How do you make a case against capitalism while appearing to defend consumers’ rights and values? You make a movie called The Social Dilemma.
The movie is cleverly done. It purports to oppose manipulation by Big Tech of social media users, calling out advertisers who manipulate people for profit. At the same time, the movie engages in its own manipulation. How does it do so? To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “let me count the ways.”
These are the opening two paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “No Fair Trial for Big Tech,” Defining Ideas, November 12, 2020.
A highlight:
In the whole movie, only one person expresses skepticism about the idea that manipulation by social media is sui generis. He expresses this view at a panel in which he challenges the aforementioned Tristan Harris. This skeptic points out that newspapers and print media also played on people’s addictions and ability to be influenced. He notes that when television came along, it did so as well, but in different ways. This, according to the skeptic, is just the next thing.
Here’s what’s most interesting about this skeptic. Only because I’m an economist do I know who he is. “That’s Kevin Murphy,” I said to my wife, who was watching the movie with me. Who’s Kevin Murphy? You wouldn’t know from watching the movie. You had to pay close attention even to know it was Kevin Murphy. I had to pause and rewind and only then did I notice that he had a name card in front of him. Probably not one viewer in fifty notices that, and probably not one viewer in a thousand knows who he is. So let me tell you. Kevin M. Murphy is a star economist at the University of Chicago. He won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1997, given in those days only once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under age forty. He’s the only business school professor ever to win a MacArthur genius award. But the movie tells you none of that.
And one more highlight:
Rosenstein complains that social media corporations go unregulated “as if somehow magically each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result.” One gets the idea that he’s never read Adam Smith, who indeed did argue in The Wealth of Nations that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”
Rosenstein also says mining the earth and pulling oil out of the ground are bad for humans. He claims as evidence of a warped, for-profit system that trees and whales are worth more dead than alive. And then he jumps the shark, or maybe I should say the whale, by saying “we’re the tree; we’re the whale.” How exactly social media companies kill us and how exactly they gain from dead consumers he leaves as an exercise for the viewer.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 13 2020 at 5:05pm
Thanks for the thorough review. I don’t think this is something I would be interested in watching. Social media is here and we need to learn to live with it. As you note, manipulation by the media is nothing new. I remember as a kid in the 1950s reading Mad Magazine and they would always have stuff about subliminal advertising (whether it was true or not is a different story) and we were always worried that there would be messages briefly flashing during the Saturday movie matinees.
In the long ago days, there were all the newspaper wars, with papers published with every political slant. As Ecclesiastes said, ‘nothing is new under the sun.’
David Henderson
Nov 13 2020 at 5:36pm
You’re welcome, Alan. We actually agree on something. 🙂
Bill
Nov 13 2020 at 5:12pm
Haven’t seen the movie. Is Murphy wearing a baseball cap?
David Henderson
Nov 13 2020 at 5:37pm
Ha, ha. No. Which is why I wasn’t sure it was he until I rewound.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 14 2020 at 7:28am
A good argument against a bad regulation of market transactions should recognize when and under what conditions regulation might be ameliorative, and show that those conditions do not exist. This sounds like what Murphy was doing.
Even better would be to argue for that ameliorative regulation. First, one might even achieve the better regulation (or less bad version of the bad regulation), but even if not, one is more persuasive, I think, in preserving the status quo (assuming that the bad proposal is actually worse than the status quo) because that demonstrates that one shares the (presumably) good intentions behind the regulation.
Swami
Nov 14 2020 at 5:03pm
Many excellent points, Bill. I do have a few pushbacks though.
First, they aren’t just using algorithms to market goods and services. Like you, I see this as a value, as it brings more relevant goods my way. They are also using the algorithms to find out what addicts us to their platform. Their goods are sucking up hours of people’s time in arguably unhealthy ways. This should be troubling and could represent a negative byproduct of their goods.
Second, Smith’s comment on the self interest of the shopkeeper is not an argument for unbridled selfishness (it does not promote theft, rape, rent seeking or deception). It specifically applies to self focused acts within an implied institutional framework of free markets with property rights, courts, bourgeois values, etc).
My take away is that with radically new types of social media outlets, we need the proper institutional arrangements (formal and informal) to support these. They are missing now.
What are these new institutions? I am not sure, but that is the question we should be asking — that we need to be asking.
Comments are closed.