Advent and the Social Dilemma
Advent is God’s time out, his season set aside for us to have ears to hear and eyes to see; to recognize that Jesus Christ is coming—always coming—in every moment, in every encounter, if we are attentive. It’s time to prepare for the celebration of his “God-in-the-flesh” birth among us and to simultaneously become wide awake to his coming again. Advent is patience in a world of impatience.
Advent is also that season in which God has called us to slow down and wait on Jesus Christ with eager expectation and to not miss him.
But the algorithms that drive our cell phones and other instruments of social media have no capacity for slowing down. They have no moral compass, no heart or soul, and no patience. Quite the opposite. They have the increasing ability to measure every click we make, profiling us with ever increasing accuracy to drive us further and further into the engagement of an on-line world that is all consuming, de-humanizing, and rapidly destroying the social fabric of our culture.
This is the message of the Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma. Based on interviews with early team leaders, designers, and engineers at Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and more, it makes the point that the very technology intended for human good has actually brought out the worst in human nature. About an hour into the documentary, Tristan Harris, a former designer at Google and now the “conscience of Silicon Valley,” observes:
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