “surveillance capitalism” put forward in the film does indeed seem well suited. Everyone’s online activities are observed, tracked and measured, while algorithms exploit users’ cognitive biases to increase their consumption time, obtain more money and/or personal information from them, steer their choices and ensure the success of advertising.
An economic model that governs the whole digital sector
The problem is that, contrary to what this film might suggest, this new capitalism does not govern only the social media model. Plain television already practises it to the extent of its means. This is what the head of TF1 called in 2001 “offering advertisers available brain time”.
As for video games, things are even clearer. For some years now, algorithms the player is not aware of have been manipulating their choices so that they are encouraged to play ever longer, to spend ever more money and to bring ever more monetisable personal data to the platform hosting their game.
And Netflix? It acts no differently! This company knows what we have chosen to watch, at what time we watched it, and at what point we stopped because the show was too distressing or boring. And it also knows where we live, and therefore our social category, since housing is correlated with income. And it knows what our children watch, and depending on what each person views, it can tell whether you are a man or a woman, cheerful or depressed, and so on. And this allows it to steer our choices without our knowing…
The remedy of talking to each other
Faced with this threat, the contributors denounce the danger of no longer talking to each other. But then why did they have themselves filmed each alone in front of a camera, in a succession of soliloquies, when they are probably neighbours in Silicon Valley? Would these people be incapable of starting by talking to each other?
During the end credits, a doctor does finally give some advice. They suggest delaying entry onto social media until secondary school, not using the smartphone during meals and forbidding teenagers to take it into their bedrooms. Those who know the “3-6-9-12 milestones” will recognise in these last two pieces of advice the ones we have been giving since 2008. But at “3-6-9-12”, we add to this talking with children about what they see on screens and what they do with them, in order to establish a climate of exchange that benefits everyone. This American doctor says not a word about it, and the short sequences of family life meant to illustrate the ravages of the smartphone do not mention this possibility either…
So, is The social dilemma an invitation to give up our screens or to change them? Do these former players of the GAFAM really want to warn us about the dangers of the digital economy, or rather each begin to build their own legend while recovering some of the time we spend on social media in order to have us devote it to Netflix? And, by the way, where did they invest the formidable profits they made from their long allegiance to the GAFAM, when they were still shareholders? In Netflix? We would like to know more…
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, doctor of psychology qualified to supervise research, member of the Academy of Technologies, and associate researcher at the University of Paris (CRPMS).
