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

by Christopher Wylie

After Western militaries were grappling with how to tackle radicalization online, the firm wanted me to help build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat extremism online.

The story of Cambridge Analytica shows how our identities and behavior have become commodities in the high-stakes data trade.

My brief exposure to hacking communities left a permanent impression. You learn that no system is absolute. Nothing is impenetrable, and barriers are a dare. The hacker philosophy taught me that if you shift your perspective on any system—a computer, a network, even society—you may discover flaws and vulnerabilities.

Everything we do, he said, is predicated on understanding exactly who we need to talk to, and on which issues.

BUT BY DIRECTLY COMMUNICATING select messages to select voters, the microtargeting of the Obama campaign had started a journey toward the privatization of public discourse in America.

Facebook making on average $30 from each of its 170 million American users. At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are “free.” In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.

For thousands of years, dominant economic models had focused on the extraction of natural resources and the conversion of these raw materials into commodities. Cotton was spun into fabric. Iron ore was smelted into steel. Forests were cut into timber. But with the advent of the Internet, it became possible to create commodities out of our lives—our behavior, our attention, our identity. People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex.

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

Most campaigns can be boiled down to two core operations: persuasion and turnout. The turnout, or “GOTV” (get out the vote), universe is those people who likely support the candidate but do not always vote. The persuasion universe is the inverse, representing those who likely will vote but do not always support the party. People who are either very unlikely to vote or very unlikely to ever support us are put into an exclusion universe, as there is no point in engaging them. Voters who are both very likely to support the candidate and very likely to vote—these are the “base” voters, and they are typically excluded from contact, but they might be prioritized for volunteer or donor recruitment. Finding the right set of voters to contact is the name of the game.

There was also a far less developed market for consumer data in Canada and Europe, so many of the standard data sets in the USA either were not available or had to be pieced together from many sources.

political staffers are often so socially clueless, they forget that regular people have lives.

In social sciences, a “latent variable” is an element that is influencing a result, but one you haven’t yet observed or measured—a hidden construct that’s floating just out of view.

five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Exploring the nuances of identity and personality started to help me unpack why, despite the fact that politicians do polling all the time, they still seem horrendously out of touch. This is because so many of their pollsters are out of touch. Polling firms influence politicians’ ideas of what makes up voter identity, which are usually horrendously oversimplified or just plain wrong. Identity isn’t ever a single thing; it’s made up of many different facets.

In the sixth century B.C., Persians of the Achaemenid, knowing that Egyptians worshipped the cat god Bastet, drew images of cats on their shields so the Egyptians would be reluctant to take aim at them in battle.

During World War II, the British perfected the art of misdirecting the enemy by staging fake invasions, using dummy tanks, and even planting fake battle plans on a corpse dressed as a dead soldier in the fantastically named Operation Mincemeat.

In devising an informational weapon, it’s helpful to think of the basic aspects of any weapon system: the payload, delivery system, and targeting system. For a missile, the payload is an explosive, the delivery system is a rocket-propelled fuselage, and the targeting system is a satellite or a heat-seeking laser. With informational weapons, the same components are present. But there is one key difference: The force you are using is non-kinetic. In other words, you don’t blow stuff up. In informational combat, the payload is often a story—a rumor deployed to trick a general or a cultural narrative intended to pacify a village. And just as the military invests in chemistry to inform bomb building, it also tries to research what kinds of narratives will yield the biggest impact.

When a society jerks into extremism, so does its fashion. Think about Maoists, Nazis, Klansmen, and jihadists—what do they all have in common? A look.

Extremist movements latch on to aesthetics because so much of extremism is about changing the aesthetics of society. Oftentimes much of what is promised is not about any tangible policies, but rather a new look and feel for a place or culture.

Montréal is the sort of place that will change you if you let it.

It is much harder to stay loyal to an existing hierarchy or group when you begin to think that you are being used in some unfair way, or when events seem senseless or purposeless.

People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to feelings of envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behavior. This means these targets will be more likely to develop an exaggerated suspicion of harassment, persecution, victimhood, or unfair treatment. This is the “low-hanging fruit” for initiating the subversion of a larger organization. Later, this learning would serve as one of the foundations for Cambridge Analytica’s work catalyzing an alt-right insurgency in America.

The targets were in effect creating their own dossiers with rich data that could quicken a psychologist’s assessment of their disposition.

Co-founded by Peter Thiel, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who was also an independent director of Facebook, Palantir was a massive venture-capital-funded company that undertook information operations for the CIA, the National Security Agency, whose mission is to analyze signals intelligence and data for national security purposes, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to the NSA.

the military affectionately called the YUMs—young unmarried males—

Working with a military contractor, I met all sorts of bizarre characters, most of whom had a strong desire for “absolute discretion”—it wasn’t the least bit unusual to not know the full identity of a person before the first meeting.

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.

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.

I told him that if you can’t define something, you can’t measure it, and if you can’t measure it, you can’t know if you are changing it.