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

by Christopher Wylie

there was an appetite among Democrats and even some Republicans to get to the bottom of why Trump had so drastically fired FBI director James Comey after telling him to drop the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn—who, it turned out, had a consulting agreement with Cambridge Analytica. The full story went far beyond Brexit—it was about Bannon, Trump, Russia, and Silicon Valley. It was about who controls your identity, and the corporations that traffic in your data.

I had seen people face serious threats to their safety; several of my former colleagues had warned me to be extremely careful after I left. Before joining SCL, my predecessor, Dan Mureşan, had ended up dead in his hotel room in Kenya. This was a decision that I could not take lightly.

When I started telling him about Cambridge Analytica’s projects in Africa, Rabkin’s eyes widened. He interjected, “This sounds so twisted and colonial.” Rabkin was the first journalist to use that word with me—“colonial.” Most of the people I told about Cambridge Analytica were fascinated with Trump, Brexit, or Facebook, but whenever I got onto the topic of Africa, I usually was met with shrugs. Shit happens. It’s Africa, after all. But Rabkin got it. What Cambridge Analytica was doing in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria—it was a new era of colonialism, in which powerful Europeans exploited Africans for their resources. And although minerals and oil were still very much part of the equation, there was a new resource being extracted: data.

I sat in Alistair’s office as Briant played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. “Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,” said Oakes. “So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.” Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

Why should Americans care about what Russia was doing in Britain? Because these Brexiteers shared the same data firm, in Cambridge Analytica, and the same adviser, in Steve Bannon, and they were clearly keeping the Russians informed at each step of the way. And these same Brexiteers were some of the very first people invited to Trump Tower after his surprise victory. The president-elect of the United States met with British citizens who were regularly briefing the Russian government.

Hundreds of millions of Americans have entered into Facebook’s invisible architecture thinking it was an innocuous place to share pics and follow their favorite celebrities. They were drawn into the convenience of connecting with friends and the ability to fend off boredom with games and apps. Users were told by Facebook that the enterprise was about bringing people together. But Facebook’s “community” was building separate neighborhoods just for people who look like them. As the platform watched them, read their posts, and studied how they interacted with their friends, its algorithms would then make decisions about how to classify users into digital neighborhoods of their kind—what Facebook called their “Lookalikes.” The reason for this, of course, was to allow advertisers to target these homogeneous Lookalikes with separate narratives just for people of their kind. Most users would not know their classification, as the other neighborhoods of people who did not look like them would remain unseen. The segmentation of Lookalikes, not surprisingly, pushed fellow citizens further and further apart. It created the atmosphere we are all living in now.

What was supposed to be so brilliant about the Internet was that people would suddenly be able to erode all those barriers and talk to anyone, anywhere. But what actually happened was an amplification of the same trends that took hold of a country’s physical spaces. People spend hours on social media, following people like them, reading news articles “curated” for them by algorithms whose only morality is click-through rates—articles that do nothing but reinforce a unidimensional point of view and take users to extremes to keep them clicking. What we’re seeing is a cognitive segregation, where people exist in their own informational ghettos. We are seeing the segregation of our realities. If Facebook is a “community,” it is a gated one.

The destruction of mutual experience is the essential first step to othering, to denying another perspective on what it means to be one of us.

Americans check their phones on average fifty-two times per day. Many now sleep with their phones charging beside them—they sleep with their phones more than they sleep with people. The first and last thing they see in their waking hours is a screen. And what people see on that screen can motivate them to commit acts of hatred and, in some cases, acts of extreme violence. There is no such thing as “just online” anymore, and online information—or disinformation—that engages its targets can lead to horrific tragedies.

By most metrics, Russia’s military is significantly weaker than that of the United States. The U.S. military budget, at $716 billion, is more than ten times that of Russia. The United States has 1.28 million active military personnel, as compared with Russia’s 1 million; has more than 13,000 total aircraft, as compared with Russia’s 4,000; and has twenty aircraft carriers, whereas Russia has one. By all existing conventional measures, Moscow would never again be competitive with the United States in terms of “great powers” warfare, and Vladimir Putin knew it. So the Russians had to devise another way to regain the advantage—one that had nothing to do with the physical battlespace.

We can already see how algorithms competing to maximize our attention have the capacity to not only transform cultures but redefine the experience of existence. Algorithmically reinforced “engagement” lies at the heart of our outrage politics, call-out culture, selfie-induced vanity, tech addiction, and eroding mental well-being.

We risk creating a society obsessive about remembering, and we may have overlooked the value of forgetting, moving on, or being unknown. Human growth requires private sanctuaries and free spaces where we can experiment, play, dabble, keep secrets, transgress taboos, break our promises, and contemplate our future selves without consequence to our public lives until we decide to change in public.

Privacy is not about hiding—privacy is about human growth and agency.

To understand the harms of social media, we have to first understand what it is. Facebook may call itself a “community” to its users, or a “platform” to regulators, but it is not a service, in the same way a building is not a service.

Social media and Internet platforms are not services; they are architectures and infrastructures. By labeling their architectures as “services,” they are trying to make responsibility lie with the consumer, through their “consent.” But in no other sector do we burden consumers in this way. Airline passengers are not asked to “accept” the engineering of planes, hotel guests are not asked to “accept” the number of exits in the building, and people are not asked to “accept” the purity levels of their drinking water.

People are already morphing themselves to fit a machine’s idea of who they should be. Some of us are curating ourselves on social media to increase our follower engagement, to the point that who we really are and how we present online become confused and conflated. And when those followers see enough of these curated identities, some of them begin to hate who they are or how they look, and they starve their bodies to conform to a new standard that now surrounds them. Others click on links recommended to them by algorithms, engaging with that content, and get drawn further and further down the rabbit hole of personalization until their worldview changes without their realizing it.

A platform like Facebook has been burning for years with its own disasters—Cambridge Analytica, Russian interference, Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing, New Zealand’s mass shootings—and, as with the reforms after the Great Fire, we must begin to look beyond policy, to the underlying architectural issues that threaten our social harmony and citizens’ well-being.