The Great Hack on RogerEbert.com
This is a new documentary on Netflix. I watched it this afternoon. I know, I should have been watching the Mueller hearing, but I watched the morning and the Republican questioners were triggering my rage, so I changed the channel.
Let me be frank, a lot of this film is stuff you already know because as a DKos member you’ve been engaged with this issue — the use of data to manipulate elections. But you haven’t seen it put together this way. You haven’t seen it in this detail.
This documentary will chill you to your bones. The ability to run a democratic (little d) election is being challenged by big data. Facebook made it possible. But you could shut down Facebook today and we would still be in jeopardy. The genie is out of the bottle.
Big Data owns our souls, even if you never took any of Facebook’s quizzes.
The documentary follows the quest of one man to find out exactly what information Cambridge Analytica had on him. It touches on Brexit and a disastrous election in Indonesia. There’s a lot about the election of Donald Trump. David Carroll never got his data. But the conclusions of his investigation are nothing short of horrifying. I knew most of the revelations before I saw the film, but this puts it together in a way that touches every aspect of modern life. It raises the possibility that it may not be possible to run an honest democratic election in the modern, digitally connected world.