The Social Dilemma That The Social Dilemma Missed
I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. The Kirkland dorm Facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
I left the quotes out for effect, but you probably recognize the text. Mark Zuckerberg prattled that gem of his drunken inner dialogue onto his blog just before he hacked into the Harvard database where he stole images of his female classmates. Then without their knowledge or consent, he positioned those images side by side so that his male peers could rate and compare the women based on their looks. He called the platform that he created Facemash. An online forum where bros could go to play a classic game of hot or not. The idea that Facemash pitted one woman against another- often friend against friend, roommate against roommate, classmate against classmate, didn’t seem to occur to Mark. Or maybe it did.
Could you imagine waking up one morning in college (or any morning at any time) to find out that a bunch of dudes brazened by anonymity and fueled by toxic masculinity had rated and compared your photo to one of your friends? If you’re a woman, I’m quite sure that your answer is yes, you can imagine such a thing. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar. But knowing that this kind of thing happens to women all of the time doesn’t make what those women went through any less mortifying and infuriating. It makes it more so.
Zuckerberg would later refer to the Facemash incident as a “prank.”
Boys will be boys, after all.
Some sixteen years later, sometime in between the shit show that was the first presidential debate and the entire west coast going up in flames, The Social Dilemma was released onto Netflix and quickly earned the distinction of most watched documentary of the year. Since we all spent more time on social media than ever in 2020, either in an effort to connect with friends and family during social distancing restrictions and quarantine or just out of sheer boredom, it seems fitting that a documentary about the dangers of social media would so intrigue us.
The Social Dilemma features interviews with some of the men behind social networking behemoths such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The men present like thoughtful, repentant, and likable dudes whose ideas about making something good for society somehow evolved (or is it devolved?) into the dystopian reality that is present day. There are a few loose references made to The Matrix. And why not? Our reality doesn’t seem far from it. We all like to envision ourselves as black-clad badasses Neo or Trinity- or even as woke as Morpheus (dream god pun intended), but the sad truth is that we’ve been consistently, religiously, and predictably popping that blue pill for a long time now.
The Matrix premiered in 1999.
2020, as we all well know, is something else.
98% of us check our social media accounts within the first 15 minutes of being awake and we spend an average of 4 to 6 hours per day with our faces in our phones, lap tops, and iPads. (That does not include streaming and television.) We have inherited and now inhabit a virtual reality where likes and notifications translate to dopamine hits in our brains. The Social Dilemma reminds us that our attention is the product and that advertisers are paying big bucks to keep us plugged in- always.
“There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users': illegal drugs and software. " — Edward Tufte
(And we thought we just had an opioid crisis on our hands.)
In some of its darkest moments The Social Dilemma illustrates Facebook’s role in toppling democracies, and how the platform was used to incite mass rape and genocide in Myanmar. It also spends some time addressing how social networking sites affect the developing brains of children. In a dramatization of a typical American family, a young girl named Isla is depicted posting photos of herself on an Instagram or Snapchat-like app. Isla is engaging in what has become a commonplace practice in the social networking age. She is coming to terms with her own self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-worth within the context of social media. She is learning to derive her self-worth from whether or not her photos are liked. By posting the selfies, she is engaging in self-objectification. She is seeking validation. Attempting to model the idea of beauty she has learned she must emulate, she makes duck lips into the camera, cocks her head and tilts her chin just so, and after adding a few “beautify me” filters to the photo, she posts it. Then she waits for those likes to come rolling in. We learn from The Social Dilemma that this is called intermittent positive reinforcement and that social networking sites are explicitly designed with this in mind. It’s the same principle that makes slot machines so addictive.
We watch as Isla gets a few immediate likes and some compliments on her photo.
Cha Ching.
Then a “friend” comments and makes fun of the size of her ears. In response, Isla, looking dejected, self-consciously covers her ears with her hair, hiding the perceived flaw. The scene conveys one of the cautionary tales that Tristan Harris hopes to get across to viewers. As a former Design Ethicist at Google, he co-founded an organization called The Center for Humane Technology, where he is attempting to make social media a more humane and less harmful space.
But a little girl covering up her ears with her hair is a tame example of a far more disturbing reality. The movie cites how the increased prevalence of social media usage (right around the time that SNS became available on mobile devices) correlates with the rise in child and teen self-harming behavior, depression, anxiety, and teen suicide. I suppose I can’t blame Jeff Orlowski for not wanting to film a dramatization of something so horrific as teen suicide, but the documentary barely skims the surface on the other disturbing trends that it mentions like the rise of eating disorders, body dysmorphia disorder, and a whole new dysmorphia added to the DSM-5 called snap chat dysmorphia. It also only tangentially mentions that the increase in all of those mental health disorders disproportionally affects girls.
Which brings me to my point. (Or at least one of them.) When we look at The Social Dilemma through the feminist lens, what becomes clear is how social media has not only affected the brains and well-being of children, but how SNS have also become veritable breeding grounds for the increased exploitation, disempowerment, and (dare I say it?) programming of women.
Advertisers have a long history of preying on women’s insecurities and second class status as objects. Miss Representation, a documentary directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom in 2011 did an excellent job at exposing how mainstream media and culture contribute to the under-representation and marginalization of women in the United States.
But this was 9 years ago. With social media, the insidiousness of the phenomena has reached proportions never before seen in history.
Whereas women who struggled with body image issues and eating disorders could be counseled, as I once was, to avoid buying fashion magazines or to refrain from watching certain programming on television, women today are hard-pressed to avoid the onslaught of beauty-centered and sexualized media imagery- much of it designed to advertise to our specific pain points. Thanks to surveillance capitalism, Social Networking Sites know exactly what those pain points are and advertisers, “trading in human futures” now have our undivided attention.
Simply put, advertisers are still selling products to women by telling women that we aren’t good enough, and women are still buying it— except now those advertisers have a wider and more captive audience than ever and BONUS for them, thanks to influencers and celebrity culture women are using their social media accounts to advertise products via their celebrity and/or their personality and looks. So, while our attention is the product, other women are capitalizing on making themselves the product. The fan/consumer feels like they are getting a glimpse into the private lives of their favorite celebrities, complete with dirty bathroom mirror selfies. (Ariana Grande is the most popular influencer on Instagram.)
And in a bizarro-world rendition of life imitating art— er, advertising, non-celebrity women everywhere are posting similar content. Whether they are influencers, aspire to be influencers, or just want to look like one, half-naked, suggestively posed women (and girls) are all over the internet. They demand your attention, and they want your likes.
According to Jaron Lanier, a computer philosophy writer, and founding father of virtual reality, it’s not our attention that is the product, it is the slight imperceptible change in our behavior that is the product. Not surprisingly at the same time that we are seeing an increase in the use of social media, in part because of access to those sites from mobile devices, we have seen an absolute explosion in the number of women getting plastic surgery and using injectables like botox and fillers. (Breast implants are by far the most popular surgery with many teens getting “boob jobs” as high school graduation gifts.)
When I was a teen trying to emulate and possess the standards of beauty of my day, as teen girls are told to do, I thought that perhaps I was possibly just a few make up counter visits and a few weeks of not eating away from looking like the super models that graced the covers of my Vogue magazines and dated the rock stars that I had crushes on. At least I could try to look like them. And try I did. I used money I earned working at the mall to buy the products that Vogue advertised to me, and I starved and binged and purged like a champ. My size 25 Guess jeans were the barometer of my success or failures. I have no idea what would have happened to me if I had been able to post photos of myself online for validation, or if the solutions to my beauty flaws required surgery and fillers, and not just make-up. Either way, the message was clear- few things mattered more than how I looked.
Now that I am a 44-year-old woman, well past the age that men my age filter out on dating apps, and fast approaching my last fuckable day, Youtube algorithms advertise “botox- like” skin tightening strips. Facebook and Instagram assume that I want bikinis, lingerie, makeup, weight loss solutions, and of course, anything that I can get my hands on to reverse the signs of aging. My lips should be plumped, my mouth and eyes erased of laugh lines, crow’s feet, smoker’s lines, bunny lines, and the elevens. My face can be derma-brased (funny how the past tense of dermabrasion sounds like a piece of meat ready for the BBQ) and lasered, and chemi-peeled. My skin should be taut, my cheeks filled, my forehead smooth and mostly expressionless, and my eyebrows lifted. I should be as thin as possible with a flat stomach, but have a full ass and ample yet perky breasts. I should be hairless everywhere except for my crowning jewel- my hair- which must be thick, and shiny, and voluminous, and preferably highlighted. I should also be free from stretch marks, blemishes, and any food related deformities like muffin tops and cottage cheese thighs. Basically, I shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house until I look like a sex robot or a Kardashian.
In another bizarro world twist, social media and dating apps like Tinder have become a platform on which women (and children like the one depicted in The Social Dilemma) practice self objectification. Self objectification is the phenomenon of women viewing themselves through the lens of an external observer, habitually monitoring their own appearance whether in public or private settings, and seeking reassurance that they meet the expectations of the external observer. Women willingly engage in self objectification on social media but a disconnect occurs when our male colleagues, and bosses, and friends, and suitors feel at liberty to comment on our weight, or the size of our lips, or the shape of our legs or any other body part of ours that they are used to judging and rating and commenting on. Though to be fair, men commenting on women’s appearances was happening long before the internet. Women have known for ages that all of that “locker room talk” doesn't stay in the locker room. It speaks directly to us at work, online, on dates, and pretty much every where we go. It shouts at thirteen year old girls on the streets that they have nice tits. It grabs us by the pussy. It follows us home.
The danger in objectifying women’s bodies is that doing so de-humanizes women and the dehumanization of women can and does lead to violence against women.
“Men don’t live in a world where they are likely to be raped, harassed, or beaten- at least not straight white men, whereas women and girls do.” ~Jean Kilbourne
Nearly 1 in 5 women have experienced completed or attempted rape during her lifetime.
1 in 3 female rape victims experienced it for the first time between 11-17 years old.
And because this post is getting pretty heavy, and speaking of dating and umm…violence against women, I present you with some comic (but also sadly ironic given the source) relief:
Tristan Harris was onto something when he realized that “50 white men in silicon valley making decisions that affect how 2 billion people think” is dangerous. But men aren’t the enemy. Men who aren’t critical thinking allies, though, aren’t helping. And even those men, “the good men,” can be problematic. Hannah Gatsby has something to say about that in this video. Skip to about 50 in the video which is when everyone is seated and she begins speaking:
For those of you that didn’t watch the clip, here is a quote:
“A man rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness, it is misogyny…and now take everything that I have said up to this point and replace the word men with white person. ”
As a white woman, I am not comfortable speaking to the black experience but it occurs to me as it has occurred to countless others, that patriarchy and white supremacy operate from similar playbooks. Those in power create a narrative that we must look a certain way in order to have worth- in order to gain access to employment, or love, or sexuality, or visibility in society. That how we look can make us worth-less.
When advertisers lighten the skin of black women it can be argued that they are catering and contributing to systemic racism. The same has be said about our culture’s attempts to tame and straighten and relax and control and ban black hair. The message is that black women and black people in their natural state do not belong. Hitler’s obsession with blonde hair and blue eyes also comes to mind. (Whew, good thing we’ve stopped idolizing that iteration of beauty.)
I am not saying that my experience as a white woman is remotely similar to that of a black woman’s, or even to that of a black man’s, or a person of color. Comparative suffering is a slippery slope. But when we use filters, airbrushing, surgery, botox, and fillers to enhance a woman’s looks for the male gaze, we erase the signs of aging, or of giving birth, or of eating, smiling, laughing, and thinking- the very things that make a female an embodied, living, human being.
Our standard of beauty these days looks, and is, more man made than ever.
“Whatever the future threatens, we can be fairly sure of this: Women in our ‘raw’ or ‘natural’ state will continue to be shifted from category ‘woman’ to category ‘ugly’ and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face.” Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1990.
The harm in the current widely accepted and distributed beauty standards and the narrative around them is the “othering” of the female form in its natural state. Women liberated themselves from their forced domesticity in the 60’s. We gained the right to work (though not to earn as much money) and (white women) earned the right to vote, and to own property, and to get a credit card without our husbands co-signing, but we still don’t have the privilege and freedom of walking in the world in our natural state. We are lied to and told that in order to earn those rights we have to look a certain way, and then when we are objectified, and raped, and harassed, we are told that it is our fault because of how we look. The goal of the beauty myth is to erase, marginalize, objectify, disempower, and at its worse, blatantly justify violence against women. Sadly, we willingly contribute to the patriarchal structures and systemic misogyny so prevalent in this culture- so much so that we hardly even notice our contribution. We are the product, and the byproduct.
Like Tristan, I am concerned about the effects on social media has on children, and because I too am concerned that social media has the power to topple democracies, I thought it was worth mentioning what the documentary missed:
Women.
As Alicia Garza puts it, the only way that a democracy will work, is if we put more power in the hands of more people.
Right now women have far less of that power than men.
Women make up 51% of the population, yet only 23% of congress. Men also write, and produce, and film, and fund, and engineer most of the media that we consume. If we are living in the Matrix designed by predominately white men, it’s worth mentioning that women are still struggling to claim their power and voices and visibility in worlds both real and online. But in a world where our brains can no longer distinguish between the two, how can we know what is real?
My first post on Substack was about how 2020 has enabled us to see that we are swimming around in a fish bowl full of shit, but The Social Dilemma and recent events have reminded me that we still have more than a few blind spots.
A few weeks ago we learned that women in an immigration detention center in Georgia underwent forced sterilization. (It’s almost as if the horror show that has been 2020 wouldn’t have been complete without the news that some so called doctor was using a for profit immigration detention center in the US to practice Eugenics.) At the same time in the Twitterverse, 62-year-old Madonna was crucified for having too much work done, while 18-year-old Billie Eilish was simultaneously shamed for having a “mid 30’s mom bod.” (An it’s not just women who are celebrities being bullied and harassed and threatened on Twitter, just ask my friend in the online writing community, Melissa Blake.) In other social media news last week, Kim Kardashian announced that she makes much more money from Instagram that she does from Keeping Up With The Kardashians, which pretty well sums up half the point of this post.
The Wachowski sisters, using Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation as a primer, blew our minds 20 years ago when they gave us The Matrix, but could they have known that it would all get this…convoluted?
Can any of us even see how deep the rabbit hole goes anymore?
If the white men who helped to engineer The Matrix are worried, what does that mean for women, and people color, and the LGBTQ community, immigrants, the impoverished, the elderly, and the disabled? What does it mean for Mother Earth?
For four long days starting on November 3rd, two white men accused of rape or sexual assault competed for a seat to our nation’s highest office. One of those men (thankfully the loser) is a fascist, racist, dictator, but the other supported the Hyde amendment until the 11th hour of his candidacy, helped to imprison black and brown people, and vehemently campaigned for his entire career to cut social security. Let us hope that somehow President Biden can do better than his record over the last 40 years would indicate. We already have one male supreme court justice on the bench who was accused of rape, and one who was accused of sexual harassment, and thanks to Amy Conan Barrett and the white men in congress who appointed her, women’s rights to our own bodies, our own lives, and to our freedom is yet again in jeopardy. As if it ever wasn’t.