For most of the time I was at SCL and Cambridge Analytica, none of what we were doing felt real, partly because so many of the people I met seemed almost cartoonish. The job became more of an intellectual adventure, like playing a video game with escalating levels of difficulty. What happens if I do this? Can I make this character turn from blue to red, or red to blue? Sitting in an office, staring at a screen, it was easy to spiral down into a deeper, darker place, to lose sight of what I was actually involved in.
