About the movie.
The Social Dilemma movie is not a shit storm. Rather, it’s a really decent movie. A thrill ride, a futuristic dystopia of machine over man, will have you on the edge of your seat.
And it’s a documentary. Featuring us. Our social media lives, and importantly, from the POV of the creators of, well, all of it: Twitter, Instagram, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, AI, the “like” button, etc. The curtain is pulled back on social media. The evolution of a fun way to connect with old friends, to a tool for social justice, to a tool for political disruption, to a tool for disrupting democracy — all by activating our behavior. So, you see they aren’t responsible. We are. These developers were genius at human-centered design, tapping emotional insights in people and injecting tech that would relieve an itch, and subsequently, technology advanced and learned how to turn our itch to need. And to action. If this sounds like heroin, the analogy is not far off.
We are prey. They are predator.
Watch the movie. Then delete social media from your phones, at the very least. You and your phone should sleep in separate rooms. You are not lovers. You are roommates.
Guard the children. They are ultimate prey.
But About the shit storm. I’m going to drop a lot of Pew Research, CDC and other trusted sources. If you don’t trust these sources, bugger off.
There are over 210,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the US. Just over 1,000 people died from Covid between the 24 hours of October 1, 2020 to October 2, 2020, according to the Center for Disease Control, when I began writing. And of course, you know the news about the POTUS and company.
America accounts for approximately 20% of the world’s total Covid-19 deaths. We are winning.
Yet, despite consistent credible evidence, Pew Research found that ~25% of US adults believe the Covid-19 outbreak was intentionally planned by powerful people. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/24/a-look-at-the-americans-who-believe-there-is-some-truth-to-theconspiracy-theory-that-covid-19-was-planned/
Most Americans (71%) learned of the Covid-19 conspiracy through social media. Belief in this particular conspiracy aligns with education: less educated, higher the belief that this is, in fact, a fact. Political party affects belief: Republicans believing the conspiracy (34%) vs Democrats (18%).
As of July, majority of Republicans (59%) believe the Covid-19 death count is inflated. Few Democrats (9%) believe the official count is high. That’s 1 in 3 Americans that doubt the number of people who have died. Fox News viewers are most likely to doubt the death toll. They also show the greatest spike in increased doubt of the number of deaths, 44% in May to 62% in late July (Axios-Ipsos poll).
The majority of Americans, however, believe the number who have died from Covid is actually higher (37%) or that reported numbers are correct (31%).
Another source. Germany’s Allensbach Institute surveyed US, UK, France and German citizens in June 2020. About a third of Americans call the conspiracy theorists (the ones that claim Bill Gates is the boogeyman…he’s not, by the way) crackpots. But nearly a quarter, believe there is ‘more than meets the eye’. That mainstream media does not tell the truth. And so they scour other sources, e.g. the unseen, unknown, nonaccredited voices of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
As for Bill Gates, one in eight Americans under the age of 30 believe he, Bill, started Covid-19 to set up a new world order.
Additionally, one in five of these younger Americans heard ole Bill plans to implant microchips in people to control them. Curious if those same folks know The Gates Foundation has committed nearly $4B in global grants to combat malaria? And that is just ONE example out of the $36B Bill and Melinda Gates have donated to their foundation. Clearly Bill is the worst.
Side note: when asked to agree/disagree “Most conspiracy theorists are crackpots”, over half of Germans agreed. Only 18% of French respondents agreed. Global alignment is going to be tough.
THE AMERICAN TRIFECTA: Conspiracy Belief • Cognitive Dissonance • good old fashioned Gullibility

CONSPIRACY BELIEF. You ready?
[ 50% of Americans believe a conspiracy about a current Political event or phenomenon.]
This number is slightly behind the average Presidential voter turnout, which is somewhere around 55%. For perspective.
Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, University of Chicago, found that half (50%) of Americans believe in at least one of the following conspiracies:
• 19% believe the US government was behind the 911 attacks. (A different study by Stempel and Hargrove in 2007 found nearly 1/3 of American respondents agreed that “federal officials either assisted in the 911 attacks or did nothing to stop it in order to go to war in the Middle East”).
• 11% believe the US government mandate for florescent light bulbs is because florescent light bulbs make people obedient and easy to control. Go ahead. You did not read that wrong.
• 25% believe the financial crisis of 2008/2009 was caused by a small cabal of Wall Street bankers. (Okay, well, that one makes sense to me.)
Several studies on why Americans believe conspiracies uncovers a strange kind of mistrust of ‘the man’ (authority), combined with a goiter sized rugged individualistic attitude. This is not new. It’s why we sailed the oceans blue in the first place. Cue Jonathan Groff as the Mad King, Hamilton.
What I loved about this research was how it did not judge the conspiracy. No matter how whack. Rather, the intent, with real curiosity, was to understand why some people attach to conspiracy. That conspiracy is just another form of political discourse by which people interpret events of the world around them. This removes bias that conspiracies are psychopathology or a product of gross misinformation. Not to say they aren’t. But that relates to who/what was created, the purpose of the conspiracy.
We’ll get back to that. This is about attachment — why someone would believe in the first place.
Strong narrative drives what is a “good”, effective, conspiracy. A good conspiracy is a good story. A narrative that triggers predispositions.
Let’s pause here: both Manchurian Candidate movies -1962 starring Frank Sinatra and 2004’s Jonathan Demme directed/star studded remake — are spectacular. America, you will love these.
Michael Barkun, Professor Emeritus of Political Science in his 2003 ‘A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America’, sees a collision of two potent ideas in popular American culture. One, the belief that the current world will be destroyed, good will win over evil, not chained to any single religion, rather, will pull, indiscriminately, from a variety of traditions, such as eastern religions, new age, fringe science, radical politics, etc. Second, the rise of “stigmatized knowledge”. Ideas that were once fringe or “nutty”, are self-verified, despite authority/institutions handily proving error, miscalculations, lack of reason. Such as climate change denial, the location of Atlantis, alien abduction, etc.
SEE: the internet.
Barkun explains how conspiracies work, the story structure, if you will:

Identify the source of unusual social and political phenomena, and put it in unseen, intentional and malicious forces
Interpret political events as the struggle of good and evil
Researcher Hofstadter (1964), “the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is to think that vast or gigantic conspiracy is the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power”.
Tease out mainstream reports of political events as false tales, attempting to distract people from a hidden source of power
What makes us believers? After multiple rounds of study, Oliver & Woods find it is twofold.
First. Believers have an innate bias toward intentional predators. (FEAR). I love their example. You hear a strange noise in the night, it MUST be a break-in. Something evil, illicit. The assumption allows for control. “That’s why I grabbed the gun Officer”.
NOTE: I tend to assume when there is a bump in the night is one of the cats. I’m right more than I care to admit.
Second. Believers have a natural pull, bias, toward STORIES that explain big events and interpret history as struggles of good vs evil. Stories are key for organizing memory and reason. Cognitively, conspiracies jive in certain folks’ brains. The good vs evil, light vs dark stories help process and organize political information in a way that makes what is typically confusing or ambiguous easier to understand.
[ And none of this is abnormal. ]
No disorder here. It’s just a way of understanding. That is why not everything in America is conspiracy, e.g. farm subsidies. How’s that fun?
Also, conspiracy development (much like conceiving, writing, producing content or a TV show!) is exhausting. Most people don’t create conspiracies. Conspiracy comes to them.
Like in 2020, that Covid-19 is the flu, will go away with warm weather, is only for old people, a vaccine is almost done, Bill Gates started this, with China…oh my, did you hear the one about China?
Conspiracy tickles predispositions, or not. This is why some of us are baffled by how others react or don’t react. Red meat to the lion. Red meat to the vegetarian.
Facts get eaten by conspiracy. Information that might shift thinking, a fact, for example, enters to thwart the conspiracy, that very fact is made into evidence to support the conspiracy. When Barack Obama’s birth certificate is produced by the Hawaiian hospital, conspiracists now believe the hospital is in on it.
Have a look at Jordan Peterson. Never heard of him? He has #1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon, massive Twitter (560,000) and YouTube (~1M) followers. Your college age sons have most likely heard of him and/or watched his videos.
He twines an intellectual air, rational calm and authority. Uses the Barkun formula masterfully. He found an audience.
[ ‘Feminists have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination’ ]
[ ‘Developing nations are pits of catastrophe’ ]
To a Dutch far-right group he claimed support for ‘enforced monogamy’. His audience: white, typically young men, believe their white privilege is under attack.
Peterson wasn’t famous. Until the Fall of 2016 when he inserted himself in a Canadian moment. Bill C-16 would ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity. He arrived at a cultural opening, fear of what (white) men were losing, ignited in the United States, and quickly found a niche: taking stances on issues he fundamentally did not understand, or had an odd relationship toward, twisting them, and releasing YouTube presentations, calm, cool, professorially, and pointed the finger at the radical left.
For Bill C-16, he claimed that he would be jailed “for hate speech” for his rhetoric, creating drama and stakes for his followers. Canadian legal experts argued in his defense, disputing that his “talk” was not criminal. But the boys showed up. And well, as we say in show business: He found a vein.
“I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, because it’s just so goddamn funny I can’t help but say it: I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors,” Peterson told the podcast host Joe Rogan. “If they let me
speak, then I get to speak, and then I make more money… if they protest me, then that goes up on YouTube, and my account goes WAY up.”
Houston. We have a problem. Speaking of, did we really land on the moon?
NOTE: the special effects green screen didn’t exist yet. But Bill Kaysing convinced himself that the U.S. didn’t have the technological depth to pull off a moon landing.
Also, there were no stars in the photos.
In 1976, he self-published “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle”. Calm, authoritatively. He even had a stint working at Nasa.
Despite the mountain of evidence that proves the lunar mission, belief in no evidence that it did not happen (I’m dizzy in these double negatives) captivates conspiracists. Youngers, 21% of 24–35 year-olds think the moon landings were staged vs 13% of over 55 year olds — because “you couldn’t prove anything then, now we have technology to investigate ourselves”. Before we Americans feel special, a YouGov poll found one in six Brits agree with this statement “the moon landings were staged”.
Sigh.
There aren’t that many people that believe this conspiracy (4–6%). But the Moon-Hoax entered modern times in 2001. Fox News aired a documentary, Did We Land on the Moon? Hosted by Mitch Pileggi, X-Files actor. They repackaged Kaysing’s engaging story for a new, young’ish audience. Like Friends caught a young audience on Netflix, and fresh appeal blossomed.
Oliver Morton, author of The Moon: A History for the Future, “ …an implausible event for which there is lots of evidence (Apollo 11) and a plausible event for which there is zero evidence (the moon hoax), some people will opt for the latter. The point of Apollo was to show how powerful the American government was in terms of actually doing things. The point of moon-hoax theory is to show how powerful the American government was in terms of making people believe things that weren’t true.”
FAR MORE DISTURBING are “911 Truthers,” anti-vaxxers, Pizza-Gaters. Holocaust deniers. Climate Change deniers. Sandy Hook conspiracists. Anti-maskers in an airborne pandemic. What these conspiracies have in common, unlike the benign narrative of the Moon hoax: these affect people in real, at times, life-threatening ways.
Have you heard the one where a group of left-wing billionaires, Hollywood A-listers, philanthropists, Jewish financiers and Democrats run a child-trafficking pedophile ring and covertly rule the world, and only Trump can save us? Oh wait. That’s not a joke. Meet QAnon. Sweeping the global stage, moms, aunties everywhere! And yes, there are 25 (TWENTY FIVE) Q’ees running for public office in this nation. Some with good chance of winning. Do yourself a favor, don’t click on “Save the Children”.
Most people believe, that at the end of the day, American public opinion is ultimately rational, and made through professional, deliberate information sources and ideology. That, while conspiracies have always contradicted the mainstream, organized outlets and danced like sugar canes in our heads, that we wake up, come to our senses.
But now the Citizen Culture unleashed through social media — citizen scientist, citizen news publisher, citizen expert (huh?), collides with machine learning, AI, Moore’s Law. And this is a gamechanger.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
“People hold a core belief. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create extreme discomfort, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” Frantz Fanon
Cigarettes will kill you, but I’d like a smokey treat anyway. Understanding we have little time to stave off the effects of climate change, but my SUV has such great seats!
COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS, similar to dissonance. These are the little, in inaccurate, negative lies we tell ourselves. •Overgeneralizing — seeing a constant negative pattern, based on one event. (That is, definitionally, not a pattern). •Blaming/Denying. Not me! •Polarized Thinking. See only in black and white, all or nothing, extremes. •Negativity bias, or better yet, there are no positives. •Catastrophizing: everything is or will be the worst. •Magical Thinking (Covid-19 will end when the weather is warm. Hmmm?). •Over-personalization. Self-blame, or being targeted. •Mind Reading. I know what you are thinking. (No you don’t.). •Double Standards. •Fallacy of Fairness: YOU think things should work out according to what YOU think is fair. Uh, could we cue back ‘over-personalization’? •Emotional Reasoning: when feelings are reality (no they aren’t).
Entertainment break: Be sure to catch Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Flea Bag. Oh my.
GULLIBILITY Gullibility is defined as being duped.
Pork is the other white meat. No it’s not.
In 1938, “The War of The Worlds”, Orson Wells’ Halloween broadcast whipped people into panic with Breaking News style interruptions describing an alien invasion. Legend has it most people turned to the episode from a more popular show and happened upon what they thought was a news bulletin. Holy cow! The Martians have landed! What’s even more fun is the double-conspiracy, that it was nation-wide panic. But the show had few listeners and the panic was fairly isolated.
The news-style production dealt authority and a sense of realness that leapt over reason.
The same week I watched The Social Dilemma, I also listened to a podcast (CaseFile episode 157) about the “Strip Search Scam”. I bring this up to highlight our gullibility for authority.
Dangerous gullibility.
In April 2004 Laura Fletcher was 18, a senior in High School, and working at McDonalds. The manager received a phone call, claiming to be local police — an employee had stolen earlier that day. The manager identified (over the phone), Laura, from the description the caller provided. Long story short (listen to the podcast), the manager worked with the “officer” (over the phone) to hold the young woman, strip search her, find someone to watch over her — at which point, Laura was sexually assaulted. Twice. Because the caller told the man now in charge of monitoring Laura to molest her (over the phone). She was also beaten by this same man. HOURS went by before the call was understood to be a scam.
SEVENTEEN McDonald’s managers, and over SIXTY managers at different establishments, across a rural swath of the USA, had been duped similarly. Over a TWELVE year period.
He had a calm, authoritative, professional voice. He found an audience.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971, set out to study effects of perceived power. Students joined the experiment, either as prisoner or prison guard. Guards were told to exert psychological control over the prisoners. In footage of the study, psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo tells the guards: “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that
their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy … We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
The study was abandoned after just six days. It’s also never been replicated, partly because of the methodology. But it is fascinating and studied.
“I had been conducting research for years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,” Zimbardo, 1996.
Well, that’s creepy.
Oh wait, there’s more.
In July of 1961, Yale University, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to understand obedience to authoritative figures. Ultimately, to understand the psychology of genocide.
“Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
Note: the study began just three months after the start of Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial. This was a frighteningly timely study. It repeated many times around the globe with consistent results.
A high proportion of respondents would obey, fully, albeit reluctantly.
BACK TO THE SOCIAL DILEMMA: THE SHIT STORM
The social dilemma, NOT the movie.
In April of 2004, when Laura Fletcher was sexually assaulted twice, beaten and held hostage for hours — because an unknown caller on the phone “told me to”, Facebook had ZERO users. It’s initial IPO would hit in August of 2004 for $85/share. YouTube was an idea concocted by three PayPal employees who thought it was weird there wasn’t one single location to share video (inspiration: Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl and the Christmas Day Tsunami — both in 2004). We had no Twitter. No Snap. No Instagram. No Reddit. We had no social media.
[ And then the shit storm began. ]
A cheeky (yes, pun) start to “The” Facebook, a site to chase skirt at Harvard, turned benevolent — friends finding each other after years, families connecting — turned active (I’m not claiming intent, but it is certainly active) aid to an enemy of the state (Russia 2016) . Take a look at their accounts. Billions are not real. Facebook estimates 5% are fake. In November 2019, FB reported shutting down 5.4B fake accounts, and then in March of 2020, reported creating super AI that was able to remove billions of fake accounts.
[ Sounds like a serious regenerating bed bug problem. ]
“If you’d come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin’s employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I’d have asked where your tin-foil hat was,” wrote Antonio García Martínez, who managed ad targeting for Facebook back then. “And yet, now we live in that otherworldly political reality.”…The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained precisely how. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic October 12, 2017
According to Pew, 18% of American adults get their political news through social media. Over HALF of those, source Facebook. (Does this seem safe given the “bed bug” issue?)
According to Pew, 25% of all Americans source YouTube for news. Mix of Independent channels (42%) and News organizations (49%) — with viewers sourcing from the two equally. The algorithms deal with traditional news media, New York Times, Washington Post, and digital natives, Buzzfeed, with equal gravitas. In Independent channels is also a mix of celebs like John Oliver, and YouTubers, explicitly creating for the platform. Russia Today, an independent channel can get billions of views, and is far more likely to focus on conspiracy theories such as the anti-vaccine movement and Jeffrey Epstein’s death.”
That is more people than Radio (by far), network TV, cable TV or local TV. They are younger (nearly half are under 30 years), less educated, less likely to follow major news stories, e.g. the coronavirus outbreak or the 2020 presidential election, not coincidentally, know less about either issue. But are more likely to have been exposed to a variety of false, unproven conspiracy stories.
The ability to hold conspiracy belief, cognitive dissonance, gullibility is American.
Most research finds the American embracement of conspiracies, is, well, a bit of who we are: a “Levi’s”, “GoWest”, rugged individualism. We believe we can avoid being controlled by secret forces, tease them out of the system — which means we believe they exist (It’s just a cat!) And we hold a very strange relationship with authority: abhor and adhere it.
Cambridge Analytica, Russian bots, foreign agents interfering in our democratic process have all been exposed. THOSE are not conspiracies. So have the bubbles algorithms have pushed us into, dividing us. This is to say that AI, machine learning, Moore’s law collide with social media — pouring gasoline on our conspiracy instincts. Game-changing in terms of control, narrowing the message, and directing behavior based on false information. (I know you know this.)
Discourse does NOT have to be dismantled. Connection is NOT illusion.
If there is one story trope I hate, it’s victim. We are not victims. We’ve done what we’ve always done: someone invented chocolate, and it was so damn good, we ate it all. Same with bubble gum, cigarettes, fidget spinners, Hummers, canned wine. And then we learned to back-off. Mostly.
I haven’t done an official survey, but people in my fairly wide sphere, across demographics and multiple states/countries, are tired. Worn out from the social media shit storm. We will require regulation from the man, and we will require self-regulation to crawl out of this storm. The former will come with our votes and political will. Mark, you’ve been, as they say, so good and so bad. Time to face the music. (You too Google, Twitter, Snap, etc., etc.)
Now the self-regulation.
First, the cleanse: That’s right. Grab the lemons and cayenne pepper. We are going full tilt. Clean your phone off. Delete all the apps you absolutely can. Can you have one screen of Apps, no more? Imagine that. Turn the alerts off. Turn the tracker-jackers off. This will be VERY uncomfortable for the first 72 hours to six months, but then, euphoria. The phone does not sleep with you anymore. Find a lover.
Second, a reverse war on information: Who is delivering you information? Know your sources. Ask: what good does it do them if you read, subscribe, follow them? What good does it do them if you share their content? Do you know the hierarchy of the power you hold?
Open an article 2. Like an article 1. Disco: Share the article.
Know that your actions, not the genius you are following, triggers the AI, and on and on the world spins.
Ask questions. Is it elixir? Or snake oil? Do you feel fear and anger and indignation? Or curiosity and wonder and optimism? Can do or can don’t? Can you invert their statements and make sense? “Obama is an American
citizen.” Hmmm. Does one thing feel rational and the other irrational? Test yourself. Have you ever watched or read a news outlet “to know what the enemy was thinking”? See, that’s not good.
Last, can we all agree to take this out of the hands of our children? It is hurting them, their brains, their relationships, their discourse, their citizenry, their connections. Their self-worth.
Let’s resurrect conversation, intimacy and diverse mindsets, all around the same table.
Also, put a mask on.
Here is the description and talent reference. Thank you Wikipedia.
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. The film explores the rise of social media and the damage it has caused to society, focusing on its exploitation of its users for financial gain through surveillance capitalism and data mining, how its design is meant to nurture an addiction, its use in politics, its effect on mental health (including the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates), and its role in spreading conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and aiding groups such as flat-earthers. The film features interviews with former Google design ethicist and Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris, his fellow Center for Humane Technology co-founder Aza Raskin, Asana co-founder and Facebook like button co-creator Justin Rosenstein, Harvard Universityprofessor Shoshana Zuboff, former Pinterest president Tim Kendall, AI Nowdirector of policy research Rashida Richardson, Yonder director of research Renee DiResta, Stanford University Addiction Medicine Fellowship program director Anna Lembke, and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. The interviews are cut together with dramatizations starring actors Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, and Vincent Kartheiser, which tell the story of a teenager’s social media addiction. The Social Dilemma premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released on Netflix on September 9, 2020.