The Social Dilemma
A docudrama hybrid in which former Big Tech executives — ex-Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, ex-Facebook ad-targeting engineers — argue that the attention economy is corrosive by design, intercut with a fictional family drama illustrating the claims.
- Directors
- Jeff Orlowski
- Released
- 2020
- Writers
- Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, Jeff Orlowski
- Runtime
- 94 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Non-technical audiences who need a starter conversation about behavioral targeting, recommendation feedback loops, and adolescent mental-health concerns. Useful as a teen-and-parent shared watch.
Skip this if
Anyone who has read Zuboff, danah boyd, or any of the actual research the film loosely reframes. The dramatization is heavy-handed and the empirical claims have been criticized by researchers cited in the film. Take it as conversation-starter, not policy briefing.
Key takeaways
- Recommendation systems are optimization machines whose objective function — engagement — has measurable downstream effects on user behavior; the film makes that case clearly even where it overstates specifics.
- The fictional family scenes are the film's weakest material and most viewers can skip them.
- Most of the people the film features have moved on to founding Center for Humane Technology and similar advocacy organizations; the film's afterlife is its policy advocacy.
Notes
Pair with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) for the theoretical heavy lift, with The Great Hack for the political-targeting case study, and with danah boyd's It's Complicated for an empirically grounded counterweight on adolescent online life. Useful for the conversation it starts; treat the empirical claims as hypotheses, not findings.