The Great Hack: A fascinating but flawed documentary from Netflix

The problem with Netflix’s new must-see documentary, The Great Hack, is that its very concept will encourage half of its potential audience to grind out a few fillings before they’ve even sat down to watch it.

The film is billed as the long-awaited expose of Cambridge Analytica, a name now synonymous with politicised psychological warfare based around their control (and our loss) of private data. It’s a film that urges us to take control of our lives and to establish a proper model of democracy in a digital age. It’s just a shame that half of its audience won’t hear that and will instead think it’s about overturning the result of Trump’s election or the Brexit referendum.

The film sets out by following David Carroll, a New York media design professor, who wanted to know how much of his own data was being held by Cambridge Analytica. As the story unfolds, we are introduced to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist for The Guardian,who has done much to expose the story but who has also become the subject of criticism and attacks from the incendiary sections of the Right. Carroll and Cadwalladr both have interesting stories to tell but they soon become tangential to the story as the real subject emerges in the form of Brittany Kaiser, a former executive at Cambridge Analytica, who we trail as she comes to terms with her work and the impact it has had on the world.

From Carroll, Cadwalladr to Kaiser, the film takes its time to find a way into this difficult story. And, in fairness, it generally does a good job. It cleverly uses computer graphics to explain how discrete points of data become powerful when consumed in their billions. It covers the collapse of Cambridge Analytica well, including some compelling testimony from Julian Wheatland, its former COO/CFO. It exposes the hypocrisy of Facebook, as well as the inadequacy of their response. As a general primer, it fulfils its purpose. It just doesn’t get into the hard stuff. It is a deficiency pinpointed by Kaiser herself, in testimony before the UK Parliament’s Fake News Inquiry, when she admits “I am not a data scientist, and I never handled Cambridge Analytica’s data models or any significant datasets myself”. And that’s where the documentary begins to feel like it’s lacking.

It instead fixates on Kaiser’s personal life or absence thereof. She’s nomadic, fresh from her time on the dark side of the political moon. She is first seen scrawling the name of her former employer on a structure before it is lit as part of the Burning Man festival. Condemning her old life to a ritualistic death, she is then seen in the moments of rebirth. She’s floating in a pool “somewhere in Thailand”, regretting her part in the story. Then she’s jetting to London. Then to New York. Then to Washington to testify before Robert Mueller’s investigators. At every stage, we’re drawn to this sympathetic but, in some ways, unusual character, and her dislocation inside her own life means there’s always an interesting story to tell.

It’s always unfair to criticise a creative work for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. The Great Hack is a personal voyage rather than a story about the hacking of democracy. Yet that does mean that it’s a little disappointing. Dominic Cummings himself has warned that with “data-technology-elections […] there is vast scope for non-charlatans to exploit technology and potentially do things far more effective [Sic], and potentially dangerous for democracy.” Yet, repeatedly, the documentary focusses on the personal. Kaiser talks about her friendship with Alexander Nix, the face of Cambridge Analytica and the now notorious subject of a Channel 4 News undercover report in which he is seen boasting about the dirty tricks his company played in various elections. Kaiser also talks about her role in human rights, the data-driven Obama campaign, and how the loss of the family home meant that she had to become the family’s breadwinner, even if that meant crossing her own moral boundaries. “She did it all for the money” really is the non-verbalised motivation here.

Yet none of that, again, explains what happened or whether it will happen again. Instead, we have half articulated suggestions that Cambridge Analytica was behind the Brexit vote. Kaiser spoke at the launch of Leave.EU, the unofficial Leave campaign, though their work was said to have ended there. Then we have the victory of Donald Trump, where the filmmakers do a better job of explaining how an election can be influenced if a campaign can motivate the “persuadables” in each district. What they don’t do, however, is back their suspicion with numbers. Nor do they allow that Trump’s victory wasn’t entirely about the data but about a cold, unresponsive candidate in Hillary Clinton, and the naïve intervention of FBI Director James Comey, just days before the vote. It was also, more directly, about a Constitution that persists in using an electoral college.

At times it does feel like the film tries to shy away from the politics. When Carole Cadwalladr says: “This is not a partisan issue […] This is about the integrity of our democracy” she makes a strong point but, unfortunately, it comes in response to an accusation of bias by Gerard Batten of UKIP. Some may watch the documentary and think its real purpose is to restate the argument that one or the other (or perhaps both) victories were unfairly won. Yet that, really, is to miss the point.

That point is best made by Christopher Wylie, the data consultant who achieved fame as the green (sometimes pink) haired whistleblower appearing in numerous Guardian stories. Wylie’s involvement is surprisingly limited given the quality of his testimony, but that’s perhaps understandable given subsequent questions about his level of involvement with CA. Yet here he plays two important roles. The first is to suggest that MPs speak to Kaiser. The second is to articulate perhaps the most important point the film makes: “If you cheat on an exam, you get a fail. If you cheat on the Olympics, you lose your medal. You should not win by cheating.”

And that is at the heart of The Great Hack but also why it will be so divisive and why your teeth might now be clenched. How democratic is democracy if it can be farmed? If people sit before screens all day, subjected to psychologically crafted political messaging of either colour, is it any different to brainwashing, except that subjects choose it willingly because the messaging is interspersed with baby pictures and comments from friends? It takes us deep into Clockwork Orange territory where we question the place of free will in the modern world or what Anthony Burgess called “the grinding opposition of moral entities”. Brittany Kaiser herself provides perspective when she insists that “In the end, [voters are] the ones that go to the ballot box and make their decision.” Yet it would have been interesting to know if, by the end of her journey, she still believed that.