Watched: 07/18/2024
Format: Netflix
Viewing: First
Director: Toby Paton, Zoe Hutton, Gagan Rehill
I didn't notice til I went to do this write-up that Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Scandal (2024) is the second docuseries on the topic of the very real hook-up site for married people seeking discreet extramarital affairs, AND the 2015 security breach/ data dump that filled headlines for a few days.
This docseries is on Netflix (more on that in a minute), but there's one on Hulu that I suppose I'll watch, the same way I watched all the Fyre Fest documentary stuff.
This docuseries breaks into three parts
- setting up Ashely Madison, who might be interested and why they'd be into, and how the company achieved success
- operating as a success, the initial media reaction, and then... realizing they've been hacked
- impact of the hack on the company, users, revelations and fallout
There are curiously few POV's interviewed for what is a nearly 3-hour documentary. Why each subject was selected becomes clear over time, but - you can guess from the start where this is going if you know what happened with Ashley Madison. In addition to interviews, there's plenty of news footage cut in to give you an idea how mainstream media was approaching the topic - which was "aghast pearl clutching".
I dunno. The doc is fine? It feels like it's both too long and too short. It's largely focused on the data breach, and the fallout, and at times, you really just want for them to stop circling the drain with redundant information and speed it along. We know what happened on a base level, so the suspense isn't there whether or not they'll stop the hackers, etc... But I also was much more curious about the assumptions made by Ashley Madison as a company, and that they did enjoy success. No matter what else was uncovered during the forensics into the hack, millions of people signed up.
From the top: I strive not to throw stones in glass houses. I have my own list of bugaboos and things I consider to be showstoppers, but pearl-clutching over other people's very personal business is not my thing. So, if I'm a little "meh" on this issue, we can discuss my sense of moral relativity in a post on some different blog and some different day.
Our subjects include:
- some staff - curiously, I never did figure out what the one guy in glasses actually did for Ashley Madison
- a Christian vlogger couple
- a couple with an open marriage that used the site
- a woman whose husband was exposed in the leak
- a data forensics expert
- a law-enforcement fellow
- a journalist
- I think one therapist-type
It's... fine. But I would have liked a wider variety of participants. You can map all three couples straight from Dan Savage columns, and it just feels like it takes forever to get to the point. I did like the Swedish forensics guy. It takes a certain kind of brain to do that work.
When Ashley Madison (the site, not the doc) exploded into the zeitgeist, my gut reaction was "there is no way the male/female ratio lines up economically, unless there's, like, a very limited, very active female population with abundant free-time on their hands."
Straight up: back in 2014 or so, I did create a dummy account to see what was even on the site. No, I was not planning shenanigans, I was more incredulous this thing existed, based on societal assumptions, and I wanted to see who these people were. I really wish I'd blogged this whole thing, but I didn't want to get anyone in trouble, including myself.
About a minute in on the site, I vaguely recall thinking "I don't think these are real people" except for some awkward photos which seemed like no one curating fake people would post. But I also didn't see anyone I knew, so how interesting was the exercise, really?
I believe the final tally - not discussed in the doc - was that the overwhelming number of users were male (WaPo said 85%. - this report is even more damning). Which shocks me not at all. But this is the sort of thing that seems relevant that doesn't wind up on screen.
The Columbo part of the doc pieces together an unspecified, but lopsided ration of male-to-female, with the discovery that most users were just talking to chatbots and/or staff. Horny housewives in your area may not need the use of a website in choosing a cabana boy for illicit hokey-pokey.
Ashley Madison's model was "pay-per-interaction" (and as I never interacted, I'd forgotten this fact). So, essentially, Ashley Madison was following the same model as the pills and gummies that promise to grow one's wang. Sure, it doesn't really work, but you can mess with dudes who want to believe it will - in this case, by making them think they were talking to a sexy woman in their area.
What this was like and how users interacted is, weirdly, not really discussed. I think some basic societal stats would have really helped here. Estimations of infidelity within marriage. That sort of thing. Along with real reporting of usage and interviews with those who did interact, both fer-real and those who fell for a robot.
My confusion heaped up while watching the doc because the YouTuber dude admitted to being on the site, but I guess he'd had other infidelities, or attempts at them? I couldn't figure out if he ever met a real human through the site.
If the doc is successful at anything, it's showing that even the best-intentioned action of the hacker(s) only really hurt the customers of the company. Sure, you can be mad that Ashley Madison is offering the service. But it takes a certain kind of narcissism or limited world-view to not get that it is now YOU, the hacker, who is choosing to destroy homes and lives. And that will likely end in at least one death, by murder, suicide, or both. But people are weird about infidelity (see: pretty much any category on Reddit) so maybe they didn't care about the people they were hurting. Which kind of makes them the worst person in this story. Sometimes it's okay to do bad things for the right reason (more moral relativism here at The Signal Watch!) and not air everyone's dirty laundry.
And, of course, with the media's salivating approach to the story, it was just going to make things worse as anyone with even ties to a public personality was likely fair game.
Lemme be clear: there's Ashley Madison villains in the story. The CEO was clearly not doing his job of making sure they were as secure as the site promised. He was building internal businesses to defraud the public, and there's villains who helped perpetuate that line of thinking and execute those chatbots, etc... Someone convinced grown men they had a date with Jesse James' mistress.
That's the stuff I want to hear about - what was the moment Ashley Madison switched from a "find a date" site to a "pretend to talk to a woman" site?
Netflix has a tendency to put out these docs that aren't... very good. But very popular. Like most of their original programming, it's stuff you can listen to while on your phone. They never seem to want to go very deep, and they wind up raising more questions with their docs than I think they answer. It's worth a watch just to watch the third episode to see what happened - you can probably guess most of the first two episodes.
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