Review of The Great Hack
(Transcribed from video)
Hello folks. August 12th. It’s too late in the day for coffee. So this is going to be pretty random and off the cuff. I was up at 3:00 AM again, unable to sleep again, two nights ago, three nights ago. So I watched a documentary, as you do. Some people drink or watch cartoons or I dunno, more play games on their iPad. I watch documentaries and Ted talks. And I finished watching this one documentary that just got released on Netflix about three weeks ago. The Great Hack. It’s very well worth watching.
It’s not easy viewing. It’s not light entertainment. It’s all about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, in the Brexit referendum and 2016 the Trump thing, and your data privacy. (Who Owns it? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not you.) Very sobering documentary. I encourage you to watch it. I don’t really have any comments on it other than to realize that I sorta generally prided myself as being fairly up to date on what’s going on Internet wise, privacy and security wise. And I realized after watching that . . . . No, I’m not. I haven’t been paying attention. Not nearly enough attention.
So if you think that might describe you, I recommend you go watch that film. It features a Professor David Carroll, in New York I think, who after 2016, decided he wanted to find out what data Facebook had on him particularly as regards the election. And he wanted to have it, please! And the long and the short of it, by the end of the film, he still didn’t have it. This was only released three weeks ago.
And I gotta throw that in with TED talk I watched in the middle of the night, which was Yuval Noah Harari. He is an Israeli historian, super clever chap, full of witty one liners and modern proverbs. One that I just found a searching on screen a few minutes ago was:
Questions that are hard to answer are much better for you than answers you’re not allowed to question.
This TED talk was on the rise of of fascism and how this is making dictatorships now much more likely in the world (and I think he implied the Western world). And the line he ended up with, as he was being questioned by Chris Anderson. . . . Chris was saying, Well, you know, now that you have enlightened us, surely we’ll be wise enough to be alert to that kind of thing. Yuval replied with:
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
And put that together with two other quotes that I read recently:
History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.
Otto von Bismarck, well over a century ago, 150 years ago. And he made his fair share of history. So if he thought that? Hmm. Worth considering. The last quote I’ll throw your way is a paraphrase of something that Bertolt Brecht the German playwright said, which was:
Parliament has lost confidence in its people. It wants to dissolve the people and elect another one.
Ouch. That might be shockingly close to the mark, particularly in the UK. But I don’t think the UK is alone in this regard, at all. I think the same Brexit thing that is happening in the UK is happening all over the Western world and possibly the eastern world as well.
Check those quotes out. Look up The Great Hack. Watch that. It’s an hour and a half long, not light viewing. And Yuval Noah Harari, his TED talk on fascism.
