Never having set out to write a film review, I found watching Netflix’s ‘The Social Dilema’ hit so many issues directly and with absolute precision that it should be mandatory watching for all policy makers. It deals with so many of the issues facing today’s society, from an environmental, economic, social, technological and regulatory point of view. There is a section in the last 15 minutes when insiders to the tech industry give their views and quotes, which is pure gold.
My personal favourite quote is from Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer with Facebook, former engineer with Google and co-founder of Asana.
‘We live in a world in which a tree is worth more financially dead than alive and a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in this way and corporations go unregulated they are going to continue to destroy trees, kill whales and mine the earth and to continue to pull oil out of the ground even though we know its destroying the planet and we know its going to leave a worse world for future generations.
This is short term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs as if somehow magically each corporation acting in its own selfish interest is going to produce the best result.
This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What is frightening and hopefully the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory has been in the first place is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale and our attention can be mined.
We are more profitable to a company if we are spending time starting at and advert than if we are living our life in a rich way. So we are seeing the results of corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention for the things they want us to look at rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and values and our lives’.
Justin Rosenstein
The docu-drama has many other fascinating and relevant quotes from tech insiders. It really is a powerful documentary that examines the theories that have bought our civilisation to the current position. Its a short post, but if you have a chance to watch this powerful drama it will be time well spent.
Rebel Economics 