MARCH 6, 2021 – PING! I checked my phone—a message on WhatsApp. Since I’m connected with only three people on that Facebook-owned app, by easy deduction I knew the text was from our son Byron.
“If you are looking for an interesting documentary [. . .],” it read.
“Yes?” I replied
“The Social Dilemma[.]”
“Netflix?”
“Yes[.]”
A Millennial, Byron is highly critical of his generation. However critical, he’s also thoughtful and insightful. When he talks, I listen. I watched the documentary.
It’s a low-budget production featuring interviews with high-ranking Silicon Valley engineers and people who study the awful effects that social media afflict upon the social fabric. Interwoven into the interviews is a condensed movie about a fictional teenager who tries to go cold-turkey but ultimately fails.
None of the dire warnings is new. The chilling words of insiders, however, underscore the need for action. The monster among us is the product of post-modern capitalism. What created the new monster and now feeds it is an old monster: the insatiable quest for shareholder return. At the cost of our minds and our privacy, the new monster has made a few people fabulously wealthy. Wealth by itself isn’t evil. Extreme disparity in wealth, however, is extremely destabilizing.
(Included among the wealthy, I suspect, are the very engineers in the documentary who have forsworn social media when it comes to their kids—a bit like former drug lords keeping their own kids off the playground full of drug dealers.)
Big Tech is much bigger than Big Oil, but Big Tech enjoys another, more insidious trait: its product is not something it draws from the earth, then sells to consumers-turned-addicts. Facebook, Twitter, Goggle, et alia mine our minds solely and inexorably to sell us to . . . ourselves, for exponentially growing profits garnered by . . . Big Tech.
The collateral damage is substantial, as revealed so starkly in our fractured politics.
The extreme danger posed by Big Tech exceeds the reach of current anti-trust law. What’s desperately needed is effective regulation of out-of-control mind control—something far beyond the imagination of crusaders against yesteryear’s monopoly model.
At the moment, however, we’re preoccupied with other pressing concerns: the pandemic and its manifold consequences; natural disasters exacerbated by our neglect of infrastructure; the causes and effects of climate change (remember when that was “a thing”?); investigation of the January 6 frontal assault on democracy; re-assembly of the immigration system that was savagely dismantled by the you-know-who administration; the potential for renewed in-the-street racial tensions as we approach the George Floyd, Jr. trials; et cetera ad nauseam.
The irony is that the foregoing challenges have eclipsed the most insidious challenge of all: Big Tech manipulation of our minds.
To begin solving our many serious problems, we need to start at . . . the beginning—regaining ownership of our minds.
PING! goes my smartphone.
“First count to 10,” I say to self. “That’s a pre-start, anyway. Then—after reading the notification—write to my congresswoman and senators . . . via Outlook, of course.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
