The Great Hack (2019)

With so much currently being said about the abilities of AI to run amok, it's quite useful to turn the clock back to this documentary and appreciate that many of the issues being discussed now could have been foretold a decade ago. The focus of this rather lengthy and erratically paced film is a company called Cambridge Analytica - a business built from nothing that specialised in tracking and profiling unsuspecting internet users and then selling on that data to anyone interested in exploiting it - from corporate America to political America. Along the way, this makes a decent attempt to unpick the procedures rife amidst a compete lack of adequate regulation (or any desire to craft any) and I wondered if anyone were to ask Sir Tim Berners-Lee nowadays what he made of the way his creation designed to share knowledge across the academic community had been hijacked by propagandists and profiteers the world over, might he just have cut off his own hands? This is actually quite an informative piece of film-making that doesn't imerse us in acronyms and tech-speak. Instead, it uses more readily quantifiable examples to illustrate just how our data - well their data, really - is crafted, collected and used - almost always without our appreciation of it's accuracy, value or ability to view and/or permanently delete from servers protected as much by legislation as by firewalls. Much of it's credibility comes from poacher turned gamekeeper Brittany Kaiser who held a series of senior posts across this power-hungry industry but who jumped ship when allegations of illegal activities and electioneering emerged, behaving in her own latter day Damascene fashion and exposing some of the excesses of these hitherto unfettered enterprises. It's not so much that these companies actually fiddled anything directly, it is more that they knew how to manipulate the subjects - us. Whether it was the US election that first sent Donald Trump to the White House, or Brexit, or an election in Trinidad - each event is presented here as an opportunity to demonstrate just how inter-connected these entities were/are and at how shewdly this information is used to steer people as if they were sheep being unknowingly coralled into or out of a pen. What is also quite concerning is that much of this "farming" is carried out amidst a sea of apathy and convenience from a population that simply can't be bothered worrying about anything - even when it is informed. The film is far too long, though, and I think also prone to a little rambling that rather detracts from it's potency. Shave half an hour from it, and also possibly subject the plausible (on her own terms) Kaiser to more independent scrutiny and we could have a feature every politician currently acquiescing to the lucrative demands of unelected and exploitative entrepreneurs in the US, China, India and beyond could watch and then perhaps each of us could be given a "kill switch" of our own to disable systems that we ought to be auto opted-out of rather than auto opted-in. Our political masters are far too closely embroiled and incompetent to take any sort of objective stance on reining in these mighty corporations - especially when they employ a great many people and cite national defence as a benefit of their operations; and here we are clearly shown that it's ultimately going to be up to us to withdraw our participation if we want enduring change.