A common narrative about social media goes like this: something something anxiety and deep insecurity; it’s hard to see an unending torrent of information expand on my tiny tiny screen; there are so many atrocities; I’m hooked; it’s like a drug. Another narrative, structural rather than personal, goes like this: something something dark billionaires and corporate money; harvesting our data; controlling our behaviour; election manipulation; fake news; Brexit; Donald Trump. Despite their differences, both narratives involve a kind of high fatalism, situating technology in either the merciless, uncontrollable morass of primordial human psychology or the dark machinations of capital. Attempts at coherence can lapse into concessions of defeat as we slip from being self-possessed critics of a conceptually identifiable entity to lackeys of omniscient gods. Consequently, it’s often hard to differentiate potentially powerful critiques of the industry from ostensibly critical stories that further entrench its hold. What might it mean, then, to acknowledge the omnipotence of technology without further reproducing the narratives that make it so powerful?
Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s The Great Hack (2019) takes on the latter narrative without adding much else to it. Released by Netflix, the documentary examines the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that broke in March 2018, which revealed that the now-defunct British political consultancy firm founded by Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer had illegally harvested data from 87 million Facebook users for its political advertising campaigns. Cambridge Analytica was subsequently tied to the Trump presidential campaign, pro-Brexit group Leave.EU, national elections in Trinidad & Tobago and, according to the company’s former website, one hundred or so other election campaigns around the world.1 In keeping with its Bond villain subject matter, The Great Hack is suffused with a pulpy, conspiratorial tone. There are clear heroes: British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the scandal for The Observer alongside reporter Emma Graham-Harrison and American professor David Carroll, who filed a high-profile lawsuit against the consultancy. There are also clear villains: former Cambridge Analytica CEO and Etonian Alexander Nix, a one-man advertisement for the abolishment of private schools, and Mark Zuckerberg, a one-man advertisement for the abolishment of billionaires. Then there are those in the grey area, whose unclear alliances keep you on the edge of your seat, such as Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica manager turned whistleblower whose present-day contrition cuts a different figure from the woman who coolly celebrated the victories of her far-right clientele.
The Great Hack opens at Nevada’s infamous Burning Man festival in September 2018, when the scandal is already public knowledge. Kaiser, wearing steampunk goggles and a beige leotard, scribbles the name of her former employer on an enormous wooden structure in the middle of the desert, which is then set on fire. (The documentary is many things – stylish and fast-paced – but it is not subtle.) Kaiser’s public catharsis is followed by an explanatory leap back in time, accompanied by some helpful animations. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica reached out to Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist working at the University of Cambridge. Kogan created a Facebook quiz, the innocuously titled ‘This is Your Digital Life’ that mirrored many of the online personality quizzes people in the early 2010s still found interesting enough to complete. The quiz exploited a loophole in the Facebook interface, allowing Cambridge Analytica not only to access the data of the quiz takers, but also that of their friends. It’s now estimated that up to 87 million people were affected. This data helped the firm to build psychographic profiles (like Myers-Briggs archetypes, but for marketers looking to target consumers). Using data gleaned from people’s ‘likes’, status updates and messages, data scientists then built O.C.E.A.N personality profiles, tracing their ‘Openness’, ‘Conscientiousness’, ‘Extraversion’, ‘Agreeableness’ and ‘Neuroticism’. The Great Hack suggests (though it stops short of showing how) that this information can be used to build extraordinarily powerful political advertising campaigns.
The action unfolds with a stomach-dropping sense of inevitability. The consequences of Cambridge Analytica’s campaigns – already painfully evident to the viewer – are delivered with an equally stomach-dropping sense of doom. It feels as though we are retroactively examining the anatomy of a complicated, successful heist. But as The Great Hack focuses on explaining the public narrative of Cambridge Analytica’s work, the documentary forgets to do something else: interrogate it. In a kind of wholesale unveiling of the puppeteer in the dark, Amer and Noujaim portray the firm as a hyper-competent shadowy operation that gets what it wants. A documentary that strives to take down Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and the data-industrial complex that mines our digital lives for corporate profit, The Great Hack ends up becoming a high-profile advertisement for all three. To uncritically depict something as all-powerful, after all, is to suggest that it is all-powerful. “I wish people would stop assuming these places can do everything,” an academic studying the tech world once said to me, “It only makes them more successful.” There are dangerous institutions, of course, but there are also incompetent ones. It’s important to learn what differentiates the two. It’s a little uncomfortable to see The Great Hack so straightforwardly reproduce the convenient self-mythologising of Cambridge Analytica’s former employees. It shows a clip of Kaiser telling MPs that the firm’s work is powerful enough to be considered “weapons-grade” propaganda. Is it always?
In one of the rare moments when the effectiveness of the firm is put to question – an MP asks CA whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, “Have you or anybody else made any assessment of actually whether any of this made much difference to the final outcome of the EU referendum?” Wylie is both evasive and resolute: “When you’re caught in the Olympics doping, there’s not a debate about how much illegal drug you took, or Well, he probably would have come in first anyway. If you’re caught cheating, you lose your medal.” Wylie has a point: unethical acts should be criticised, no matter their impact. But this sidesteps the very concern that brought him to parliament in the first place: the rising fear that data firms and shadowy online campaigns have become powerful enough to radically change our democracies. If we want to rein in the effects of big data campaigns, we need to know how they operate and what they can and cannot do. The failure to develop such understanding concedes defeat to any consultancy cynically wielding the buzzwords data collection, internet targeting, psychographics. It’s worth pointing out that both Kaiser and Wylie, having established themselves as hyper-competent data consultants, can parlay this reputation into new jobs (Wylie is now a research director at H&M).
For every The Great Hack-like narrative about data-driven campaigns leading to Brexit and tyranny, there are opposing stories. I think of Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow’s report on how an intelligence company’s attempt to influence local elections in a small Californian town spectacularly backfired (people were curious about why there was such an aggressive campaign against a candidate in a relatively small election, and as a result voted for her in droves),2 or the counter-criticisms that Cambridge Analytica, in the words of media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, “sold snake oil to gullible political campaigns around the world.”3 Ted Cruz, a former client, complained that the firm had done nothing for him. I also think of this political alignment chart produced by Facebook’s election team in 2016, which shows that Silicon Valley’s brightest and best cannot distinguish between liberals and the left, and believe there’s a deep affinity among American Kardashian-watching vegans for India’s far-right leader Narendra Modi.4
Perhaps this kind of targeting can be prescient and powerful. Then again, perhaps it is a product of the same garden-variety business psychology that tends to arise within any dysfunctional mega-corporation full of overconfident MBA graduates. The point is that the debate should be aired rather than foreclosed. What are we not talking about when we assume the divine omnipotence of firms like Cambridge Analytica? Treating online misinformation campaigns as fait accompli powerful ignores the question of what sort of society is so susceptible to them. In The Great Hack, Kaiser defends her work with Cambridge Analytica, saying the firm merely targeted apathetic non-voters with the goal of engaging them in politics, not feeding them misinformation. Her claim should be met with great scepticism. Yet it also raises concerns about the larger social conditions that have created a public so apathetic as to be so powerfully swayed – even radicalised – by online ads.
When thinking about the Internet, it is the ordinary human experiences that interest me the most. I like stories that repudiate the otherwise abstract, depersonalised glaze with which the Internet is so often furnished, ones that refuse to attribute power to the temple gods of technology by offering a glimpse of the people behind it. The rogue Twitter employee who (assuming it wouldn’t work, he has since said) deleted Donald Trump’s account before leaving his job; Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turks’, underpaid people around the world who perform the tedious digital tasks that drive the development of artificial intelligence, and who often do the work of artificial intelligence themselves; the masses of distressed, online moderators worldwide who flick through violent imagery to ensure that such images never make it onto users’ screens. It feels like a cliché to point out that the technology industry is, just like other industries, bolstered by human labour; undervalued, traumatic, invisible work. But it begs the question why so many narratives about it obscure this ordinariness. Even rampant demystifiers in the tradition of The Great Hack can end up further mystifying this world, failing to show how and why it is dangerous in service of a warning that it just, simply, is. The human, with all its attendant chaotic vulnerabilities, presents more of an opening for meaningful rebellion than any Bond-villain narrative ever could.
Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect examines the subtler side of technology, revealing the odd yet unexceptional forms of human life that can arise from it. Its quiet, understated style echoes that of Zhu’s previous feature, Another Year (2016), a three-hour slow film that shows migrant workers in Wuhan eating meals in real-time. Present. Perfect’s protagonists, largely unnamed Chinese live streamers, talk about their lives, frustrations, and the monotony of work to an unseen audience. As ‘anchors’ of their own streaming channels – similar to Instagram Live users – they broadcast their day-to-day lives over phones and laptops. In China, this can be particularly lucrative. Live streaming began to take off in the nation in 2016, the opening title cards to Present.Perfect tell us. It has since grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Streamers can receive rewards and gifts during their broadcasts; one coveted item is a virtual birthday cake that costs $2000 USD.5 Viewers can chat with streamers through a live forum and offer rewards for the completion of successful tasks. Successful anchors have become millionaires and celebrities in their own right. A burgeoning talent management industry dedicated to handling, coaching and managing anchors has cropped up, proving that no grassroots phenomenon can exist without becoming the stuff of big business. Still, the intimate, unmediated, and amateurish nature of live streaming makes nationwide success seem tantalisingly reachable.
Present.Perfect is composed entirely of found footage from live streamers, and Zhu’s artful editing gives the documentary an understated shape. The film is graded in black-and-white, offering a more muted glimpse of a digital world more commonly glazed with candy-like glitziness (an oft-used tactic for those trying to spend less time on their smartphones is to set their colour schemes to greyscale). The opening section is entirely wordless, cutting between slow, repetitive scenes of mechanical and manual labour. A tall crane, carrying a package, lopes across the sky, offering a panoramic view of a rapidly modernising city. Factory workers pile heavy sacks onto their backs, their chatter inaudible to the viewer. Nothing is explained: you don’t know where any of this is happening, who the people in these scenes are, or why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. In this sense, Present.Perfect simulates the experience of watching live streaming, dropping you into other people’s lives with little to cushion the fall. In many ways, this is a more compelling depiction of the Internet than The Great Hack’s grand fantasy of unveiling the singularly shadowy beast. To be online is to be in a state of constant, hyper-stimulated confusion, which often leaves you scrambling to contextualise all the stories that flood your world at once. There’s no single grand puppeteer in Present.Perfect. Just an assemblage of disparate bodies, all trying to make money and perhaps even find a purpose in life.
As the film progresses, it eventually focuses on the streams of five anchors. Their stories unfold slowly. A young single mother streams from her station at the clothing factory where she works, stitching seams into men’s underpants. Her boss isn’t in, so she can get away with it. A 30-year-old man with growth-hormone deficiency walks through the countryside, buying cheap snacks with prices that draw envy from his city-dwelling viewers. An older man, recovering from being burned in a fire, chats to his audience late at night after work. A street painter with severely restricted growth chalks art on the sidewalk. An enthusiastic dancer performs to pop music on city corners. He’s not very good but, as he tells the trolls popping up in his replies, amateurism is precisely the point. “Go watch television if you want to see professionals,” he says. These are the most amateurish of the amateurs. Most of the anchors in Present.Perfect, as Zhu told Filmmaker Magazine, don’t have mainstream success in the live-streaming industry.6 Their shows, like Zhu’s work, are self-consciously mundane, slow-paced, inviting you to discover new ways of looking at that which can be dismissed as ordinary (Zhu on live streaming to MUBI Notebook; “Some people were asking me the other day, ‘why do people look at those boring things for so long? Are there viewers for this?’”).7 Since we only see the broadcasts, we have to infer what is happening in the comments from the anchor’s reactions. Certain patterns emerge. Women, particularly if they are young and pretty, receive a lot of inquiries from men asking if they’re dating anyone. “This is not a matchmaking service,” the young mother snaps after what seems like the fiftieth inquiry about her relationship status. People with disabilities often get caught in loops explaining their bodies, routines and habits to viewers. All of the anchors in Present.Perfect are coded as socially marginalised in some way: they are often working-class and live outside sprawling metropolises. None of this feels incidental to why they have taken on new lives behind the camera. They are shy, isolated, or have little time and energy for non-virtual forms of leisure, they tell their viewers. Live streaming helps them build a public existence beyond the narrow ones offered to them in their environments.
“What is the purpose of this?” the burn victim asks midway through Present.Perfect, reading aloud a question posed by one of his viewers. It is a question I ask myself often when browsing the Internet, half-engaging with stories about the lives of others; learning what people are currently angry about; seeing what person I hate-follow is having for breakfast. My junk-filled brain holds so much information that is entirely irrelevant to my self-flourishing and mental stability. “There’s no purpose,” the anchor responds. “Just streaming and chatting… to find someone to talk to.” He’s exhausted and bored at work all day – his late-night streaming offers him the chance to feel human. His reply is not a triumphal endorsement of the Internet along the lines of that cloying, oft-repeated Facebook PR line – We bring the world closer together – but a bare statement of fact: my life can be repetitive and boring; this is fun for me.
It is often said that the virtual world is a corrupted, degraded version of our ‘real’ one, that the friendships formed there are synthetic knockoffs of the authentic thing. A few reviews of Present.Perfect have echoed the moralistic clamour commonly seen in discussions of social media. These have commented on the surreal, eerie tone of the film and the ‘narcissism’ and ‘exhibitionism’ of the live streamers in it. These readings seem to come from pre-existing biases and preconceptions about the Internet, rather than a critical engagement with Zhu’s project of artful mundanity, which pushes us to attend to social worlds with generous attention. It is hard to locate repulsive narcissism in Present.Perfect’s amateur streamers. A 30-year-old anchor who tells his audience that live streaming has made him more confident and helps him leave the house more often, it seems like what these experiences emphasise is not loneliness as an individual feeling, but as a social force capable of bringing people together, one that can possibly bring about joy.
Of course, not everyone who live-streams does it because they are lonely, just as not every viewer watches it to rid themselves of their solitude. But there is sometimes something very moving about seeing these spontaneous relationships between strangers unfold so candidly. The unflagging patience with which some anchors handle the most irritating and intrusive of questions (and their righteous irritation when they don’t want to); how some of the most mundane facts of someone else’s life – the price of a local snack, for example – are turned magic and exotic by others: all this feels somehow momentous, made by people in search of something hard to come by in the hamster wheel rhythm of day-to-day life. Yes, this may be for monetary gain but, in Present.Perfect, that almost seems beside the point. The result, however, isn’t full-throated praise of the Internet, but rather an earnest depiction of the new stories that arise from its hold over public life. In a sphere dominated by self-flagellating passivity and powerlessness masquerading as critique, Present.Perfect opts instead for an understated, yet unapologetic, normalisation of life with social media, devoid of overt sentimentality. It is within this muted space – one that rejects both end-time sensationalism and blind optimism – that hope can be cultivated.
Since the magical year of live streaming in 2016, the industry has come under greater censorship from the Chinese government. Measures have been introduced that restrict the type of content anchors can show: the street dancer in Present.Perfect, briefly shown cross-dressing, has since been fined.8 Much has been written about the dystopian-like character of the Chinese surveillance state. What’s interesting about Present.Perfect’s approach, then, is how it shows people as people, illuminating the mundanities of their lives without portraying them as passive victims. This has not stopped some, however, from questioning the authenticity of the casual joy and ordinary boredom experienced by these live streamers. Echoing the classic maneuver of pathologising ‘the subaltern’ in the pursuit of helping them, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw asks whether the live streamers “were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear”, a charge that seems misguided when one considers the many American and British YouTubers who still manage to pursue their apolitical interests while living under Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.9 That one can live under a surveillance complex and still feel utterly ordinary shouldn’t be surprising; the 87 million people whose data was mined by Cambridge Analytica can attest to as much. Different forms of surveillance, of course, have different stakes: the ones in authoritarian countries are much worse, and there is a case for citizens to be more politically engaged in their day-to-day lives. But there’s something irritating in the way that some narratives about China’s digital dystopia are presented, congealing the country’s people to a voiceless mass in the service of an alarmist west-facing agenda. The warning often embedded in these stories – it could happen here – feels distasteful, if not a wilful disengagement from the fact that ‘it’ has already happened ‘here’, albeit commonly mediated through private venture capital, not the government.10 It is not lost on the viewer that Present.Perfect itself, as an assemblage of other people’s live streams, offers a meta-commentary on the fact that nothing you post on the Internet today truly belongs to you.
This is the grand irony. The Internet is one of the few social commons we have today, a place for uninhibited public self-expression. It is also a space that renders us commodities like never before, a set of exploitable data points to be cynically targeted with ads. Look a little further, and the industry’s crimes pile up. Our tech giants don’t pay sufficient taxes; their lax content regulation policies have enabled hate movements; they employ the same addictive techniques used by gambling firms to keep us looped into neurotic, shouty hell zones. And yet we scroll. We are, in our confused, horny, lonely, chaotic digital lives, trying to sate our chronically unmet hunger for a life larger than our cubicles, desks and apartments, only to be beaten back by the fact that these platforms that tantalise us with the possibility of overcoming ourselves aren’t owned by us, don’t have our best interests at heart, and always, somehow, make the same people rich. The Internet has arisen as the most pre-eminent social commons for the people, one of the few spontaneous ones that we’ve got. It is not the one we deserve, as The Great Hack shows. But some beautiful things happen on there anyway. What might it be like to extend the gentle humanism on display in Present.Perfect – one that is tender and completely uninterested in one’s own shiny exceptionalism – into the very architecture and economy of the technology industry, whose behemoths currently reject those values?
It won’t be easy, given how powerful these giants are. It might not happen at all. But there are flickers of hope. In 2018, several Google employees quit in protest over the company’s contracts with the Pentagon. New institutions set up by disgruntled former workers now examine how to redesign digital platforms so they don’t feed on our worst, self-destructive instincts. There has been a rise in tech worker unionisation and activism. Academics and activists are developing business models that would allow us to own our own data. These ideas may feel like small drops in a terrible ocean, but they nevertheless offer us something our popular narratives of despair don’t: a clarity that comes from taking a piecemeal, unsentimental look at the moving parts of an industry. It’s often said, after all, that Silicon Valley is to today what Wall Street was to 2008; a destructive insular bubble hated by the public, but incredibly powerful. Wall Street relied on public ignorance of the minutiae of its financial systems, packaging debts into debts via means that few of us could explain. In the era of professional obscurantism, coherence can be a powerful weapon. It is a coherence more interested in understanding how these systems work, rather than agonisingly mining one’s complicity and passivity towards abstract and fetishised digital monsters. This alone is not revolutionary. Yet the revolution, it seems, can’t happen without it.
Rebecca Liu is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers. Another Gaze is an unfunded non-for-profit publication. If you like what you read you can donate here.
1. Devjyot Ghoshal, ‘Mapped: The breathtaking global reach of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company’, Quartz, March 2018. 2. Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow, ‘Private Mossad for Hire’, The New Yorker, February 2019. 3. Siva Vaidhyanathan, ‘Facebook’s privacy meltdown after Cambridge Analytica is far from over’, The Guardian, March 2019. 4. Alex Kantrowitz, ‘Facebook’s 2016 Election Team Gave Advertisers A Blueprint To A Divided US’, BuzzFeed News, October 2017. 5. Peter Yang, ‘A Primer on China’s Live Streaming Market’, Medium, September 2018. 6. Interview with Daniel Egan, ‘“Shows of Women Who Eat Bananas Seductively are Banned”: Shengze Zhu on Present.Perfect’, Filmmaker Magazine, May 2019. 7. Interview with Cathy Brennan, ‘Livestreaming China: Shengze Zhu Discusses “Present.Perfect”’, Mubi Notebook, January 2020. 8. Becca Voelcker, ‘Interview: Shengze Zhu’, Film Comment, February 2019. 9. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Present.Perfect. review – China’s livestreamers looking for love’, The Guardian, January 2020. 10. Mike Elgan, ‘Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system’, Fast Company, August 2019
