Martin Heidegger and the Social Dilemma

Heidegger’s Essay in the 1950s on technology predicted social media, fake news, and the internet.

Jeff Orlowski’s recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma illuminates the profound influence that social media and technology has on our lives. The picture the film paints for us is one in which the technology we use every day collects a massive amount of data from us, and in doing so, competes for our attention by pulling at the strings of primordial human psychology. As a result, our privacy has been breached, the “truth” is uncertain, and misinformation runs rampant.

By collecting immense amounts of data from all of its users, Google essentially knows what you would like to hear from the search results. For instance, if you or those around you in your geographic area put in the search bar, “climate change is…”, what will show up next is heavily contingent upon your location. If you are in a location that is quite liberal, say, the first thing to come up might be “climate change is an existential threat.” By contrast, if you are in a location that is quite conservative, the first thing to come up might be, “climate change is a myth.”

In any case, the way modern technology is set up is with the intention of collecting as much data as possible. The pursuit of data collection ad infinitum has produced problems like wide-spread misinformation, fake news, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Due to the sheer level of information that technology collects and generates, reality has become blurred as a result.

It is doubtful that upon the creation of the internet that blurring the truth was the intention. Rather, the intention was the proliferation of truth. Indeed, one of the internet’s first purposes was to create a platform for scientists to communicate with one another.

How could things have gone so wrong? How could the pursuit of truth have so readily transformed into a tornado of untruth? How could anyone have known this was going to happen? Surely, it was impossible to predict this. Prior to the internet, technology was simply too different. In what way was the windmill anything like the internet? Undoubtedly, they were nothing alike, right?