How thirst for likes brought down democracy
“It’s a socialvalidation feedback loop ... you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
That was Facebook cofounder Sean Parker two years ago, taking stock of the seismic impact of the social media giant he helped nursemaid into this world. That quote rose slowly to the forefront of my thinking as I took in the new Netflix documentary “The Great Hack,” about the infamous Facebook data breach of 2015, and realized just how much Parker’s clinical diagnosis of social media’s insidious appeal has been borne out.
While our current age of interconnectivity should, in theory, make it easier than ever to sort truth from supposition and arrive at a kind of Platonic ideal, the film crystallizes how it has instead made it easier to reject an empirical reality and substitute one populated by ideological fellow
travelers ready to serve as an amen corner to our every proclamation.
It sure feels as though objective, provable facts have become an optional addon in our daily discourse, and if that’s the case, we may already be too far gone. The entrenched, desperate need for engagements and interactions and “likes” in every facet of our lives may well have brought on the end of free and fair elections, and liberal democracy right along with it. Alarmism? Perhaps, but I defy you to watch “The Great Hack” and not feel an encroaching dread in the pit of your stomach.
Indeed, that sentiment may not be alarmist enough to encompass the size and scope of what’s actually happening as we dive headlong down the rabbit hole. Filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim guide us through the meteoric rise and fall of datamining firm Cambridge Analytica, whose benign name obscured the truly dodgy tactics they employed, using people’s own internet activity to shift levers of political power all over the planet.
“Data is the most valuable asset on Earth,” says Brittany Kaiser, one of the film’s primary subjects, and the cynical centrality of that quote is repeatedly underscored. Kaiser was at one time the business development director of the United Kingdom firm before, she says, a bout of conscience prompted a selfcorrection and telling all against her former employer to anyone who will listen (including Robert Mueller in his recently concluded investigation into Russian electoral interference).
Her journey plays in parallel with that of David Carroll, an American professor who sued Analytica to retrieve the data he claimed was stolen while they illegally scraped information from 87 million Facebook users. With operational funding coming mainly from notable fringe figures as Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica had the specific intent of skewing voter behavior in service of a rightwing agenda and putting rightwing politicians in office.
While the company has since gone under, it’s sobering how much it succeeded at its goals — and how much wreckage was left in its wake. Analytica played a key role in both Brexit and the American presidential election in 2016, and while those are the twin brackets upon which the film’s narrative hangs, that’s only part of what’s at play. It’s a bit like global warming in that while you know it’s a problem, your brain is almost unable to process the scale of the problem.
The online and social media habits of virtually the entire planet are being passed around like trading cards by companies with vested interests in changing our thinking, changing our habits and changing our votes. Every new engagement constitutes a new data point. With the digital data genie out of the bottle, it’s terrifying to reckon with the uncomfortable reality that many of our critical thinking faculties have been subsumed by the great data vortex.
Even still, while we do get a sense of the enormity of what is happening, the film hogties itself a bit by framing around the parallel stories of two of the most prominent figures in this drama. This story is bigger than these individuals. And while I understand the desire to put human faces on the issue, that decision has the followon effect of scaling down what’s actually at stake. But at its best, “The Great Hack” will alarm you, infuriate you, and — hopefully — activate you.