Literature and Media Series Entry #7


    So far are we now from Rear Window’s analogue, crime-fighting surveillance that the word is devoid of positivity in the 2020 Netflix drama-documentary The Social Dilemma. Anxiety has reached a boiling point, and, apart from the film’s hackneyed allegory of manipulative mini-men living in your phone, everything described is non-fiction. Surveillance has become capitalism, carried out by tracking cookies, followed with recommendations and capitalised on by advertisements, all designed to keep users (a customer moniker shared only with the drugs industry) on social media newsfeeds for as long as possible. The algorithms that sell and decide what people see have almost no human assistance – and, as the documentary points out, cannot tell the difference between real and fake news (unlike Kojima’s vision). Even the de-stabilisation of countries is available to purchase for a few million. “Bots” are no longer metal skeletons hunting you, they are controlling the flow of political conversation on forums. And few people can even tell.





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