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

by Christopher Wylie

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. As a gay kid in a wheelchair, I came to understand systems of power early on in life. But as a hacker, I learned that every system has weaknesses waiting to be exploited. — SHORTLY AFTER I STARTED my job at the Canadian Parliament, the Liberal Party took an interest in what was happening down south.

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

Although direct mail had long been part of American campaigns, data-driven microtargeting allowed campaigns to match a myriad of granular narratives to granular universes of voters—your neighbor might receive a wholly different message than you did, with neither of you being the wiser.

Platforms started to mimic casinos, with innovations like the infinite scroll and addictive features aimed at the brain’s reward systems.

The newly formed Cambridge Analytica became that arsenal. Refining techniques from military psychological operations (PSYOPS), Cambridge Analytica propelled Steve Bannon’s alt-right insurgency into its ascendancy. In this new war, the American voter became a target of confusion, manipulation, and deception. Truth was replaced by alternative narratives and virtual realities.

Cambridge Analytica first piloted this new warfare in Africa and tropical islands around the world. The firm experimented with scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling. It worked with Russian agents and employed hackers to break into opposition candidates’ email accounts. Soon enough, having perfected its methods far from the attention of Western media, CA shifted from instigating tribal conflict in Africa to instigating tribal conflict in America.

America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction.

The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

As an ER medic, he was trained to not waste time, but in politics you survive by wasting time.

like two butterflies at a moth convention.

five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. With time and testing, the measurement of these five traits has proven to be a powerful predictor of many aspects of people’s lives. A

Obama ran on change, hope, and progress—in other words, a platform of openness to new ideas. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to focus on stability, independence, and tradition—in effect, a platform of conscientiousness.

If you randomly grab a hundred women off the street, will they all be the same person? What about a hundred African Americans? Are they all the same? Can we really say that these people are clones by virtue of their skin color and vaginas? They all have different experiences, struggles, and dreams.

But to me, fashion and politics are both, at their core, about cycles of culture and identity. To my mind, they’re essentially two manifestations of the same phenomenon—a conviction that would become central to what we created at Cambridge Analytica.

Their style was self-indulgent and naïvely romantic, and it bordered on kitsch. Even terrorists have pop culture.

Targets are encouraged to begin catastrophizing about minor or imagined events, and counternarratives attempt to remove meaning, creating an impression of confusing or senseless events. Counternarratives also attempt to foster distrust in order to mitigate communication with others who might hamper the target’s evolution. 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. You become less willing to accept setbacks, take risks, or comply with commands.

The ultimate aim is to trigger negative emotions and thought processes associated with impulsive, erratic, or compulsive behavior.

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. Let’s

including starting rumors to spread through mobile messaging or riling up crowds with planted confederates and arresting protestors.

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

Nix knew that everyone, including Bannon, suffers the yearning of an unfulfilled secret self. He

To make a population more resilient to extremism, for example, you would first identify which people are susceptible to weaponized messaging, determine the traits that make them vulnerable to the contagion narrative, and then target them with an inoculating counter-narrative in an effort to change their behavior. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse—to foster extremism—but that was not something I had even considered.

So which is true? Is she happy or not happy? The answer depends on which information is being pulled to the front of her mind. In psychology, this is called priming. And this is, in essence, how you weaponize data: You figure out which bits of salient information to pull to the fore to affect how a person feels, what she believes, and how she behaves. Unless

This cognitive bias is called the availability heuristic, and is just one of many biases that affect our thinking.

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.

It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity.

Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic, where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion. It’s the same bias that makes people say things they later regret in a fit of anger—in the heat of the moment they are, in fact, thinking differently. With their guards down, Fox’s audience is then told they are part of a group of “ordinary Americans.” This identity is hammered home over and over, which is why there are so many references to “us” and direct chatting to the audience

This primes people for identity-motivated reasoning, which is a bias that essentially makes people accept or reject information based on how it serves to build or threaten group identity rather than on the merits of the content.

So Cambridge Analytica’s first target was Bannon himself.

This means the data from Facebook has increasingly more ecological validity, in that it is not prompted by a researcher’s questions, which inevitably inject some kind of bias. In other words, many of the benefits of the passive qualitative observation traditionally used in anthropology or sociology could be maintained, but as many social and cultural interactions were now captured in digital data, we could add the benefits of generalizability one achieves in quantitative research. Previously, the only way one could have acquired such data would have been from your bank or phone company, which are strictly regulated to prevent access to that sort of private information. But unlike a bank or telecom company, social media operated with virtually no laws governing its access to extremely granular personal data. Although

for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s naturally occurring data.

“sensational and extreme interests,” which has been used increasingly in forensic psychology to understand deviant behavior. This included “militarism” (guns and shooting, martial arts, crossbows, knives), “violent occultism” (drugs, black magic, paganism), “intellectual activities” (singing and making music, foreign travel, the environment), “occult credulousness” (the paranormal, flying saucers), and “wholesome interests” (camping, gardening, hiking).

August 2014, just two months after we launched the app, Cambridge Analytica had collected the complete Facebook accounts of more than 87 million users, mostly from America.

When I joined SCL, I was there to help the firm explore areas like counter-radicalization in order to help Britain, America, and their allies defend themselves against new threats emerging online.

How could we understand racial bias, authoritarianism, or misogyny if we did not explore them? What I did not appreciate is the fine line between exploring something and actually creating it.

Men who were not used to moderating their impulses, body language, and speech began to resent what they saw as the unfair mental and emotional labor it took to change and constantly correct how they presented in public.

these straight white men nonetheless felt a subjective experience of oppression in their own minds. And they were ready to emerge from the closet and return to a time when America was great—for them.

But lurking behind the strange humor was the rage of a life of rejection.

But liking an extreme group, such as the Proud Boys or the Incel Liberation Army, marks the user as distinct from others in such a way that a recommendation engine will prioritize these topics for personalization. Which means the site’s algorithm will start to funnel the user similar stories and pages—all to increase engagement.

Once a county-based group begins self-organizing, you introduce them to a similar group in the next county over. Then you do it again. In time, you’ve created a statewide movement of neurotic, conspiratorial citizens. The alt-right.

questions about black people—whether they were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, for example, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail. Bannon believed that the civil rights movement had limited “free thinking” in America. He was determined to liberate people by revealing what he saw as the forbidden truths about race.

Bannon went deeper and had Cambridge Analytica scale and deploy many of the same tactics that domestic abusers and bullies use to erode stress resilience in their victims.

created a wicked reinforcement cycle in which the cohort would strengthen their racialized views when they were exposed to criticism. This may be in part because the area of the brain that is most highly activated when we process strongly held beliefs is the same area that is involved when we think about who we are and our identity.

What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced.

They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes.

just-world hypothesis (JWH). This is a cognitive bias where some people rely on a presumption of a fair world:

We found that people who displayed the JWH bias were, for example, more prone to victim-blaming in hypothetical scenarios of sexual assault. If the world is fair, then random bad things should not happen to innocent people, and therefore there must have been a fault in the victim’s behavior. Finding ways to blame victims is psychologically prophylactic for some people because it helps them cope with anxiety induced by uncontrollable environmental threats while maintaining a comforting view that the world will still be fair to them.

Steve Bannon aimed to affirm the ugliest biases in the American psyche and convince those who possessed them that they were the victims, that they had been forced to suppress their true feelings for too long.

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.

In the end, we were creating a machine to contaminate America with hate and cultish paranoia,