The Great Hack documentary, Netflix, reviewed, and why you need to watch it

The Great Hack documentary, Netflix, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Great Hack, Netflix documentary, released July 2019.

Data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. It’s being weaponized to wage cultural and political warfare. People everywhere are in a battle for control of our most intimate personal details. From award-winning filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, THE GREAT HACK uncovers the dark world of data exploitation with astounding access to the personal journeys of key players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal.

Academy Award nominees Amer and Noujaim (The Square, Control Room, Startup.com) continue their tradition of exploring the seismic ripples of social media with this riveting, complex film. THE GREAT HACK forces us to question the origin of the information we consume daily. What do we give up when we tap that phone or keyboard and share ourselves in the digital age?

THE GREAT HACK premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Amer and Noujaim, the film is produced by Karim Amer, Geralyn Dreyfous, Judy Korin and Pedro Kos.

The Great Hack documentary, Netflix, reviewed

This documentary felt both about things that happened a while ago, and then also extremely relevant with the recent antics in the British parliament last night as it was suspended / prorogued for potentially the next five weeks. Alaistair Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, very much wanted to have it both ways. Boasting about his impact on various elections and campaigns around the world, and then denying involvement in the Leave.Eu campaign. Even declaring he felt like a victim. Result investigations have also revealed that despite the apparent winding up of Cambridge Analytica, data is still being shared and washing around to all sorts of unlicensed third parties.

The documentary benefited from access to key members of the Cambridge Analytica team and early-stage investors to Facebook too. These interviewees were aware of their involvement in bringing us to the current dire situation that we are now in, but also want to try and now reign in the monster that has been unleashed. Without aiming to give away too many spoilers, and in a documentary like this, the goal is much more important to raise awareness about the serious problems we face.

Facebook have been shown, time and time again, to make one statement about what they are and have been doing with our data, and to then subsequently serve up the trite / contrite admission that ‘mistakes have been made and we are working to rectify them…’ This approach is now, if it ever was, no longer credible. Mark Zuckerberg, FaceBook CEO, has refused time and time again to testify in front of the UK parliament to discuss his companies potential breaches of UK election law and their usage of people’s personal data.

The serious challenge we face is that we, as humans, as not as indecipherable and impervious to being influenced as we would like to think we are. Once you harvest several thousand data points on individuals it has been clearly possible to then generate many, many online nudges to influence and guide our behaviour. Even as we believe we are acting under our own volition and our own decisions. The consequences of this have enabled a wave of populist politicians to have come to power, often exacerbating and fueling nationalist feelings and hate towards minorities.

The examples of the treatment of the Rohingya illustrate that this can lead to bloody ethnic cleansing too. As we watch the current Brexit horror show from the UK inbetween our fingers it is a clear reminder that the consequences of a data manipulated Brexit referendum in 2016 are still playing themselves out. In elections where the results are often less than 1% between the winner and the loser, a massive input of money to be spent to promote one side’s cause can be hugely influential.

Documentaries like this are vital to raise awareness, and remind us of how we got to this current state, and that laws have been broken along the way, and recent election results have not been merely ‘the will of the people’ in any shape or form. Watch it and make up your own mind.

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