There’s a Latin maxim we use in law, volenti non fit injuria. It’s a common law doctrine which says that if someone willingly and knowingly exposes themselves to harm, they have engaged in an assumption of risk, and they cannot legally recover anything. Literally, to a willing person, no injury is done.
Typically, we use this in negligence law, but I think we can also apply it to the tech industry. It’s easy to see a story of absolution and heroism if you take the ‘exposé’ of The Social Dilemma (Netflix) on face value.
The Social Dilemma is a docu-drama released earlier this month, exploring the dangerous human impact of social media platforms, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
There are several limitations of such an endeavour. A film has artistic intentions and this film has won awards at Sundance. And it’s also on Netflix, which works on an algorithm, and anyone who makes a film wants to get the news out. So there are factors that affect how we should think more critically about the film.
But there are other more fundamental issues with the film. Perhaps this year has just raised my awareness, though it’s always been part of my real life, but the lack of voices from diverse peoples is glaringly obvious within minutes. The documentary part largely consists of white males speaking, but then the dramatised family is interracial and heavily edited so as to hide this problem. And the white members of the family have most of the speaking lines, and when the multiracial and Black characters do, they’re cut off by the other members of the family. Like, do people not see this problem at all???
Then it takes a long time, firstly for anyone to name the problem, and then for anyone to mention the word ‘profit’ or better yet, ‘surveillance capitalism’ until a fair way through the film. (Side note, I recently heard/watched Shoshanna Zuboff speak at a virtual conference and she should have had way more screen time.) And the blame gets put, yet again, on the algorithms, addiction, psychology, and echo chambers, rather than the people who programmed it to become what they now are. Numerous studies, books, and other people have debunked many of these theories (see the reading list at the end of this post) and shown that far from academic approaches, these are easy, alternative answers to what’s really the problem: capitalism.
Not only that, but these are inherent problems with a profit model, and it’s only because its effects are being felt in such fearful, democracy-undermining ways now that Western liberal nations are suddenly realising social media platforms are dangerous. As The Great Hack (also Netflix) pointed out, social media has facilitated human rights abuses and undermined democratic election processes in Myanmar, Brazil, and the Philippines, ie. the Global South and the colonial legacy. The Truman Show comparisons don’t exactly help.
And is it just me, or haven’t we had enough of having to listen to white, middle-class men to tell us how to fix our problems? Sure, it’s difficult to pin blame on any one person, or tech bros more generally, which I also don’t think is fair. But we all have a responsibility, and to have the audacity to think that by ‘sounding the alarm’ you can be forgiven is rather far-fetched. It merely reinforces the idea of the white, male genius.
The idea that humane and ethical design, which yes, in its own right, is a good goal, one that I am definitely interested in. But it also doesn’t hit on anything about the very real ways in which social media tools have been weaponised for online hate, bullying, racism, or doxxing, and not just disinformation. And the myopic, inward focus on reform from within again excludes the voices of diverse peoples because only when the insiders say reform is ok can outsiders also say likewise.
The emphasis on drama, too, has its limits, as it hides the real positive change that tech companies can bring about to our world—just look at Black Lives Matter. It’s not enough, nor is it responsible, to advise people to turn off notifications, add browser extensions to stop recommendations, or delete their accounts. We all live with social media tools and their effects every single day. We have to change the profit system.
There’s possibly something to the fact that just about everybody is talking about the film, whether they have an established interest in tech or not. If, by virtue of its popularity and its Netflix audience, it reaches more people, then maybe the film can have a positive influence on our discourse.
And certainly, it adds to growing outcries over just how much social media companies and big tech has taken over our lives—just look at Facebook advertising boycotts, celebrities freezing their accounts, and the movement Stop Hate For Profit. And it’s not just people power, it’s also (attempted) regulatory options too—GDPR and CAA, and closer to home, the Australian government’s attempt to force Google and Facebook to pay for content.
But I hope, more than anything else, that people realise this is just one story in the myriad history of surveillance capitalism and the context in which people working at tech companies created them. I hope it’s a conversation starter. And I hope we change the profit model we’ve all assumed risk and are responsible for.
Suggested reading: