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

by Christopher Wylie

This notion of human agency serves as the philosophical basis for criminal culpability, and we punish transgressors of the law on the grounds that they made a condemnable choice. A burning building may indeed harm people, but the law does not punish that building, as it has no agency. And so human laws regulate human acts, and not the motivations or behaviors of their surroundings. The corollaries to this are the fundamental rights we have. During the Enlightenment, the fundamental rights of people were articulated as core entitlements to protect the exercise of human agency. The rights to life, liberty, association, speech, vote, and conscience are all underpinned with a presumption of agency, as they are outputs of that agency. But agency itself has not been articulated as a right per se, as it has always been presumed to exist simply by virtue of our personhood. As such, we do not have an express right to agency that is contra mundum—that is, a right to agency that is exercisable against the environment itself. We do not have a right against the heavens or the undue influence of motivated and thinking spaces to mediate the exercise of our agency. At the time of America’s founding, a situation where our agency could be manipulated by a motivated and thinking environment was never contemplated as a possibility. For the Founding Fathers, this would have been a power known only to God.