Pic­ture, if you will, a high-tech voodoo doll of you on a serv­er some­where. Prob­a­bly more than one server.

While the mak­ers of that reverse-engi­neered avatar might not be stick­ing lit­er­al pins into it, in “The Social Dilem­ma,” film­mak­er Jeff Orlows­ki makes a fine case that in min­ing data from your onscreen inter­ac­tions, they are con­struct­ing a pre­dic­tive ver­sion of you and try­ing to prick your inter­ests and put a spell on your atten­tion in his­tor­i­cal­ly unprece­dent­ed ways. (“The Social Dilem­ma” began stream­ing on Net­flix this week.)

The quotes Orlows­ki begins his wake-up call of a doc­u­men­tary with — and pep­pers through­out — aren’t easy to top. There’s Sopho­cles’ “Noth­ing vast enters the world of mor­tals with­out a curse.” And this from sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke: “Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” And this wry quip from data-visu­al­iza­tion guru Edward Tufte: “There are only two indus­tries that call their cus­tomers ‘users’: ille­gal drugs and software.”

Yet, here’s one to add: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” It may not be as ele­gant as the oth­ers, but it rep­re­sents the tone tak­en by the tech lead­ers inter­viewed by the Boul­der-based direc­tor who inves­ti­gat­ed the extra­or­di­nary prob­lems wrought by big-tech behe­moths, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ones that have entan­gled so many in the vast web of social media: Twit­ter, Face­book and Google.

Among the documentary’s smart and per­son­able talk­ing heads: Justin Rosen­stein, co-inven­tor of Facebook’s “like” but­ton; Tim Kendall, for­mer pres­i­dent of Pin­ter­est and for­mer Face­book direc­tor of mon­e­ti­za­tion; and Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Sur­veil­lance Cap­i­tal­ism.” (That book’s sub­ti­tle: “A Fight for a Human Future at the New Fron­tier of Power.”)

Tris­tan Har­ris, a for­mer design ethi­cist at Google, became notable for writ­ing an ear­ly inter­nal and leg­endary doc­u­ment ques­tion­ing the addic­tive ten­den­cies of smart­phone tech. Think Jer­ry Maguire’s man­i­festo after his dark night of the soul. Har­ris caused a buzz and then, well, crick­ets. He went on to co-found the Cen­ter for Humane Tech­nol­o­gy, a non-prof­it pro­mot­ing the ethics of con­sumer tech.

RELATED: Watch this very real Net­flix doc about a man who weld­ed him­self inside a “kill­doz­er” and destroyed half of Granby

These days, Sil­i­con Val­ley is referred to in much the way we talk about Hol­ly­wood or Wash­ing­ton: It is a glob­al eco­nom­ic force, a wield­er of spec­tac­u­lar pow­er, some­how exem­plary, too, of some more hon­or­able ideals. Orlows­ki went to one of its feed­er schools.

“I was class of ’06 at Stan­ford. When we all grad­u­at­ed, that was (around) the birth of the iPhone and the birth of apps. So many of my clos­est friends went direct­ly to Face­book, Google or Twit­ter. Mul­ti­ple friends sold their com­pa­nies to Twit­ter for exor­bi­tant amounts of mon­ey,” Orlows­ki said on the phone before his film’s world pre­miere at January’s Sun­dance Film Festival.

The project came out of con­ver­sa­tions with those friends “who were start­ing to talk about the prob­lems with the big social media com­pa­nies back in 2017, at the birth of the tech back­lash that we’ve been see­ing. Hon­est­ly, I’d heard noth­ing about it, knew noth­ing about it.”

So many of his cre­ative, thought­ful friends were work­ing in new tech that Orlows­ki won­dered, “How’s it a prob­lem?” A fan of long-form jour­nal­ism, he set out to answer that ques­tion and a few oth­ers. “For me, this process was two years of being an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist. (Of doing) first-hand research with the peo­ple who make the tech­nol­o­gy and try­ing to under­stand what the hell is going on.”

He is not alone in try­ing to wrap his brain — and ours — around that. Orlows­ki was among a clus­ter of sto­ry­tellers at January’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, pos­ing time­ly ques­tions about soci­etal costs of seem­ing­ly free plat­forms — quan­daries that have been reflect­ed in a del­uge of head­lines about big tech’s role in our lives, in civ­il dis­course, in democ­ra­cy. (The film’s final cut includes a few recent images of news footage hint­ing at the rough tan­go between our lives and the Twit­ter­sphere around COVID-19.)

Two oth­er high-pro­file projects that should prompt a rethink were Shali­ni Kantayya’s “Cod­ed Bias,” about the MIT Media Lab, where research uncov­ered just how racial­ly biased facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware is. It’s a sear­ing yet inspir­ing look at what hap­pens when the peo­ple mak­ing tech’s design choic­es, and build­ing its algo­rithms, cre­ate for peo­ple who look exact­ly like them. Co-direc­tors and Karim Amer and Guvenc Ozel’s vivid vir­tu­al-real­i­ty liv­ing-room instal­la­tion, “Per­sua­sion Machines,” depicts with its jaw-drop­ping envi­ron­ment the data-min­ing excess­es of a “smart home.”

There have always been con­cerns about the amount of pri­vate infor­ma­tion that cus­tomers seem so will­ing to cede with lit­tle regard for secu­ri­ty. But social media is prov­ing itself a vora­cious beast. It’s less about iden­ti­ty theft than the poten­tial for manip­u­la­tion on a mass scale. Advances in AI and machine learn­ing have added a spe­cial — arguably dystopi­an-court­ing — wrinkle.

It’s lit­tle sur­prise, then, that Orlows­ki is ask­ing urgent ques­tions. He’s forged a place in the doc­u­men­tary van­guard. He first made a splash when he trailed envi­ron­men­tal pho­tog­ra­ph­er James Balog around Green­land, Ice­land and Alas­ka. With stun­ning images, Balog doc­u­ment­ed the calv­ing of ice shelves, the reced­ing of glac­i­ers, and Orlows­ki doc­u­ment­ed him.

The resul­tant work, “Chas­ing Ice” (2012), was gor­geous and chill­ing — in all the wrong ways. It was a dif­fer­ent kind of cli­mate change doc, not a screed but a nature film that made a com­pelling case that there are seis­mic — like­ly irre­versible — changes afoot. It won an Emmy. (Trav­el­ing through Den­ver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port, you may have stopped to Balog’s mes­mer­iz­ing time-lapse video for his Extreme Ice Sur­vey work.)

Orlowski’s 2017 fol­low-up, “Chas­ing Coral,” won an Emmy for Best Nature Documentary.

“This is the begin­ning of a decade of films about tech­nol­o­gy and the con­se­quences of tech­nol­o­gy,” Orlows­ki said of the com­pa­ny. “There’s so much at risk and so much at scale, the way tech­nol­o­gy is designed.”

In both “Chas­ing Ice” and “Chas­ing Coral,” he worked to make con­cepts stark­ly or strik­ing­ly visu­al. He faced a sim­i­lar chal­lenge with “The Social Dilem­ma. “We were try­ing to think of ways to show peo­ple what’s hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of their screens that’s invis­i­ble,” he said. “How do you show peo­ple some­thing that is lit­er­al­ly impos­si­ble to see? You can’t see what’s hap­pen­ing on the servers, right? You can’t even see the servers. But how are the algo­rithms designed and what are they doing that con­trol 3 bil­lion people?”

The num­ber is not far off: Accord­ing to Ger­man data-sta­tis­tics track­ing com­pa­ny Sta­tista, there are cur­rent­ly 3.5 bil­lion smart­phone users.

For “The Social Dilem­ma,” Orlows­ki weaves a nar­ra­tive tale about a mul­tira­cial fam­i­ly wrestling with the role of tech in their home. Think of it as a drama­ti­za­tion of con­cerns. The strat­e­gy evolved out of his own response to the news he was hear­ing from his Sil­i­con Val­ley friends and their wor­ries around the industry’s overreach.

“Because of the way they were describ­ing it, every time I looked at my phone, I kept see­ing a manip­u­la­tive machine on the oth­er side try­ing to pup­peteer me. For the year I was on Face­book, I thought, ‘I’m being used.’ And it gave birth to this nar­ra­tive sto­ry­line we fig­ured out this way to inter­weave with the documentary.”

As a film­mak­er, it was a chance to direct actors. Vin­cent Kartheis­er of “Mad Men” plays the three-yam­mer­ing embod­i­ments of AI, dial­ing up the needs, nudg­ing impuls­es and com­mand­ing the atten­tion of Ben. Skyler Gison­do por­trays the increas­ing­ly dis­tract­ed high school­er. Help­ing cre­ate this intri­cate dance between the inter­views and nar­ra­tive was Oscar-win­ning edi­tor Davis Coombe, a local film­mak­ing lumi­nary. (He also co-wrote the doc with Orlows­ki and Vick­ie Curtis.)

“I real­ly loved doing all that,” said Orlows­ki. “The writ­ing, the shoot­ing, the direct­ing. All of the nar­ra­tive stuff was real­ly fun and brought, I hope, a dif­fer­ent dimension.”

Ben and his fam­i­ly are intend­ed to rep­re­sent the ways many of us inter­act with the tech­nol­o­gy, not as design­ers but as Insta­gram­mers and Tweet­ers, friends and over-shar­ers, Tik­Tok-ing kids and their aggra­vat­ed parents.

Of course, recant­i­ng can be a tricky thing. We admire peo­ple who see the flaws — even cor­rup­tion — in a sys­tem and alert us to the dan­gers. But we can also be sus­pi­cious of their dec­la­ra­tions. Indeed, there is an under­cur­rent of qui­et hubris inter­mixed with the insid­er cau­tions of a num­ber of Orlowski’s experts.

An inten­tion­al­ly wit­ty moment comes ear­ly in the movie when, after a few of them have reflect­ed on the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of tech, and the sense that it was meant to help not harm. Although each had been a chat­ter­box of insights and per­spec­tives, every one of them grows silent, look­ing for all the world stumped by the sim­ple ques­tion that Orlows­ki asks: “So what’s the prob­lem?” More than once, an inter­vie­wee reminds us that one of the tools to address the hyper-speed amass­ing of pow­er and prof­it is rather old-school: regulation.

Even more illu­mi­nat­ing than con­fess­ing their own addic­tions to email, or push noti­fi­ca­tions, or Twit­ter are the moments when these engi­neers, soft­ware design­ers, mar­ket­ing whizzes share their own prac­tices for them­selves — or their family’s rules for their chil­dren — about social media.

“I’ve unin­stalled a ton of apps from my phone that I felt were just wast­ing of my time … and I’ve turned off noti­fi­ca­tions,” said Rosenstein.#newsletter_ad {float: right;width: 40%;padding: 0.5em;border-left: 2px sol­id #EDB207;margin-bottom: .2em;margin-left: .5em;}@media (max-width:416px){#newsletter_ad {width:100%;}

“Nev­er accept a video rec­om­mend­ed to you on YouTube. Always choose. That’s anoth­er way to fight,” said Jaron Lanier, one of tech’s most inno­v­a­tive minds turned most tren­chant critics.

“We’re zealots about it. Crazy,” said Allen, asked about social media and his chil­dren. “We don’t let our kids have real­ly any screen time.”

And per­haps the most time­ly advice: “Before you share, fact check,” said Renée DiRes­ta, research man­ag­er at the Stan­ford Inter­net Obser­va­to­ry. “If it seems like some­thing designed to push your emo­tion­al but­tons, it prob­a­bly is.”

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