wWhat would you call a true crime documentary with only a passing interest in the crime? you can call it Ashley Madison: sex, lies and scandal, Netflix’s new three-part series, released Wednesday, follows the rise and fall of Ashley Madison, the online dating site aimed at married people to have affairs. The episode shows the company’s rise to prominence in the noughties, due to a series of provocative advertising campaigns and its CEO’s almost constant presence on the talk show circuit. watches episode two 2015 hack: When a group of cyber criminals Website’s entire database of users’ personal information leaked (over 30 million people), as well as internal emails and other compromising data. The final episode looks at the fallout: resignations and investigations – most of which yielded no results.
Obviously carelessness is being taken in this kind of documentary. (It’s right there in the Soderbergian subtitles.) Ashley Madison has always been surrounded by controversy: There’s something strange about its poor business plan. You can argue that the company is simply meeting the public’s demands for service, in a free and unfettered market – but there is no denying the fact that profit is obtained through personal betrayal. at both ends, the cost was human: First the cheating of spouses, then the alleged “witch hunt” of users after the data leak, resulting in several suicides. sex, lies and scam offers compassion and airtime to his adulterous interviewees – most prominently, a Christian influencer named Sam Rader. But if they’re not the villains of this story, then who is?
problem with sex, lies and scam It’s not so much that it’s willing to show some sympathy toward the cheating spouse. Being an immoral, selfish, or untrustworthy person is not always considered villainy. But in spreading the blame around – between users, website executives and the hacker group – it ultimately absolves everyone.
As the documentary progresses, more and more details of Ashley Madison’s unethical business practices are revealed. For example, the site quietly allowed the proliferation of “bots” among its profiles, which compensated for a customer base that was overwhelmingly comprised of straight men. Or the questionable method of belligerently charging visitors to access basic functions of the site – what would now be known as microtransactions. (Customers paid a large fee to have their details completely erased from the site’s databank – an offer that generated millions in revenue, leaving all data intact only for Ashley Madison.) The series was created by ex-CEO Noel Biederman ( No) is content to tarnish the interview) with a suggestion of dubiousness, but is less damaging to others working within the Ashley Madison machine, particularly the many people within the corporate structure interviewed in detail here. Went.
These men, including charismatic former vice president of sales Evan Back, talk the audience through the Ashley Madison story with a kind of unapologetic matter-of-factness that borders on entertainment. In the background is a heavyset middle-aged man wearing what appears to be a bright pink Hawaiian shirt – the kind of gaudy informal attire that reflects serious wealth. The documentary opens on him as he prepares for an interview. Pointing to the oversized sunglasses on his face, he says to the camera: “By the way, I’m not wearing these glasses. I don’t want to come across as some people Swill, with sunglasses inside.” He then tries on several more items of ostentatious spectacles, before settling on pink-lensed “grandma glasses”.
Beck is a lively and entertaining interviewer; It’s easy to see why his voice features so prominently throughout the series. And yet, as a high-ranking executive within the framework of Ashley Madison for nearly a decade, Beck is exactly the kind of person who should hold the moral accountability of the series. It may be that this was intentional – that the documentary is giving these people such generous leeway as a means of demonstrating their callous disregard for the ethical consequences of their employment. But a narrative is ultimately shaped by who is telling it, and sex, lies and scam First and foremost, as told by those who were inside. This access has advantages – detail, color, insight – but sacrifices the kind of moral objectivity that the situation perhaps demands.
It’s notable how few case studies are featured in the documentary: not surprisingly, there weren’t very many people to speak out about their marital infidelity on camera. Program director Toby Patton said, “Rather than scold people who join Ashley Madison, we were more interested in finding out why they were attracted to the site.” “What were they looking for? What was going on in their relationship? And, importantly: What was their partner’s side of the story?” If the series actually managed to answer these questions, that would be one thing. But this only points towards them.
sex, lies and scam It ends by explaining that the hacker group was never identified, and Ashley Madison has more users today than ever before – about 70 million, unaffected by the data leak. It is clear that no lessons were learned from the entire debacle. But it is not that we will be able to learn so much from Netflix’s new documentary.
‘Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal’ is now available to stream on Netflix