Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum. As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning. A former federal prosecutor, he is sharp and precise with his lines of inquiry, and he wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter.

Did you work with Steve Bannon?
Yes.

Did Cambridge Analytica have any contacts with potential Russian agents?
Yes.

Do you believe that this data was used to sway the American electorate to elect the president of the United States?
Yes.

As one of the creators of Cambridge Analytica, I share responsibility for what happened, and I know that I have a profound obligation to right the wrongs of my past. Like so many people in technology, I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to “move fast and break things.” I’ve never regretted something so much. I moved fast, I built things of immense power, and I never fully appreciated what I was breaking until it was too late.

Tanks and bunker busters are useless against viral propaganda and Web-fueled radicalization. ISIS doesn’t just launch missiles; it also launches narratives. Russia compensates for its aging military equipment with “hybrid approaches” of attack, beginning with the ideological manipulation of target populations.

If you’re building a non-kinetic weapon designed for scaled perspecticide—the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception—you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates people.

Getting the required data to build Jucikas’s envisioned targeting system would not be easy, but it was possible, due to a fluke of history in some parts of the developing world. Although there was substantial underdevelopment of traditional telecommunications infrastructure, largely stemming from corruption and the neglectful legacies of colonial administrations, some of the world’s poorest countries had leapfrogged generations of technology, achieving impressive advances in mobile networks.

In Kenya, for example, local laws and customs made it difficult for some people to get a bank account, leading to a system in which Kenyans used cash to buy mobile phone credits, which could then be traded as a kind of digital currency. In fact, we found that people in many poorer nations distrusted banks, having lived through economic crises, hyperinflation, and bank collapses, and used the same mobile workaround. This setup meant that everybody needed a phone, and that it needed to work well, so that in otherwise impoverished nations, there’d been rapid investment in relatively decent mobile infrastructure.

One unintended consequence of having large pluralities of citizens connected via mobile phone networks was that everybody could be traced, tracked, profiled, and communicated with. Jihadist networks such as ISIS, AQAP, and Boko Haram had already figured this out, taking advantage of easy access to the minds of future conquests. And that turned the rules of warfare upside down.

Next we needed a case study—a location where we could scale to a nation-state level, to show potential military clients what we were capable of doing. Trinidad and Tobago, with 1.3 million people, fit the bill perfectly. It was an island nation, self-contained yet with a variety of cultures. There was an Afro-Caribbean population, an Indo-Caribbean population, and a smattering of white people, creating an interesting cultural tension to explore. It was an ideal laboratory in which to run our experiments at scale.

Working with a set of contractors, SCL was able to tap into the telecom firehose, pick an IP address, and then sit and watch what a person in Trinidad was browsing on the Internet at that very moment. Not surprisingly, it was a lot of porn. People were browsing everything imaginable, including the culturally specific “Trini Porn.” I can remember sitting around the computer one evening and watching as someone toggled between looking up plantain recipes and watching porn, all while Nix laughed at them. It was a revoltingly giddy laugh, almost infantile. He looked up the IP address and then opened up Google Maps satellite view to see the neighborhood this person lived in.

He had inherited tens of millions of pounds and never needed to work. He could have dedicated his life to noble pursuits or simply settled into a life of leisure, sponging off his trust fund. But instead he chose SCL. Nix couldn’t help himself—he was intoxicated by power. Born too late to play colonial master in the old British Empire, he treated SCL as the modern equivalent. As Nix put it in one of our meetings, he got to “play the white man.” “They [are] just niggers,” he once said to a colleague in an email, referring to black politicians in Barbados.

In 2005, the right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart began Breitbart.com, an online news aggregator, and by 2007 it had grown to publish original content as Breitbart News. The site ran on the undercurrent of Breitbart’s personal philosophy, which has been referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture.

When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy. At our first meeting, he was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau. The logic, as we later learned with Brexit, was that Britain served as an important cultural signifier for Americans. Win the Brits, and so falls America, Bannon later told me, as the mythologies and tropes of Hollywood had crafted an image of Britain as a country of educated, rational, and classy people.

He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid.

Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives” imposing their “feminist ideology” onto gaming culture. Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry, lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins.

Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings” simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels” (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach.

CA’s client list eventually grew into a who’s who of the American right wing. The Trump and Cruz campaigns paid more than $5 million apiece to the firm. The U.S. Senate campaigns of Roy Blunt of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas became clients. And, of course, there was the losing House bid of Art Robinson, the Oregon Republican who collected piss and church organs. In the autumn of 2014, Jeb Bush paid a visit to the office. Despite having received millions from Mercer, Nix never bothered to learn much about U.S. politics, so he asked Gettleson to join him. Bush, who had come alone, began by telling Nix that if he decided to run for president, he wanted to be able to do it on his terms, without having to “court the crazies” in his party.

In our invasion of America, we were purposefully activating the worst in people, from paranoia to racism. I immediately wondered if this was what Stanley Milgram felt like watching his research subjects. We were doing it in service to men whose values were in total opposition to mine. Bannon and Mercer were more than happy to hire the very people they sought to oppress—queers, immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, and people of color—so that they could weaponize our insights and experiences to advance these causes. I was no longer working at a firm that fought against radical extremists who shackled women, brutalized nonbelievers, and tortured gays; I was now working for extremists who wanted to build their very own dystopia in America and Europe. Nix knew this and didn’t even care. For the cheap thrill of sealing another deal, he had begun entertaining bigots and homophobes, expecting his staff not only to look the other way, but for us to betray our own people.

In calls with the Trump Organization, we heard about declining ratings for The Apprentice and how fewer people were staying at Trump hotels and gambling in the casinos. With the advent of online gambling and the total dependence on Donald Trump’s public image as a sexy, savvy billionaire, it seemed his team was beginning to realize that an outdated casino system and an aging, orange-stained C-list celebrity didn’t conjure “sexy and fun” for potential new customers. The Trump brand was on a downturn, and the company needed to figure out how to give it a boost.