Documentary Film Night

Digital Disconnect (2018).

In this era of Facebook privacy breaches, "fake news" and filter bubbles, the essential film DIGITAL DISCONNECT trains its sights on the relationship between the internet and democracy. Tracing the internet's history as a publicly funded government project in the 1960s to its full-scale commercialization today, the film traces how the revolutionary, democratizing potential of the internet has been radically compromised by the growing and unaccountable power of a handful of telecom and tech monopolies.

Based on the acclaimed book by media scholar Robert McChesney, DIGITAL DISCONNECT examines the ongoing attack on net neutrality and the concept of an open internet by telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon; explores how internet giants like Facebook and Google have amassed huge profits by surreptitiously collecting our personal data and selling it to advertisers; and shows how these tech and telecom monopolies have routinely colluded with the national security state to advance covert mass surveillance programs.

While most debates about the internet continue to focus on issues like the personal impact of internet addiction or the questionable data-mining practices of a few isolated companies like Facebook, DIGITAL DISCONNECT digs deeper to show how capitalism itself has turned the internet against democracy.