The Social Dilemma, a new
Netflix film, meets former tech executives and developers who helped build the online world – and think it’s causing serious harm
In 2010, the writer Zadie Smith urged users of
Facebook to step back and consider the look of one’s Facebook “wall”: doesn’t it look ridiculous, she asked, “your life in this format? The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, email and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of
Mark Zuckerberg.” The year 2010 is basically archaic, in
Social Media terms, and yet Smith was spot on in reading Facebook not as an inspiring phenomenon, or even a world-opening tool of connection, but as a flattening, bottomless manmade trap – a series of narrow, insidious design choices made by a select group of real people.
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