Picture this: You are a parent of three children, a senior in high school who does not use any social media platforms, a high schooler son who uses his phone frequently, but does not believe he has a problem with it, and a middle school daughter who does not hold a conversation with people, only text messages and social media uploads. It is dinner time and you decide to lock all the phones up for an hour so everyone can enjoy dinner without the screen. Your oldest daughter enjoys the screenless dinner, your son thinks it is silly but goes along, and your middle school daughter gets a hammer from the garage to break the container her phone is locked in and runs to her bedroom. This is exactly the scene that The Social Dilemma paints in its drama-documentary. The Gen Z girl cannot be without her phone for two minutes, and it completely controls her life.

        Released January 2020, The Social Dilemma is a drama-documentary hybrid that explores the dangerous human impact of social networking. The documentary is based around people within the social media realm. Employees from companies such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter, google, apple, Pinterest, and many more platforms participate in this documentary. Large company names appear in the documentary, such as main leader Tristan Harris, who was the former design ethicist of google. Tim Kendall was a former Facebook Executive and the former president of Pinterest. These are just a few of the former CEOs, executives, fathers of virtual reality, early investors, and employees of some of the largest social media networking platforms. With such a reliable and intelligent group of experts, the audience is inclined to listen from the introduction.

        The people in the documentary left their companies for a number of reasons revolving around “ethical concerns” and “snapchat dysmorphia” and purely not knowing if what they were doing was fundamentally right. At first, social media was “a force for good”, it connected friends from across the country, and gave people access to transportation at their fingertips. It was supposed to be something for good, and now it is killing people. Social media has moved from having a tool-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation-based technology environment. Just in the last decade, the CDC has reported extraordinary spikes in self-harm and death by suicide in girls 10-19 years old. These spikes of 153% increase in suicide in girls 10-14 compared to 2000-2010, is directly in line with the surges of social media, such as the Instagram being created in 2010. The film also points out that Gen Z is the first generation to get on social media in middle school, and because of it they are actually interacting with people less, not more.

        Social media is fighting for people’s attention, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” says Jaron Lanier, one of the founding fathers of Virtual reality. He continues to explain that our attention is the product. That the product of social media is “the gradual, slight, imperceptible, change in your own behavior and perception is the product.” Social media is the most dangerous addiction because it does not kill you, it simply takes over your life, with consent. Social media has the power to change who people are, how they act, what they buy, and what they do with their time without people even knowing it is happening.

        The scenery in the film is phenomenal. From the scene of a family dinner turning into a meltdown over a phone being taken away from a Gen Z girl, to that same girl crying over the bullying comment she received on her most recent selfie post, the documentary plays on every person’s emotions in the scenery. The honeycomb of boxes that each person has assigned to them, with people controlling what they see on Facebook, to how long they spend on a single post to a single app, to how long they have their phones turned on. All of this data exists on every living breathing person with any technological device. 

        Social media and technology are such a massive yet personal topic that it is hard to review it without giving some personal anecdote. While I watched the social media, I had overwhelming feelings of guilt, fear, shame, and unease about my entire life as I know it. I felt like I was stuck in a virtual reality with no escape. Then, I realized I am having these feelings because I am in a virtual reality with no escape. Even the people who know how social media is fundamentally wrong, still fall victim to it. The Social Dilemma is the wake-up call that I and all people need. No matter how many times people hear social media being compared to the antichrist or the most addictive drug, they still cannot let go of it. But, Harris leaves us with hopefully initiatives. People must demand that social media and technology is designed humanly, and for people not to be treated as extractable resources.