Thread by @alexhanna

The time has come.

That's right, I'm going to sit down and give The Social Dilemma (2020) the Cats (2019) livetweeting treatment.

Note, if you want a well-thought out critique of this movie, Tristan Harris, and CHT more broadly, I refer you to these sources by @libshipwreck librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/fla… and @gleemie and @ruchowdh wired.com/story/tech-nee…

But this? This is going to be purely affective and annoyed.

All right. We're starting out with some scary music and some vague quote from Sophocles. Previews of many, many white people who are giving us their very storied bona fides.

Facebook has reunited family members and connected organ donors.

Face recognition has been used for some great things, like identifying missing children.

Now, we pan to suburbia, where we find our Normal Middle-Class Family.

Putting "surveillance capitalism" in Tucker Carlson's mouth first is certainly a choice.

Oh, I was at this event at SFJAZZ. If you listen carefully, I'm sure you'll hear @ruchowdh and I snickering in the background.

"it's rare for a tech insider to be so blunt"

okay

Little cartoon Tristan Harris thinking hard on the GBus and in his apartment in SOMA.

I think the fact that I knew Jaron Leiner had white dreads at one point, but had buried that fact deep in my mind. Annoyed that I know this again.

"cis-gendered male" who is scared of social isolation, rejection, and snakes

Apparently this is Indiana Jones

"all of this data that we're pouring out"

Data is the new sweat?

I didn't know designers had a data double holodeck. I've been visiting the wrong tech offices.

Didn't one of them just say these models work with no human supervision, yet Holodeck Creepers are spending about 10 minutes on this one guy? I am confus-ed

Of course Tristan was a magician.

Gosh, I really wish he had pursued that passion more fully.

🤔🤔🤔if you get an email from academia.edu that says "a senior scholar just cited you in a paper", why don't you just get the citation 🤔🤔🤔

are we lab rats or zombies, man? choose one

Unintentional? but it certainly don't seem coincidental that all these reformed white guys come up first, allowed to speak in their own words, and Chamath, a South Asian, appears in clips in which he shows no remorse

I can't, in good faith, expect that to be an accident, especially when this man uses phrases like "population the size of Islam" to describe the number of Facebook users.

"if something is a _tool_, it's genuinely just sitting there, waiting patiently"

okay I just screamed. WHO DO YOU THINK CREATED THAT TOOL, MY DUDE

She's just reading Zuboff, casually, while watching TV.

This dramatization is so weird. So much in the racial politics alone: the Black dad who has had... two lines so far. The white kids and mom of the family who have been driving the narrative. The biracial child who had no lines and broke a cookie jar to get the phones. Phew.

This psychologist doing a great job mixing causation and correlation.

Could a global recession be... a... confounder

How DARE play Nina Simone in this scene.

HOW.

DARE.

Oh yay Rashida Richardson!

also we're 60m in and this is first time we see a Black expert on anything

I thought this TikTok girl was going to say COVID is a hoax because they need to change the batteries in the birds

I'm not even sure what the ideology of the Extreme Center is?

I think their ideology is "a pox on both their houses"?

Nazis are not going to "hear" my brown trans ass, Trist.

The ultimate tragedy -- suburban white kids getting arrested because of social media.

"Do we want that?"

Gotta give credit: glad that we got @mathbabeorg on film that says "AI is not going solve this."

"It's not about the technology being the existential threat. It's the technology's ability to bring out the worst in society and the worst in society being the existential threat."

okay, so you're gonna talk about Nazis, yeah?

"If technology creates mass chaos, incivility... more polarization... more distraction and inability to focus on the _real issues_, and now society is incapable of healing itself."

And you were getting so close. What do you think "real issues" are? What do you think politics is?

Wait, did Tristan get his own camera crew in this Senate hearing, and they are using grainy C-SPAN footage for senators?

You, dear watcher, are waking up from the Matrix.

Welcome to the real world.

"You should shut down the service" yes, we're getting closer

"but..." nooo

Oh no, tech engineers suggesting policy and regulation on data.

no no no no

Zuboff: "we outlaw markets that traffic in human organs. we outlaw markets that traffic in human slaves. because they have inevitable destructive consequences"

I'm sorry, is the implication that, slaves, at the point of enslavement, isn't already destructive??

"The idea of humane technology, that's where Silicon Valley got it's start"

I have to say, Aza, more than Tristan, has always struck me as the more historical revisionist CHT founder

Engineers, do you ever feel like group coding around a table to add the lines

"if(social_media == 'bad') { Sys.exit(0); }"

and dramatically press "BUILD"

I know I do

Seriously, though, this scene is offensive and deeply ironic: the use of dramatic music, the multi-cultural group of programmers "fixing" social media by deleting a function, the words "we can change it" being uttered as the coder with melanin presses "enter" with force

Algorithmic Pete Campbell is now wearing, instead of a black jacket, a pleasant off-white cardigan

Lainer: "Throughout history, every single time something has gotten better, it's because somebody has come along to say, 'this is stupid. we can do better'."

surely, that is the only necessary and sufficient condition

And that's that. We're running credits.

Curiously I searched all the additional interviews who weren't featured. Most were from psychologists.

Would it kill these people to speak to a single historian or STS scholar.

I'm really struck by the closing note by Lanier, "Go get off social media. The world is great out there!" Sure.

but there's always this imagination of "out there", unmediated, filled with parks and soccer practice. they close with literal sounds of children playing.

Okay! That's it. We're done!

tl;dr: CHT is white, rich boy tech savoir trash!

Get your tech critique from someone who has read a book not by Yuval Noah Harari