Like many of you, I heard about The Social Dilemma, a recently released Netflix documentary directed by Jeff Orlowski. John Naughton at The Guardian wrote an article called, “The Social Dilemma: a wake-up call for a world drunk on dopamine?” and summarizes with, “The new Netflix docudrama is a valiant if flawed attempt to address our complacency about surveillance capitalism”. My suggestion is that you watch The Social Dilemma.

Then reflect.

The natural question being asked is what actions can we take now. Orlowski echos what many of us within the industry know which is to unplug further than you are initially comfortable with.

That’s the preamble and now we can get to why I went from a serious face this morning to an ironic laugh. The funny thing is we are almost living an inverse of a concept from an older movie I enjoyed growing up, iRobot. Regarding its Three-Laws, VIKI, the AI, states that the robots needed to control the human race because we are our own worst enemy and are only harming ourselves. Let’s apply this to the short-term vision wall street, quarterly earnings reports, and the advertising has on monetization conversion metrics. Advertisers really only exist to help connect supply with demand. Capitalism is this making of the market and meant to be the most efficient methodology. Please don’t misconstrue this connective narrative as a rejection of capitalism. Though I do also encourage you to read this quick refresher on Max Weber’s “Iron Cage”. My hope is for a maturation of capitalism achieved through constructive discourse. We, the creators of this mess, need to extend our view and therefore mitigate the short-term bias we’ve engineered into the social media machine.

The short view is going to extract resources at hand quickly, the resource we are talking about here is the generative value within the fabric of our society upheld by our social contract and, ideally, democratic, institutions. Let’s elongate our view and incorporate positive perpetual feedback loops. There is a word to encompass that, sustainable.

Sustainability can be an evolution of capitalism’s definition of efficiency because if we continue to depress, subjugate, and retard our human maturation with the forces mentioned in The Social Dilemma, then capitalism will eat itself. 

These arguments are not particularly new, but they gave me my ironic laugh this morning because we can change this and if we begin to set our efficiency models further out, we will realize that quality of life for everyone will rise. That’s profitable for everyone, that’s efficient, and puts us on a positive trajectory.

In my founding of Altered Landscape, I’m seeking to incorporate lessons from a few key disciplines I’m exploring, transitioning to a B-corp, design ethics, and biomimicry. There are solutions within our concept of empowered personal data. We are going to learn by doing together and we invite you to join us.