If you’d rather not think about how your life is locked in a dystopian web of your own data, don't watch the new Netflix documentary *The Great Hack*.

But if you want to see, really see the way data tracking, harvesting, and targeting takes the strands of information we generate and ties them around us until we are smothered by governments and companies, then don't miss the film, which premieres today on the streaming platform and in theaters. Ostensibly, it tells the story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but even if you know that sordid tale already, the film is worth a look. It uses the scandal as a framework to illustrate the data mining structures and algorithms that are undermining individual liberty and democratic society, one Facebook like and meme at a time.

"We became obsessed with trying to bring the POV of the algorithm to life," explains codirector Karim Amer, who made the film with Jehane Noujaim, of the visual language the team developed for the doc. "How does the algorithm see us? If we could create a perspective for that algorithm, then we could help people understand our own fragility and the superstructure that exists around us, and how it's constantly sucking and collecting your behavior."

As a primer on the scandal, which dominated headlines around the world for two years after the election of President Donald Trump, the film is both succinct and thorough. It begins as news is breaking that Cambridge Analytica unethically scraped data from millions of Facebook users and used it to target vulnerable and impressionable voters in an effort to elect Trump and pass the Brexit resolution. Then it tracks the fallout. The film is bookended by professor David Carroll's quest to get his own data back from Cambridge Analytica—a story WIRED told in depth—but focuses mainly on former CA employee Brittany Kaiser and her abrupt and somewhat baffling decision to turn against her employer.

Directors Amer and Noujiam Kaiser her starting a few days after she quit in 2018. At one point, she says the systems social media enabled and the firm relied on to influence democratic elections constitute "weapons grade" technology.

But it’s hard to control a weapon you can’t see, and that's where The Great Hack offers even those very familiar with data tracking, and with the whole story of Cambridge Analytica, something powerful and new. It makes visible the normally invisible data of our everyday lives, and how it is harvested and weaponized against us. Through thoughtful narration and emoji-inspired animations, Amer and Noujaim reveal the digital detritus we leave in our wake whenever we send an email, look something up on a search engine, linger over an ad, make a purchase, or hit "like" on social media. And then, as alarming music swells in the background, the film uses that CGI to show how this data trail is being leveraged against us, every day: to sell us things, get us to vote or to stay home from the polls, to divide or unite us according to the whims of whoever has paid enough to take our digital threads and weave them into a web of their own desires.