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"Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse."
Sophocles
By maureenaumand on 2020-10-30 17:33:40
I have often taken great joy in Facebook. Having had the privilege in life of being a decades long public school educator, it
is a remarkable thing to have lived in an era when I have been able to watch and connect with the lives of so many I once
knew as teenagers, awkwardly trying on style, ideas, personas, building ambitions and dreams, being enabled to see them
morph and blossom into the fullness of adulthood, adulthoods peopled with spouses, careers, children (in some cases,
retirements and grandchildren) interests, passions, philosophies- graceful maturity. It makes me smile to see that “my”
theater kids - once full of grit and creativity- remain “ friends” on the platform....an enduring legacy of old bonds fine tuned
over time; it makes me smile to see those I once knew as carefree children, beam from the digital page with such obvious,
movingly palpable pride and passionate affection for their own children. Having also had the privilege of belonging to a
large extended family, it is profoundly life affirming and generative of a deep sense of being connected to the flowing river
of life to follow the joys ( and sorrows), the successes, twists and turns of so many beloved others, many of whom I
embraced from the moment of their births, as they now also build, year by year their own lives. As their many lovely faces
young and old populate my screen, it is a dazzling kaleidoscope for sure. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s progenitor, claims
that this was the driving force of their creation at the start: transformative, transparent human connectivity, a time and space
warping vehicle to enable the expansion and deepening of human community. Increasingly, however, the accusation has
been coming from many quarters that this goal has been perverted in a Frankensteinian twist. Essentially critics posit that the
evolving mechanisms, brainchildren of Silicon Valley’s most brilliant and well intentioned minds, developed to enable many
social media platforms to function as they do - perhaps because of the human frailty of imagination and the resulting
complexities of unintended consequences, have also enabled dark and dangerous, democracy eroding, unregulated societal
forces to emerge on a mind boggling scale. Critics see that key among those mechanisms the amoral algorithms which
attached to the innocuous “Like” button drive the subtle, ever evolving pas de deux between the user and the system. Also,
critics posit that the monetization of the platforms, which has made social media / technology entities the wunderkind of the
economy, garnering sultanic wealth for their owners and stockholders, has also opened the door to what Harvard Professor,
researcher Shoshana Zuboff calls an all pervasive “surveillance capitalism” (chronicled in her powerful book of the same
name) which commodifies all of those beautiful profiled lives on my digital screen, turning them into data sets for sale and
presaging a dystopian future, a new war front, far removed from the originating utopian vision. These as well as many other
chilling accusations form the narrative base of two recent documentaries on the NETFLIX platform which serve up
troubling analysis, especially cogent at this charged moment of the national election. The first, THE GREAT HACK ,
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written and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer premiered in January,2019. The second,
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, released in September of 2020 is directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis
Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. THE GREAT HACK tells the story of the now defunct British company Cambridge
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Analytica (though reborn as Data Propria which is currently working for the Trump campaign, and
Emerdata) through the eyes of the investigative British journalist for The Observer, Carole Cadwalldr, two company whistle
blowers: the brilliant technologist Christopher Wylie and elusive and perhaps self serving and obscuring, former company
manager, Brittany Kaiser, and an American media professor, David Carroll, turned activist in an attempt as Cadwalldr says
to “lift the veil on the data industrial complex” whose work Carroll posits is “subversion on an
industrial scale” by suing to obtain access to his own information held by the company. Cambridge Analytica was a high
tech political operative, mercenary information campaign management service , a purveyor of data mining, “information
warfare”, brainchild of the military disinformation campaign contractor SCL Group, birthed in 2014. Its ownership,
funder and strategist Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, somewhere in the shadows, Eric Prince, and political
operative and Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Bragging about its “success in helping steer and shape elections in numerous
countries, including many fledgling democracies in Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, South Africa, Trinidad-Tobago, etc.,
Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Donald Trump campaign for the United States presidency in 2016. (“The film details
how Cambridge Analytica worked with conservative Brexit leaders to impact the “LEAVE IT” campaign which led to what
Cadwalldr sees as the disastrous Brexit vote in England and to have been hired to work first on Ted Cruz’s bid and then on
the US Presidential election efforts of 2016 by the Trump campaign.) Cambridge Analytica gained access and influence in
the US campaigns by touting the fact that they possessed 5,000 data points on 230 million US Facebook users. The process
by which the Facebook data became property of CA is complex, cloaked and convoluted and involves the initial
“borrowing” of the material for the supposed purpose of a psychological profiling and automation study by researchers and
academics at Cambridge who wanted to study how to link personality study psychographics to the powers of algorithm
shared the results and access to all the survey takers and their unwitting Facebook connected “Friends” with CA where it
became fodder for “sophisticated personality, psychological and political profiles.” (In 2016 a ProPublica study of the
platform found that Facebook, through a complex web of data purchase, gathering and exchange maneuvered through the
trillion dollar a year data industry had collected more than 52,000 unique attributes on each user which were used to classify
them in a staggering preponderance of ways. This classification enables finely tuned and targeted advertising - both
commercial as well as political with precision and maximum impact and thus profitability for the company and easy
accessibility for marketers of things and ideas to a global community of minds and hearts. An oft repeated refrain among
critics - if you are not paying you are the product- proves to be a cautionary mantra) Although, in spite of high level British
and American government inquiries and tireless other investigative work, the exact details of how CA’s efforts on behalf of
the campaigns remain murky - Cadwalldr says that both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have gone to extraordinary
lengths to prevent the facts coming out and that “the data swamp remains dark, toxic and invisible as the data lifts are
systematically engineered to be invisible" this much is known. Brad Parscale (Trump’s digital director in 2016 and 2020 )
claims he was putting out 50 to 60 thousand targeted Facebook ads per day during the 2016 US presidential election and that
these were targeted using the power of data driven algorithms to identified “probables” in various permutations. In a 60
Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl, Parscale called Facebook “the 500-pound gorilla” in his digital marketing campaign
and posits that “I think Donald Trump won, but I think Facebook was the method -- it was the highway in which his car
drove on.” We know that Parscale admits that Facebook employees....he requested that they send pro Trump employees only
..embedded with the campaign to help fine tune its cutting edge targeting capacity to the point that data driven adds might
target you with one message and your neighbor another according to your data profile. We know that the campaign made use
of the platform’s capacity to create and send dark ads, ads which are “microtargeted to individual users who are the only
ones who see them. Unless they choose to share them — they disappear.” We know that...though Parscale denies that it was
the official policy of the campaign to do so, Facebook ads were targeted according to racial and gender constituencies with
an eye to strategically suppressing or encouraging votes - even though he admits that the decisive rally rhetoric of the
campaign was borrowed and became memes for targeting voters. We know that bots used to automatically generate
messages, push ideas, act as a shadow of users, and as fake accounts to gain followers themselves were employed
relentlessly by actors on social media platforms and that these also used the power of algorithms to fine tune the messaging.
We also know that the Russian Internet Research Agency and bot farms, etc. spend massive amounts of money buying
Facebook advertising, etc. to not hack the system as much as to freely make use of it to its full advantage and thus easily
throw a monkey wrench into the democratic process. We know that both campaigns tried to harness the astounding power to
target and barrage, to shape and manipulate minds....with one gaining dominance in messaging over the other in 2016. The
story detailed in THE GREAT HACK “encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing — at a global scale, with added
cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public — our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of
personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically
motivated billionaire. ( Robert Mercer) The documentary THE GREAT HACK opens one doorway into the complex hall of
mirrors of this phenomenon. The second documentary , THE SOCIAL DILEMMA takes a kind of step back look and gains
its power and authority by being propelled forward narratively by a series of interviews with a number of former and current
social media creators, innovators, founders, theorists who among them have worked for many of the founding companies of
Silicone Valley and who express strongly held reservations about the dangers of the creation they have helped to build. The
underlying question which dominates the film, including the interviews, an ongoing docudrama about a family and its social
media use and a kind of science fiction enactment of how the algorithmic imperatives strive to impact a young mind, is
“What’s the problem?” The documentary attempts to outline a number of problems including the dangerous psychological
impacts on teenagers of a steady diet of like driven, uncensored use of social media that augments angst and insecurities and
leads to depression, body image dysphoria, etc., the fragmentation within families by the ubiquitous presence of phones and
screens, the time eating nature of what has become an addictive reality in many lives, etc. One analyst has called the film an
attempt to describe “the interconnected system of mutually reinforcing harms — addiction, distraction, isolation, polarization,
fake news — that weakens human capacity, caused by technology platforms with the extractive business model to capture
human attention.” The meta analysis which emerges from the interviews, however, seems particularly relevant for the
current electoral moment. There appears to be an agreement among the speakers that the very foundational driving
mechanism of social media platforms has become that of “ attention extraction” tied to profit motive. The more the platform
can hold your gaze, the more willing are the advertisers and political sponsors to pay. The film posits that because the
platform designers are well versed in the knowledge and application of human psychology, there is a constant process of
using this awareness and knowledge to create tools which will appeal to and shape rapid, emotionally driven response and
thus there is what one critic calls a constant “ race to the bottom of the brain stem’. The endless scrolling required, the
endless pursuit of likes (and the mining of likes), the apparent human susceptibility to be drawn to the angry and the
emotional all color the framing of the platform and shaping of the algorithms which drive it. The hidden nature of these
algorithms which critics see as manipulative and ultimately powerful are also posited as troubling, exploitive of human
vulnerabilities, unbeknownst to the user whose use of the social platforms has made her victim of a kind of Trojan horse
ruse. A key voice throughout the documentary is that of Tristan Harris, an early innovator and ethicist for Google and now
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founder and director of the Center for Humane Technology. With a former
insider’s platform, Harris posits that “Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact
on two billion people,” and that he feels that “we will continue to see this kind of manipulation, and these threats to
democracy, as long as Facebook has more than 2 billion users and continues making more than $10 billion per quarter." In a
dialogue with historian Yuval Noah Harare in WIRED Magazine, Harris says “I think that we are now facing really, not just
a technological crisis, but a philosophical crisis. Because we have built our society, certainly liberal democracy with
elections and the free market and so forth, on philosophical ideas from the 18th century which are simply incompatible ...
with the technology we now have at our disposal. Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the
customer is always right, that ultimate authority ....is with ... human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human
choices are these sacred arena which cannot be hacked. Ultimately, my choices, my desires reflect my free will and nobody
can access that or touch that. And ....people—some people—corporations, governments are gaming the technology to hack
human beings. Maybe the most important fact about living in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals”. An
analysis of the film in The Guardian posits that the impact of this hacking of our deep identities down to a granular level
results in the creation of “online echo chambers or silos which divide people into separate camps, at times even inciting
them to express anger and hatred at a volume not seen in previous communications forms” and that this makes “it difficult
for many people in the digital age to create and come to share the type of “common knowledge” that undergirds better and
more-responsive public policy.” The Social Dilemma ultimately determines that the problem rests in the question: can
democracy survive in an era of “post truth politics.” Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, VR pioneer and author, who appears
in THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, believes that “the stakes for reform could not be higher. If we go down the status quo, for let’s
say another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance ... fail to meet the challenge of climate
change ... degrade the world’s democracies so they fall into some type of autocratic dysfunction ... ruin the global economy.
We probably don’t survive. I really view it as existential.” [caption id="attachment_ 14666" align="aligncenter"
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width="300"] Egyptian director Jehane Noujaim and her producer Karim
Amer. Photo: Barbara Munker[/caption] Karim Amer, director of THE GREAT HACK posits, “Here we are... people who
are moral creatures, shaped by amoral algorithms shaping our behavior. We built this world. We should own that, and not
just point the finger at the people who exploited it ... As we demand more accountability and transparency, we just assume
that the admission fee to the connected world is giving up all your privacy. Now we see the wreckage that results. We have
to strive for a new system. What’s at stake is the very functionality of the democratic process. If we lose that I’m not sure
what is left.” In spite of his intrepid concern for the corrosive impacts of the commodification of human beings for their data
and the money it is making and the cooption it is inviting, Tristan Harris, known as the voice of conscience for the industry
concludes: "The system in itself can do amazing things for us. We just need to turn it around, that it serves our interests,
whatever that is and not the interests of the corporation or the government."
