You'll be tempted to unplug after viewing Netflix doc

The Great Hack zaps you with the jolt of a shocking realization. Our hyper-connected digital age has dangerously ensnared us all.

When Keanu Reeves got unplugged from the Matrix, it was just a science-fiction film. But when The Great Hack pulls you awake, it is a Netflix documentary exposing how our every click and swipe is being turned against us.

The film raises more questions than it can answer, but at least it unveils the basic reality we have all been plugged into without realizing it.

The documentary focuses on how the data that Cambridge Analytica got from Facebook was weaponized for political purposes. But that story is just one example of a much larger problem.

Solving that problem is not as simple as deleting your Facebook account. You would have to delete your Instagram account too, since Facebook owns Instagram.

You would have to unplug entirely from the digital world. But that’s not a realistic option for most people.

Instead, like Neo in The Matrix, you need to return to the digital world, and to fight back.

The first seven minutes of The Great Hack are terrific, as they allow media design professor David Carroll to articulate how digital data collection is everywhere.

The fight that Carroll fights focuses on our right to know what data has been collected about us.

Companies are not transparent with us about the surveillance they conduct on us. This is a violation of our basic rights and an assault on human dignity.

The business models of today’s most profitable companies rely on data collection. They gather as much data on you as possible, in order to turn it into money for their shareholders.

Call it “surveillance capitalism,” because through the digital surveillance of your every move, companies create huge profits.

No doubt you are already aware of one way they do this. Targeted advertising uses your data in order to influence your behaviour as a consumer.

But The Great Hack exposes the great danger opened up by these advertising methods. To do the most sophisticated sort of targeted advertising, a psychological profile of you is created from all of your online activity.

It’s a psychological profile that knows things about you of which you are not even consciously aware. It precisely maps your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

This knowledge allows you to be manipulated by others, in ways beyond mere shopping habits or purchasing decisions.

The Great Hack shows how sophisticated digital techniques have been used to target the most persuadable people in elections around the world.

Once the effectiveness of these techniques was demonstrated in smaller elections, they were then deployed to achieve the surprising votes that brought the world Brexit and Trump.

What then is being hacked by “the great hack”? Not just free and fair elections, but also the consciences of everybody who uses a digital device.

Perhaps you are skeptical about how your data-based psychological profile is a real danger. Perhaps you think political advertising on social media can only have a minimal influence on you.

But then you do not yet understand how it works. Realize what is at stake in the weaponization of your data: enormous wealth and power.

The weaponization involves not just overt attempts at persuasion, but also subtle subversions of behaviour. Influencing you not to do something is also a powerful form of manipulation.

Think about the times where you ended up spending more time on your digital device than you wanted. Or think about how you became emotionally affected, in a powerful way, by something on your digital device.

It doesn’t require much imagination to see how similar distractions could be deliberately created and used to personally target you.

The purpose of these distractions would be to prevent you from voting on voting day. Again, it is the people who are specifically targeted and manipulated to not vote that can also decide election outcomes.

It’s worth watching the entire documentary, if only to raise your awareness of this dystopian reality of surveillance and manipulation that we are now living in.

For a quick overview, you can also watch the TED Talk by the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy.”

It was her brave investigations that first exposed the scandal that The Great Hack focuses on in more detail.

Not only does Cadwalladr appear in the documentary, the film also closes with the powerful peroration from her TED Talk.

She poses the key question that should spur us to act: Is this really what we want?