When my wife and I recently sat down to watch Netflix’s true-crime documentary series — a genre we typically enjoy — about the rise and fall of the infidelity-facilitating website Ashley Madison, we had reasonably high expectations. The stakes in that drama couldn’t be higher. Millions of people risked their marriages by uploading their most intimate secrets onto a website operated by a multimillion-dollar enterprise upon which hundreds of livelihoods depended. When the service was hacked, it threatened the integrity of those marriages, the jobs of those who catered to their clients’ desires, and the still nascent concept of cybersecurity itself. The series should have clicked with us, but it didn’t. We quit after one episode.
While the stakes were high in the abstract, our investment in them was minimal. There were no heroes in this tale — no protagonists to root for, only a constellation of egotists whose self-absorption led them to destroy their personal relationships and do violence to the institutions around them, about which they cared little. Maybe the series got better from there, but we’ll never know. That service, its victims, its hackers — they all deserve one another, to say nothing of the consequences their unscrupulous actions brought down around them.
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