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

by Christopher Wylie

When Facebook banned me, they did not simply deactivate my account; they erased my entire presence on Facebook and Instagram. When my friends tried to look up old messages I had sent, nothing came up: My name, my words—everything—had disappeared. I became a shadow. Banishment is an ancient punishment to rid a society of its criminals, heretics, and political radicals who jeopardized the power of the state or church. In ancient Athens, people could be banished from society for ten years for any reason with no opportunity for appeal. In the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union, enemies of the state would not just disappear; all remnants of their existence—photos, letters, news references—would be erased and cleansed from the annals of official history. Throughout history, the powerful have used social memory and collective forgetting as a powerful weapon to crush dissent and correct their preferred histories to shape the realities of the present. And if we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way, we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel,