Pattern Matching
Where ‘The Social Dilemma’ Gets Us
The popular new Netflix documentary is a wake-up call with no answer
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
In the opening scenes of The Social Dilemma, the popular new Netflix docudrama about social media’s dark side, a series of nervous-looking interview subjects appear to stumble over a simple question: “What’s the problem?”
The film and its subjects — former employees of Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, along with a few outside critics such as the Harvard professor and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism author Shoshana Zuboff — spend the next 90 minutes throwing everything they have at that question. By the end, the viewer is left persuaded that there absolutely is a problem, and an urgent one at that, even if it’s a tricky one to pin down in a few words.
Yet, as we’ve seen time and again — most recently, with a former Facebook employee blowing the whistle on the company’s failures to stop election interference and misinformation campaigns around the world — sounding the alarm that social media is broken is easier than fixing it.
