Brexit: The Uncivil War

... in that your social media data can not just be harvested to sell you hats and hamburgers, but sell you misinformation literally tailored to you for political campaigns as well.

This is the tale of the 2016 referendum on Brexit- the vote in the UK to leave the European Union. Specifically it is a portrait of one man, Dominic Cummings (Benedict Cumberbatch), the director of the "Leave" campaign, or the campaign to exit the EU. I wasn't sure why the side story of the Cummings marriage and pregnancy was included at first, but later it becomes clear that Cummings would have come across as a statistician/political version of House, M.D. if that humanizing story was not present.

Cummings enlists the help of a tiny Canadian IT company - Aggregate IQ - to do data mining of social media for the "Leave" campaign, and they come up with three million potential Brexit voters that the "Remain" campaign (campaign to remain in the EU) knows nothing about. Cummings' strategy involves tenets of Sun Tzu's "Art of War" , specifically forcing the "Remain" campaign to "fight in the darkness", or wherever the "Leave" campaign chose them to fight. Specifically Britain has an equal time policy when it comes to political messages. So the Remain campaign would have a Nobel prize winning economist explaining the downside to leaving the EU in complex terms, and then the Leave side would talk about millions of Turks possibly emigrating to the UK, forcing the Remain side to waste time on trying to debunk that message.

It is up the viewer as to whether this tale is humorous or frightening, I think it is a little bit of both. On the frightening side you have political campaigns becoming the equivalent of the evil presence in the 1982 film Poltergeist - it knows what scares you. On the humorous side you see the frustration of the Remain side as the Leave side will simply not play by the rules. And kudos to the guy playing Boris Johnson. He looked just like him.

I'm only knocking one point off this almost perfect film because it had quite a bit of stuff that the viewer was just assumed to know. For example it kept talking about "MPs". In the US that is "Military Police". In the UK it is "Members of Parliament". I should not have to search Wikipedia in order to completely understand a film, but overall that is a minor complaint.

Highly recommended,and this is NOT a piece of propaganda.

Firstly this entire "docu-drama" completely ignores that both sides used social media big data exploiters. It ignorers the fact that lots of influential institutions with a direct self interest in remain (including for example BBC itself which content analysis studies have shown used "experts" opposed to Brexit at an 3:1 ratio) also positions themselves as neutral despite strong anti-brexit self interests and messages.

It also implies that people voted based on facebook or twitter, when while liberal voters tend to want to be with the "pack," this is not the case for independent or conservative voters who are much less likely to vote based on perceptions and psychological need to be within groupthink norms.

Lastly the producers of the film themselves have a direct self interest in remain. The fact is a majority of people in the UK do not have such a self interest. But the elite today are no different than the feudal lords. Feudal lords were the expert class of their day. They after all were the educated and literate. Does that mean their decisions were in everyone's interest? hardly. They had a self interest in preserving their class over their nation and all its classes, just as the makers of this propaganda film do.

Oh Brexit was a product of propaganda? Well what is this film if not propaganda from the other side??

If this isn't clear enough the narrative goes, as it was "Russia" or the Russians that made Trump win the 2016 election, so then it was Cummings and his shady analytical and online meddling that won the Leave EU vote in Britain. Forget about people going out of their way to vote for Trump and Brexit, it was outside forces, mind you, not their own citizens walking down the streets that day and head to the voting booth to decide for themselves what they want for their country.

To these cosmopolitans we crude simpletons just don't have enough sentience to go about and are merely victims of Kremlin hackers, spam email, the Like Button --- the black cat that crossed the road that forced us to walk a different direction! They'll blame anyone rather than understand you and me.

Outsider of the Uk, watched this movie trying to understand the brexit thing, but ended up thinking about how tec and social media when organized can take a great control in our decisions and predict our behavior, left me thinking about control while giving me some perspective about what happened with the brexit at the same time.

I also liked how I couldn't figure out what was the posture of the director, did he vote leave? Did he vote stay? I couldn't determine if he was bias or not, but the message about control was heard.

I'm also an ad guy who's spent his share of time in offices beating up strategy on white boards, so I was sucked right in and saw a bit of myself. The lead character Dominic was like most of the folks in media industries that serve some great big unseen master. We put our noses to the grindstone, put our hearts on the paper for the elusive "win", yet we overlook the damage we potentially could be causing to the world. And what damage they have done. I found out things I hadn't known before, like the role of the Mercers being behind both big data companies, thus guaranteeing their influence on the referendum. And that is where I started to pull on my guts. That they had not only done it to England but had done it to America; manipulated politics, empowering an element of society that we should be leaving in the dark cellar of the 20th century. The fear of the other on an ever shrinking world controlled by ever more powerful and terrible titans is a regression. But the story is still being told and we will know the conclusion... maybe. I highly recommend this film and leave one thought: In this ever more loud and volatile world, we must listen more than we talk.