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Marco Milone’s 19-minute documentary/essay The Power of Data is a summation of some of the current discourse and issues surrounding data democratisation, cybersecurity, technocracy, and the right to privacy. Ironically made using generative AI, the film uses a graphic visual style—2D illustrations ranging from dual tone to full colour—to accompany its voiceover narration.
One of the first points the film brings up is the explosion and ownership of our data. The records of our lives that have expanded from being about births, marriages, and deaths, to every mild curiosity, burning hatred, run-of-the-mill fetish, and accidental finger slips. Every purchase and cancelled order. Every post we lingered on for too long. Every one of our fixations. The amount of data Google hoards on each user, for instance. Now add Facebook to that list. And Twitter. And Instagram. And Amazon. And every other big and small site that runs on sponsorships and advertisements. Any site that uses optional cookies. Every smart home appliance running on IoT.
Surveillance has been made over into convenience. And who can say no to convenience? Who can be opposed to something as innocuous and sweet sounding as the cloud. How could we not collectively fall in love with the prestige of the label “high-tech”.
And yet this is far from it. The film goes into the threat from hackers and ransomers to our data as hoarded by tech companies. Every data breach costs us our safety. As it puts it, “Cybersecurity is a war.” In a poetic act of literalism, the US did, in fact, use telecommunications systems to aid in its war against Iraq.
Who decides how to use our data? An easy and troubling answer. We all know it now. We have known for a while. The question is what we shall do with that knowledge. Exposure can drive us into action just as much as it can numb us into apathy.
It layers this history of roughly the last fifteen years—when the right to choose what we reveal about ourselves has been steadily leached from us—with a longer history of how the internet began as a DARPA project, going on to a case of analogue image manipulation and the evolution of the cybercrime industry. The dark web. The uses of anonymity. Blockchain.
Perhaps it is fitting that the internet began as a project of the US military. Two networked computers in 1969 to billions of users across multiple devices per capita today. Perhaps no one imagined back then just how nefarious it would get even so.
The failure of the project—the open internet as it existed decades ago—can be summed up like this: the slow death of hope. The film points out how oppressive systems have been recreated with the very tool we had hoped will release us. How the internet became privatised. How only a handful of corporates control it now. How freedom and knowledge is being stolen from us.
The film concludes by exhorting us to reclaim that very knowledge for ourselves. The power of data versus the power of knowledge. Read the terms of service. Know how things work. And the most basic, use strong passwords and change them regularly. Maintain digital hygiene, hold on with both hands to your right to privacy.
No, this will not save us. The film is careful to temper our optimism. Our best practices are an umbrella in the rain. Whether we are soaked or receive only a little spray, the rain nonetheless is furiously on. Meanwhile we have the legacy job to figure out if, when, and how to turn off the rain.
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