Brexit

This tells the story of an almost unknown man who changed the lives of a nation forever. Lives of generations to come are reduced to just words and marketing campaigns. It makes me very sad.

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.

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.

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??

The sinister to which I am referring is not the machinations of the Brexit campaign but this little piece itself. A detailed critique of propaganda which is, itself, an intricate piece of propaganda. Take it for what it is and there's no problem, fail to do so and your as much as a puppet as the puppets this movie purports that every leaver was.