Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The Social Dilemma

Break out your tweed jackets, turtlenecks, and horn-rimmed glasses, because its documentary time on this week's exciting episode of Cinemavenger.

There's no doubt that The Social Dilemma thinks it's the smartest doc in the room. It opens with a Sophocles quote as if to say, "Check out the big brains on us!" Then it dives dick first into the ethical considerations and moral obligations of big tech and big data in the Disinformation Age.

It may sound dry, but The Social Dilemma uses expats from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants to paint a scarier picture than anything Bosch or Goya ever committed to canvas. On an individual level, these companies have designed - and continue to refine - their services to be as addictive as possible because they don't care how many hours people waste glued to their smartphone, tablet, and laptop screens as long as the advertising dollars keep rolling in.

On a broader, societal level, the Googles and Facebooks of the world have come to control the very flow of information. So, when I search for an explanation of why Trump refuses to say, "white supremacists are bad," I get one set of results, and when a neo-Nazi fuck searches the same thing, he gets a totally different set of results, results that most likely reinforce his already twisted beliefs.

It creates an echo chamber for each person and pushes people with different views further and further apart. It accelerates and amplifies the very polarization and tribal identity bullshit that is tearing the U.S. and many other countries apart like so much piss-soaked toilet paper.

In case you're not sufficiently freaked out by that, those tech-asauruses also use every click you make, every message you send, every site you visit . . . even how long you spend looking at a pic of a puppy or pussy . . . to build an uber-creepy personality profile of you so that they can squeeze every last minute of potentially-ad-watching time out of your screen-addicted ass.

On a lighter note, The Social Dilemma made me wonder when everyone is finally going to figure out that Mark Zuckerberg is an android or alien (or alien android) sent to destroy us all. Seriously, just watch any clip of him trying to approximate human behavior and tell me how in the name of Casey Kasem no one has pulled his mask off Scooby-Doo style to reveal the gears or scales or whatever the fuck is underneath it.

October 2, 2020