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

by Christopher Wylie

But Mercer, it seemed, wanted us to attempt an even more ambitious version of profitable disruption. By profiling every citizen in a country, imputing their personalities and unique behaviors, and placing those profiles in an in silico simulation of that society (one created inside a computer), we would be building the first prototype of the artificial society. If we could play with an economy or culture in a simulation of artificial agents with the same traits as the actual people they represented, we could just possibly create the most powerful market intelligence tool yet imagined. And by adding quantified cultural signals, we were verging on a new area of something akin to “cultural finance.” We thought that if we got it right, we could run simulations of different futures of whole societies. Forget shorting companies; think about entire economies.