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

by Christopher Wylie

Now I understood that this was how Cummings had gotten around the fact that Cambridge Analytica was already working with Leave.EU—he just used one of CA’s subsidiaries, based in a different country, with a name that no one knew. AIQ had Cambridge Analytica’s infrastructure, handled all of its data, and could perform all the same functions, but without the label.

The people of the United Kingdom were the targets of a scaled information operation deployed by AIQ, and the problem with Remain was that they completely failed to understand what they were up against. As Cambridge Analytica identified, provoking anger and indignation reduced the need for full rational explanations and would put voters into a more indiscriminately punitive mindset. CA found that not only did this anger immunize target voters to the notion that the economy would suffer, but some people would support the economy suffering if it meant that out-groups like metropolitan liberals or immigrants would suffer in the process—that, in effect, their vote would be used as a form of punishment.

I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation—how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behavior better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalize people inside the Republican Party.

bunch of the people they were targeting were those who typically didn’t vote Republican or didn’t vote at all. They were trying to expand the electorate through this while at the same time they were committed to voter suppression. In particular, they focused on disengaging African Americans and other minority communities. One of the ways they did this was to peddle left-wing social justice rhetoric to depict Hillary Clinton as a propagator of white supremacy—while themselves working for a white supremacist. The aim was to move people from all demographics of a more left-wing ideology to vote for a third-party candidate, like Jill Stein.

first, his campaign was a mess. But then he began repeating phrases like “Build the wall” and “Drain the swamp,” and he started rising in the polls. I called Gettleson and said, “Well, this sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?”—because these were the exact phrases CA had tested and included in reports sent to Bannon well before Trump announced.

The possibility of a Trump win was the talk of Trudeau’s office, though it was still mostly a laughing matter. On a scale of unimaginable to unthinkable to terrifying, just how unimaginable was it? We had one meeting where a couple of people were making fun of Trump. God, these Americans! They outdo themselves every time! And everybody laughed. Well, almost everyone. I wasn’t laughing, because I understood the power of psychological warfare at scale.

The Germans have an expression called Mauer im Kopf, which translates roughly as “the wall in the mind.”

When this new candidate came out of nowhere, demanding that America build the wall, I knew that this was not a literal demand. Democrats and Republicans alike seemed at a loss for how to react to such an absurd campaign platform. But, unlike this new dark horse, they could not peer into what was happening in the minds of America. They could not see that those people were not merely demanding a physical wall. It was not about building a literal wall—the very idea of the wall itself was enough to begin to achieve Bannon’s aims. They were demanding the creation of America’s very own Mauer im Kopf.

Alan wasn’t laughing, either. In one meeting he said, “I actually think Trump can win.” People looked at him and rolled their eyes, and someone said, “Come on.” Then he looked at me, and I said, “Yeah, I think he can win, too.” That was the moment when I truly grasped, to my utter horror, that the tools I had helped build might play a pivotal role in making Donald Trump the next president of the United States.

the lunatic fringe of the alt-right used the emails to fuel the deranged theory that the Clinton campaign, at the highest levels, was involved in a child sex ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. My mind kept returning to the connections among Cambridge Analytica, the Russian government, and Assange. Cambridge Analytica seemed to have its dirty hands in every dirty part of this campaign.

This was the first time I had really talked to anyone about the totality of what had happened. What, she asked me, is Cambridge Analytica? “It’s Steve Bannon’s psychological mindfuck tool,” I told her bluntly.

On May 17, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to oversee the investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign. It was beginning to become apparent that 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.

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.

This was just part of the assistance that allowed me to get through the whistleblowing ordeal in one piece. As I prepared to speak out against political and corporate Goliaths, I was a David now backed by committed lawyers and journalists, a legal defense fund, and a huge amount of moral support. So often, whistleblowers are framed as lone activists standing up to giants for what’s right. But in my case, I was never alone, and I got incredibly lucky on several occasions. Without this help, I never would have been able to come forward.

As I saw Trump rise to power and watched as he banned citizens of Muslim states from entering the United States and gave justifications for white supremacist movements, I couldn’t help feeling that I had laid the seeds for this to happen. I had played with fire, and now I watched as the world was burning. In heading to Congress, I was not simply going there to give my testimony. I was attending my own confessional.

In my living room, there’s a stand in the far corner where there used to be a television. Wires still dangle from the walls there. It was a smart TV that connected to my Netflix and social media accounts, and it had a microphone and camera. In my room, there is a nightstand with a drawer that is lined with a special metallic fabric that prevents any devices in the drawer from sending or receiving electronic signals.

An unplugged Amazon Alexa sits alone, buried among a pile of other electronic rubbish—tablets, phones, a smartwatch—that I have yet to dispose of properly.

My personal computer sits in the living room, encrypted and locked down with a physical U2F key. The cameras are taped, although there is little you can do about the built-in microphone. On the floor, there is a private VPN server connected to the wall, which in turn connects onward onto other servers.

There is a security camera at the entrance of my building that relays data to a security company. I have no idea if any of it is encrypted, so who knows who is watching.

My backpack always has a portable hardware VPN router in case I need to connect to insecure Wi-Fi, as well as several Faraday cases

the TV was deemed a risk, as it could be used to watch or listen to me without my ever knowing. As we dismantled it, I smiled at the irony of a TV that watches you.

We now live in a world where there are invisible spirits made of code and data that have the power to watch us, listen to us, and think about us. And I wanted these specters gone from my life.

People often talk about a dualism: the cyber world and our “real lives.” But after having most of my digital identity confiscated, I can tell you they are not separate. When you are erased from social media, you lose touch with people.

It’s as if my identity has been confiscated and people no longer believe that I am who I say I am.

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.

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.

Steve Bannon recognized that the “virtual” worlds of the Internet are so much more real than most people realize. 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.

Facebook, in a panic about its PR crisis, had hired the secret communications firm Definers Public Affairs, which subsequently leaked out fake narratives filled with anti-Semitic tropes about its critics being part of a George Soros–funded conspiracy. Rumors were seeded on the Internet and, as I discovered personally, its targets took it as a cue to take matters into their own hands.

Essentially, Gerasimov took the lessons of the Arab Spring uprisings, which were propelled by information sharing on social media, and urged military strategists to adapt them.

Russians had to devise another way to regain the advantage—one that had nothing to do with the physical battlespace.

It wasn’t until 1915, when the French pilot Roland Garros flew a plane jerry-rigged with a machine gun, that military strategists realized that war could actually be waged from the skies.

Information warfare has evolved in similar fashion. At first, no one could have imagined that Facebook or Twitter could be battlefield tools; warfare was waged on the ground, in the air, at sea, and potentially in space. But the fifth domain—cyberspace—has proved to be a fruitful battleground for those who had the imagination and foresight to envision using social media for information warfare. You can draw a straight line from the groundwork laid by Gerasimov, Chekinov, and Bogdanov, right through the actions of Cambridge Analytica, to the victories of the Brexit and Trump campaigns. In only five or so years, the Russian military and state have managed to develop the first devastatingly effective new weapon of the twenty-first century.

The objective is to tear apart our social fabric. They want us to hate one another. And that division can hit so much harder when these narratives contaminate the things we care about in our everyday lives—the

We are all vulnerable to manipulation. We make judgments based on the information available to us, but we are all susceptible to manipulation when our access to that information becomes mediated. Over time, our biases can become amplified without our even realizing it. Many of us forget that what we see in our newsfeeds and our search engines is already moderated by algorithms whose sole motivation is to select what will engage us, not inform us. With most reputable news sources now behind paywalls, we are already seeing information inch toward becoming a luxury product in a marketplace where fake news is always free.

For the first time in human history, we will immerse ourselves in motivated spaces influenced by these silicon spirits of our making. No longer will our environment be passive or benign; it will have intentions, opinions, and agendas.

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. Targeted users are soaked in content to keep them clicking. We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do.

what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?

If we exist in an environment that always watches, remembers, and labels us, according to conditions or values outside our control or awareness, then our data selves may shackle us to histories that we prefer to move on from. Privacy is the very essence of our power to decide who and how we want to be. Privacy is not about hiding—privacy is about human growth and agency.

These platforms are purpose-built to run user consent through a blender. No one opts out of these platforms, because users have no other choice but to accept.

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,

he expounded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance. We just don’t call them monarchies in public,

the first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media.

with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.

if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. But in politics, we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite to our democracy. There are harsher punishments for athletes who cheat in sport than for campaigns that cheat in elections. Though they won by only 3.78 percent, the Brexiteers claimed the entire “will of the people” for themselves––and even when Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percent, he too claimed victory. Despite proven cheating, Vote Leave did not have its Brexit medal taken away. No one was disqualified from running in future campaigns, and Vote Leave’s two leaders, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were both allowed to run for prime minister. Crimes waged against our democracy were not considered by the political class to be “real crime.” Many framed these transgressions as being on par with a parking fine, despite the very real harm we face when our civic institutions can be so easily undermined by criminals and hostile foreign states seeking to wage electoral terrorism on our society. And, of course, the most powerful people in Britain and America took the position that these crimes didn’t even happen—rather, they were a “hoax,” the invention of the bitter opponents they had vanquished. This, in the face of what were once known as “facts” and “reality.”

CA’s former head of product Matt Oczkowski founded a firm called Data Propria (Latin for “Personal Data”) and brought CA’s chief data scientist David Wilkinson with him. The firm has stated that it will focus on targeting “motivational behavioral triggers” and had already started work for the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Mark Turnbull, the former managing director of Cambridge Analytica, joined up with one of the firm’s former associates, Ahmad Al-Khatib, to set up Auspex International, which they described as an “ethically based” and “boutique geopolitical consultancy.”

Inside Cambridge Analytica, I saw what greed, power, racism, and colonialism looks like up close. I saw how billionaires behave when they want to shape the world in their image. I saw the most bizarre, dark niches of our society. As a whistleblower, I saw what big companies will do to protect their profits. I saw the lengths to which people will go to cover up crimes that others committed for the sake of a convenient narrative. I saw flag-waving “patriots” turn a blind eye to the defacement of the rule of law on the most important constitutional question of a generation. But I also saw all the people who cared and who fought back against a failing system. I saw journalists at The Guardian, The New York Times, and Channel 4 all working to bear witness to the crimes committed by Cambridge Analytica and the incompetence of Facebook. I saw my brilliant lawyers outmaneuver every threat that was thrown my way. I saw the kindness of people who came to support me and asked for nothing in return. I saw the tiny Information Commissioner’s Office, based in the parish town of Wilmslow, England, use what powers it could to take on an American technology giant––eventually issuing Facebook the maximum fine allowable in law for data breaches. And I saw members of Congress who were concerned and eager to learn about the brave new world we now find ourselves in.

On July 24, 2019, the Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5 billion civil penalty against Facebook, and the same day the Securities and Exchange Commission issued notice of an additional $100 million fine. The regulators found that not only did Facebook fail to protect users’ privacy, the company misled the public and journalists by issuing false statements that it had seen no evidence of wrongdoing when it in fact had. The fine was one of the largest imposed by the U.S. government for any violation. In fact, this was the largest ever fine issued to an American company for violating consumers’ privacy rights, and was twenty times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide. However, it was nonetheless seen by investors as good news. The news actually increased Facebook’s share value by 3.6 percent, with the market tacitly recognizing that even the law cannot stop the growth of these technology giants.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I am far more cynical now than before I started this journey. But it hasn’t made me more resigned. If anything, it has made me even more radical. I used to believe that the systems we have broadly work. I used to think that there was someone waiting with a plan who could solve a problem like Cambridge Analytica. I was wrong. Our system is broken, our laws don’t work, our regulators are weak, our governments don’t understand what’s happening, and our technology is usurping our democracy. So I had to learn to find my voice in order to speak up about what I saw was happening. I am hopeful, because I have seen what happens when we find our voices.

People are already morphing themselves to fit a machine’s idea of who they should be.