

This is Orlowski’s way of persuading non-tech-savvy viewers that the documentary stuff is not only real, but is inflicting tangible harm on their teenagers. The second expository track in the film – which is interwoven with the documentary strand – is a fictional account of a perfectly normal American family whose kids are manipulated and ruined by their addiction to social media. Having plundered the natural world, capitalism has now turned to extracting and exploiting what’s inside our heads
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And the problem with that is that when he gets to the point where we need ideas about how to undo that damage, the boys turn out to be a bit – how shall I put it – incoherent. It is, but Orlowski welcomes these techbros with open arms because they suit his purpose – which is to explain to viewers the terrible things that the surveillance capitalist companies such as Facebook and Google do to their users.

It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.” “These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my Ted Talk’ accounts,” she writes, “typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. The prodigal son returns having “devoured his living with harlots” and is welcomed with open arms by his old dad, much to the dismay of his more dutiful brother. They were lost and are now found.”īiblical scholars will recognise the reference from Luke 15. The writer Maria Farrell, in a memorable essay, describes them as examples of the prodigal techbro – tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening and “suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They are, as you might expect, almost all males of a certain age and type. In the first, he assembles a squad of engineers and executives – people who built the addiction-machines of social media but have now repented – to talk openly about their feelings of guilt about the harms they inadvertently inflicted on society, and explain some of the details of their algorithmic perversions. The intention of the director, Jeff Orlowski, is clear from the outset: to reuse the strategy deployed in his two previous documentaries on climate change – nicely summarised by one critic as “bring compelling new insight to a familiar topic while also scaring the absolute shit out of you”.įor those of us who have for years been trying – without notable success – to spark public concern about what’s going on in tech, it’s fascinating to watch how a talented movie director goes about the task. Its goal is admirably ambitious: to provide a compelling, graphic account of what the business model of a handful of companies is doing to us and to our societies. Thanks For Share.Both movies are instructive and entertaining, but the second one (which has just been released on Netflix) leaves one wanting more.
