Social media is rotting your brain! But don’t give it up just yet, at least not until we’ve finished building our new Must TV app, so at least you’ll have something really worthwhile to be consumed by.
Of course, we’re joking, but we’re not sure the techbros in this film are. In 2010 we had The Social Network, in 2020 we’ve got The Social Dilemma. This docudrama lets us meet the men (and the odd woman) behind the platforms we love to hate, as they scare the tweets out of us by explaining the threat to personal safety and democracy that socials are posing. If this isn’t enough to send you spiralling, we also get a bit of drama in the form of a family warped by their incessant need to scroll, a desire to remodel their faces to look like a filter, and an inability to communicate verbally. Sounds like any family in 2020, doesn’t it? Despite the interesting insight from the show’s contributors, it tries to do too many things at once. There are interviews, animation, sci-fi and drama elements, and despite having all these tech experts talking about this global issue, not one of them has a solid answer to the problem. So maybe the best thing to do, is delete all your apps and when we launch, just have ours. It’s going to be the best one anyway.
When it first dropped on Netflix, there wasn’t a huge reaction to the show. In fact, Tim Robey of The Telegraph gave the show a meagre two stars, saying that The Social Dilemma “should have trusted us, as viewers, to behold the whole iceberg here, not just the tip.” However, over time the buzz increased, trending on twitter and now sitting in the top ten shows being watched on Netflix. Despite the lack of new information, Devika Girish of The New York Times says the film “is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm,” something which is agreed by John Naughton in The Guardian, who calls it “a valiant if flawed attempt to address our complacency about surveillance capitalism.”
First shown September 2020. You can watch the trailer by pressing play on the show image, or by clicking here.
