The Social Dilemma

The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski and released on Netflix in September 2020, brought the attention economy's critique to a mass audience through a combination of expert interviews and dramatized scenarios. Harris served as one of the documentary's primary voices, explaining how social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement through persuasive design patterns—variable rewards, infinite scroll, algorithmically curated feeds—that exploit well-documented features of human psychology. The film's central thesis, articulated by Harris and other former Silicon Valley insiders including Aza Raskin, Jaron Lanier, and former Facebook executive Tim Kendall, was that social media platforms are not primarily in the business of connecting people but in the business of selling user attention to advertisers—and that the optimization for attention produces systematic harms to mental health, democracy, and social cohesion. The documentary's reach—over 100 million views in its first month—made it the most successful piece of technology criticism in popular culture, generating sustained public conversation about platform design, business models, and the need for