Based on a recommendation from my buddy Kirk a few weeks ago, I finally got around to watching "The Social Dilemma". I waited awhile because I knew this movie was going to haunt me. I actually put it off that long because I think I did not want to see what the people had to say. But yesterday I had to watch. It was kind of eating at me. I wanted to see the stuff that Kirk was telling me about.

I had started the movie a few days back, but I started it over yesterday and watched it all in one sitting. And it was as haunting as I expected. It was dour. It was bleak. It made me scared for the future. But most of all, the movie was fantastic. It was also very, very true. It was so bleak because this is the direction we are headed as a country that is as tech obsessed as we have become. We all live on our screens nowadays. It is our source for most things. I do this constantly. I check the news each morning. I look at scores every night on my sports apps. I record my kids doing activities. I log runs and calories. I write a blog. We all live on screens. It was an inevitable chapter in Earth's life.

What "The Social Dilemma" brought to my eyes, what I had not realized, what frightened me the most, was how said screens are manipulating us. How screens give us endorphin rushes. How apps like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, all of them, are advertising directly to us based on what we look at and what we talk about. Our phones and tablets are clearly listening to us. I will talk about running shoes, and not even an hour later I will receive an ad of said shoes on one of the many social media apps I use. It is scary. I do not like the idea of an AI listening to me, learning about me and advertising to me all within a span of an hour. But that is what "The Social Dilemma" taught me. It also taught me that there are people that are actually fighting to rid us of this wickedness social media platforms are doing. There are some good people in Silicon Valley that want things to change. And these people have the clout to actually do something about it.

While watching this movie, the things the experts were telling me had me shaken to my core. Outside of AI advertising to us, the use of social media in teens and pre teens is horrifying. It is also making being a teen, which is already tough enough, even harder. Kids are mean and vicious to begin with. Now, they can do it online behind a screen name. That stinks. I was also taken aback that most of the experts in the movie worked for these social media companies. It would show their name, then list the former jobs they had at places like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. All of these people were literally in the belly of the beast. They saw a lot of what the internet has become from the start. They saw what was happening and left though. They wanted to make changes. They saw that it was getting bad, so they moved on and are now fighting for the greater good.

What scared me the most while watching was me thinking about how much time I personally spend on my phone. I have not stopped thinking about it since I finished the movie last night. I mentioned above the amount of time I use apps. I also play mindless games on my phone. I will sit down and lose a half an hour playing Candy Crush. I don't need to do that nonsense. It is a waste of time. What resonated most with me, besides kids being on social media, was how the movie ended. The experts talked about a world where we can be better. Where we can log off. Where we can stop being so cruel to people on the internet, and that made me feel okay. I loved hearing them say stuff like, "turn off notifications", or "get rid of apps that are of no interest", "remove negativity from your life", "get off news websites that show no real change", "if you are going to look at the news, gather as much info as you can from many different sources". Hearing all of that has really motivated me to make some changes. I am going to make the effort to not be on my phone as much. I am going to turn off most of my notifications. I am going to delete apps like Wikipedia. I'm going to not check football scores as much. I'm going to get off my damn phone all the time.

"The Social Dilemma" is one of the most horrifying, and best movies I have watched all year. I highly, highly recommend everyone check it out. It will definitely give you things to think about. It is a great, important movie. Watch it.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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