The Social Dilemma & The Office
The Platitudes of Michael Scott bouncing around the echo chambers of social media.
If you have not already had the chance to watch Netflix’s new documentary, The Social Dilemma, I highly encourage you to do so. It is one of the more important productions I’ve come across this year.
“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”
The film does an amazing job of capturing just how these well-intended social platforms were built to bring positivity into the world. The like button invented by Rosenstein was created to give positive interaction, for example. The unintended consequence was that the lack of likes and engagement started driving teens and pre-teens into depression and even suicide.
“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.”
The premise is that we are the product being manipulated by AI in the slightest, unnoticeable ways. The slightest deviations in the beginning amount to significant deviations over time.
“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in our own behavior and perception that is the product.”
The algorithm, or AI, finds what makes you tick and uses it against you to keep your eyeballs on the screen where corporations pay for your attention. For now, people have yet to demand regulation or responsibility from these platforms.
“Social media is a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures.”
Throughout the film, each interviewee harps on the lack of regulation around their industry, including Rosenstein’s own monologue towards the end. Instead of using under-regulated industries as examples, however, Mr. Rosenstein chose instead to attack some of the most highly regulated industries the world has ever known.
“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive; in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive.
For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it’s going to destroy the planet and we know it’s going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based upon this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its own selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time.
What’s frightening and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization of how flawed this theory has been in the first place is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale. Our attention can be mined.”
Regardless, his monologue, for some odd reason, drew visions of The Office into focus. Do you recall Season 3, Episode 19 — Safety Training?
Michael Scott spends the entire episode trying to convince the warehouse workers that their white-collar jobs upstairs are more dangerous than those the warehouse workers deal with. Ultimately, Michael stages a demonstration where he plans to jump from the roof of Dunder Mifflin to show the stress of the modern-day office and how depression can lead to suicide.
So much of this Safety Training episode tells the story of climate change. Climate Activists are Michael Scott, trying to convince the world that their cause is the most important in the world. In their effort to try and convince others, they become increasingly dramatic — ultimately ending with Michael’s plan to jump off the building to show the stresses of the office can cause something horrible — suicide. Of course, it’s all a ruse, and there’s a bounce house below the roof he was trying to hide, and he doesn’t jump.
The upstairs office workers trying to convince everyone in the warehouse that their issue is dangerous is, of course, laughable and, as is the case with the hot-potato topic of climate change, people that are generally towards the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, by comparison to global conditions where 2 billion people still live without access to safe drinking water and electricity are still focused on the most basic of Physiological needs with another 2 billion people living in fear of not being able to provide a safe environment for their families.
As I described to Rosenstein in a private message, “it seems like Americans have this hubris about them — that climate change is so important that we are willing to impose our Self-Actualization upon someone first needing to satisfy their Physiological needs (Maslow).”
What is the #1 issue facing the world, you might ask? According to the United Nations, as polled by their millions of constituents and stakeholders, the answer is overwhelmingly Poverty.
You might be surprised to learn that Climate Change is not actually a top global priority at all. According to the United Nations Sustainability Project, Climate Change actually ranks as their 13th (out of 17) priority.
To an American whose social media feed is filled with messaging telling us the issue of Climate is an “Existential Crisis,” this must seem blasphemous. The moment you read The Economist or listen to the late, great Hans Rosling, you’ll quickly realize what climate change is not:
“It is important to understand all the things that climate change is not. It is not the end of the world. Humankind is not poised teetering on the edge of extinction. The planet itself is not in peril.”
The thing about poverty is it lives in a paradox — Energy does not end poverty, but you can’t end poverty without energy. This might be a revelation in and of itself — hopefully, it is.
A paradox: energy does not end poverty, but you can’t end poverty without energy.
As evidenced below and in the film, the AI will show you google search results based upon (a) who you are and (b) where you live.
This is not a function of what the truth is; it is a function of where you happen to be googling from and the particular things Google knows about you.
After seeing it in the film, I thought it would be fun to see what Google thought of me. Judging from the below, Google is thoroughly perplexed, and I must be close to the middle.
search result Sep 25, 2020, 14:35 CST
This supports where I exist politically, too — someone who refused to vote for the Child (Donald Trump) or the Nursing Home Patient (Joe Biden). If Trump and Biden are the best the Baby Boomer generation have to offer… I digress.
The platitudes of Michael Scott bouncing around the echo chambers of social media simply doesn’t produce anything noble. As Hans Rosling lectured to the United Nations, World Economic Forum, Gates Foundation, and other world dignitaries — Fear coupled with the Sense of Urgency produces bad decisions; decisions that lead to unnecessary deaths (you can read more about the incredible life of Mr. Rosling in his NYT and Amazon best-seller Factfulness).
“Exaggeration, once discovered, makes people tune out altogether… Exaggerating the role of climate change in wars and conflicts, or poverty, or migration, means that the other major causes of global problems are ignored, hampering our ability to take action against them.”
So, take this opportunity to understand how you’re being manipulated by social media and identify whether or not you’re in your own echo chamber. Examine how for example, through the slightest of initial deviations, oil might not be what you’ve been led to believe it is.
Could Natural Gas be the unexpected solution to ending Poverty and Hunger for 2 billion people around the globe? Would you be willing to accept that ending global Poverty and Hunger is a more noble goal to achieve than (potentially) reducing the earth’s mean global temperature by a few degrees?
In the ironic words of Google — “Don’t Be Evil.”
For more information on how energy subsidizes the world and can end poverty and hunger, I would invite you to open your mind and explore the in-depth analysis I’ve already provided in an article that’s already received thousands of views - How Energy Subsidizes the World.