trends
ARTS & MEDIA
THE GREAT HACK
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David Carroll, a professor at Parsons School of Design, struggles for justice in The Great Hack.
Jehane Noujaim chronicle what they view as Cambridge Analytica’s theft of personal data. The directors tell that part of the story by following the effort of David Carroll, an American professor, to use British law to gain access to the personal data he felt was stolen. They also show Carroll trying to convince his Parsons School of Design students who were born in the internet era that something’s amiss with the abuse of data. Simultaneously, Amer and Noujaim explore the political side of the saga through the eyes of Brittany Kaiser, a young Chicago native who got a taste of the power of the technology while working for the internetsavvy Barack Obama campaign. Kaiser then changed sides and rose to prominence as a political manipulator working for Republican clients at Cambridge Analytica. Now, she’s flipped again to become an advocate for owning one’s own data. Inviting the movie’s interviewees to watch videos of hearings and speeches, the directors show their subjects’ reactions to what they purport are misleading statements or even outright lies by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.
Along the way, the THE GREAT HACK filmmakers keep the visuals 5 out of 5 interesting by interviewing How your data became a commodity that their subjects upended democracy in the places they inhabit or visit. Backdrops range from the driver’s seat of a car crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a daily commute to a swim in an infinity pool “somewhere in Thailand” to the plush back seat of a limo negotiating the streets of London. The story also unfolds in classrooms, conference rooms, hearing rooms, apartments, boats, hotels and the stage of a TED Talk. Occasional montages of sound and visuals juxtapose events in ways that demonstrate the connections among farflung events and pronouncements. Through it all, The Great Hack does an admirable job of unraveling the tangle of one of the most important issues of the 21st century. Anyone who believes that democracy requires an informed citizenry shouldn’t miss this film. —Ed McKinley
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Technology’s shocking invasion of privacy gained momentum in the early 1970s when supermarkets began installing closed circuit television cameras to monitor the aisles for shoplifting. Not many customers complained, and management seemed indifferent to the philosophical implications. So from there, tech’s invasive powers continued to grow. By the mid-1980s, supermarket chains were compiling vast stores of information on customers through surveys and cash register receipts. C-level execs and their IT experts felt confident that someday they’d figure out what to do with the data they were amassing. By 2016, data scientists and political operatives knew exactly how to use their everexpanding mountains of intelligence. In one tragic example, the now-shuttered Britishbased company Cambridge Analytica—partly owned by American Republican donor Robert Mercer—had captured 5,000 data points on every American and was more than willing to sell the information. After boosting the Ted Cruz candidacy from obscurity to near-success, Cambridge Analytica succeeded in landing the buyer it really wanted—Donald Trump’s campaign. First, the company and the candidate’s staff teamed up to identify Americans they called “persuadables,” the undecided voters most susceptible to baseless conspiracy theories and false, demeaning sloganeering. Then, they targeted that audience with millions of scurrilous internet ads. By creating and placing those messages, Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign imperiled democracy today and in the future through manipulation, deception and polarization, according to most but not all of more than a dozen interviewees in The Great Hack, a new Netflix original documentary. In Hack, directors Karim Amer and
luckbox | september /october 2019
1909-trends-artsmedia.indd 38
8/29/19 1:01 PM
