I haven’t paid the slightest attention to Jeff Orlowski‘s The Social Dilemma since it premiered on Netlix about two months ago. I didn’t even watch the trailer until this morning.

I was inspired to do so, however, by last night’s appearance of Tristan Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher. A prominent talking head in Orlowski’s doc, Harris is a former “design ethicist” at Google and currently president of the Center for Humane Technology. And his message is basically that we’re all being fucked and fiddled with by social media technology.

“The compelling feature about The Social Dilemma is helplessness, like a man on a beach watching the wave of a tsunami approach and realizes immediately that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to go, and nothing to do, as his fate is already sealed, that in point of fact he is actually lucky as he has been given the time — a moment really, simply by looking up — to consider his approaching demise.

“So it is that The Social Dilemma paints a clear picture of capitalism taken to its nth degree…of a soulless artificial intelligence, a Frankenstein automaton designed to simply give us what we want, [and] that puts us on the road to an impersonal doom. But it doesn’t matter anymore what we want as the wave of the tsunami is already breaking.” — Rotten Tomatoes super-reviewer “Kevin M.W.”