The Social Vacuum
Two years ago, I sat through a film called ‘Beautiful Boy’, largely because it was a free BAFTA screening, and my daughter was keen on Timothe Chalamet. I was not so keen on him, and less still at the end of this ordeal. The conditions couldn’t have been lovelier: comfortable seats padded in scarlet leather in the spacious private cinema of a posh hotel. Probably there were drinks as well.
And it wasn’t his fault. He did his very best to flop and suffer and twitch and express all the variegated emotions of an undeveloped teenager from an overprivileged world who had nothing better to do than take drugs.
But there it was: the film suffered, not merely from an absence of subplot, but an absence of life. The family at its centre seemed to do nothing, as an art form. In the mother’s case, literally — I seem to remember a scene of fishes being painted on a canvas, under a spreading redwood tree. Though on reflection, I may have hallucinated that bit, to fill the vacuum.
As anybody knows who has been close to somebody with any kind of addiction, or indeed has been addicted themselves, there are basically only two ways out: one is in a box, and the other is something more attractive with which the addiction is incompatible. Keeping a job, for example. Or having a life.
It’s therefore not surprising that this season’s ‘shocking expose’ of the hitherto unsuspected infamy of the FAANGS, ‘The Social Dilemma’, is populated exclusively by denizens of the same geographical and social milieu as ‘Beautiful Boy’. In that film, no dishes or clothes were washed, no flowerbeds weeded, no zips mended or dodgy wiring attended to. Nobody was getting to grips with arpeggios on a keyboard, baking bread, or even lopping those expansive redwoods. The cars uniformly gleamed, as cars always have to in films, but nobody seemed to be washing them. If there was a community with, say, a choir, or a reading project with local kids, or shared vegetable plots or meals on wheels deliveries, there was no evidence of it. The father allegedly wrote. The mother painted things on canvas. The son took drugs. Are we surprised?
So we come to ‘The Social Dilemma’, which after telling us the same thing for ninety minutes (‘They want you to stay online! They’ve figured out how to do it! That’s how they make their money!’ Really? Well, blow me down…) follows recent convention in using the credits to revisit the various interviewees for an informal moment; in this case, asking them for their suggested solution.
And, with the slightly ironic exception of the fabulous Jaron Lanier, every single one of these highly educated, scarily motormouthed and clearly very concerned people, all of whom have evidently thought of little else ever since switching sides — every single one of them could think of no answer beyond, ‘Do less social media’. In various forms: ‘Turn off notifications’, ‘Don’t let your children have smartphones’, ‘Delete your accounts’ — but all with the same message of doing less — even less — than you do already.
I waited and waited for somebody to say: ‘Build something! Plant something! Teach, or learn something. Grow something, or demolish something. Bake, boil, or broil something, Start a movement, or join one somebody else has started. Better yet, find out what’s right under your nose that needs your attention. Read with schoolkids. Spend a day digging stones and stumps out of an abandoned building plot. Take a hot meal to an isolated older person — you never know, their eighty-five years may have taught them something you could learn from.’
But nobody did. It would appear that the critics of the FAANGS live in the same bubbles of anomie and detachment as the people they claim to abhor. They have more in common with each other than with anybody you or I might know. Beyond studying others of their tech-obsessed tribe and expressing outrage at what they find, it appears that they don’t know much about life, either.
That Jaron Lanier should be the exception is ironic because he’s spent much of his career encouraging us all to escape from our reality into a virtual one, not plunge into it. But it was he who said, waving his arms and hair and, who knows, quite possibly several pairs of virtual lobster claws the rest of us couldn’t see — he said, ‘Get out there! It’s a wonderful world!’
It is a wonderful world, but it sure could use some help. And trust me, once you begin, you will have neither time, energy nor desire for addiction.
