Looks like John Oliver is trending across the internet today because he is holding hostage the personal data of some click-happy members of Congress. Twitter has lit up in praise of the stunt. Well done, good sir.

Hollywood and Washington, DC, have always been strange bed fellows. In the popular — and my — imagination, Jackie Kennedy appearing on the cover of Vogue was a flirtation between the two, Ronald Reagan’s candidacy and presidency was the start of their dating, and Donald Trump’s circus was the first time everybody got, well…ya know. As the entertainment industry corporatized over the 70s, 80s and into the new millennium, and as politics embraced the power of the internet and social media, Hollywood and DC are now intertwined in pretty ghastly ways.

I always find it funny when people say actors and entertainment folks should “keep politics out of Hollywood.” The last president was the former host of a reality-television show that ran for more than a decade, and he served concurrently as the leader of the free world and Executive Producer of that same show before it was then hosted by the former governor of California, who was a bodybuilder before he was The Terminator before he married a Kennedy before he controlled the sixth largest economy in the world. Politics and Hollywood are two sides of a very strange coin.

For all the power that that gave Trump (and the Conservatives) as he ran the country like a click-bait reality show, this week John Oliver gave a master class on how to turn the tables. On his weekly show on HBOMax, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the comedy-show host explained the multi-billion-dollar business of data brokering, which is one of the integral players in the surveillance capitalist state we now find attempting to thrive in. Your email is not just on a list somewhere in a vague database, your entire search history, buying history, and location data are tracked all day long unless you take (often complex) active steps to stop it. The easiest: (1) don’t accept cookies when you browse (but who doesn’t like cookies?!), (2) use an alternative browser with better security (e.g., Brave, Firefox, or DuckDuckGo), and (3) turn off tracking on your phone. At this point, though, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Business and Big Politics know everything about you.

Leadership comes in many forms, and sometimes Hollywood provides the much-needed checks-and-balances that we thought we designed into the political system.

In the climax of this week’s episode (Season 9, Episode 7), Oliver revealed that he bought the private data of anyone in the Capitol Hill area who clicked on one of three ridiculous phony ads that he ran — one asking “Can you vote twice?,” one selling help because “Marriage shouldn’t be a prison,” and one tempting the clicker with “Ted Cruz erotic fan fiction.” With a click, users made it possible for Oliver to harvest and potentially de-anonymize the personal data of hundreds around DC, three of whom clicked from inside the Capitol building. While hilarious, it was televised blackmail to get Congress to pay attention and get their shit together to safeguard our privacy.

Of course, John Oliver is not the first to do political stunts like this from his comedy stage. Modern late-night hosts like Kimmel and Colbert not only speak out but they have (haha) declared their run for VP, rushed the RNC podium, and the like. Mostly, Oliver takes his inspiration from his political-comedy mentor, Jon Stewart who, among constant weekly strokes of brilliance, left his stage to lead the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” days before the midterm elections in 2010. Stewart always claimed to just be a comedian, but he managed to be as articulate — if not more — than most of our actual politicians about the challenges of our time. He also went on to blast Congress for failing to protect 9/11 first-responders. In 2019, Congress passed an extension of the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund in response to Stewart’s Congressional testimony.

Yes, we all want Oscar and Emmy and Grammy and Golden Globe recipients to be less righteous when they use their stage time to preach, but leadership comes in many forms, and sometimes Hollywood provides the much-needed checks-and-balances that we thought we designed into the political system. Now, they come from anyone who has a loud voice in this noisy society — those often with large entertainment followings. These political comedy geniuses have become not only more accurate sources of political news but the moral center of the modern media-entertainment-political-industrial complex. They speak truth to power and to their millions of audience members. Don’t forget that before Volodymyr Zelensky was fighting off Russians in his military greens as the real president of Ukraine, he was the star of the television series, Servant of the People, in which he portrayed…um, the president of Ukraine. America has no monopoly on the fine line between actor and activist.

What a sad state of affairs that not only must Oliver explain what a cookie is to millions of people but he then has to hijack the personal data of sitting members of our government to get them to pay attention. As digital capitalism gets more intense, especially after the pandemic when we saw its (complicated) benefits and seem to have doubled-down on it, moments like this will become all the more important. How do you get a government body that has an average age of 57.6 (the Senate’s is 62.9) to properly legislate against the ills of a tech-led society that is year-by-year iPhone-model-by-iPhone model spiraling out of control? It will take everyone with a voice to speak up. Well done, Mr. Oliver.