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

by Christopher Wylie

The story of Cambridge Analytica shows how our identities and behavior have become commodities in the high-stakes data trade.

The first time an American told me he was dead set against “socialized medicine,” the same kind of public healthcare I accessed almost every month back home, I was shocked that someone could even think this way.

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

BUT BY DIRECTLY COMMUNICATING select messages to select voters, the microtargeting of the Obama campaign had started a journey toward the privatization of public discourse in America.

With the ascendancy of social media, we have been forced to place our trust in political campaigns to be honest, because if lies are told, we may never notice. There is no one there to correct the record inside of a private ad network.

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

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

When I recommended that the party invest in databases, people thought I’d lost my mind. They wanted sexy answers—not this. Obama was their benchmark for a “model” campaign, and they were taken with high cheekbones and pouty lips, not the skeleton and backbone that made it all possible.

five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

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.

Jucikas had grown up in rural Lithuania, where he watched Soviet tanks roll through his town as a boy. He was obviously brilliant.

We went around and around, discussing the question in theoretical terms, but the reality of it felt sobering: Extremism is whatever you want it to be.

When we describe cultures, we use the language and vocabulary of personality. We use the same words to describe both people and peoples.

If you walk up to a random person on the street and ask, “Are you happy?” the chances are high that she will say yes. If, however, you walk up to that same person and first ask, “Have you gained weight in the last few years?” or “Are any people from your high school more successful than you?” and then you ask “Are you happy?”—that same person will be less inclined to answer yes.

This cognitive bias is called the availability heuristic, and is just one of many biases that affect our thinking. The bias is why, for example, people who see more news reports of violent murders on the news tend to think that society is becoming more violent when in fact global murder rates have been declining overall during the last quarter century.

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

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.

A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers.

America is addicted to its own self-conception, and it wants to be exceptional. But it’s not. America is just like any other country.

As it happens, the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging. According to evolutionary psychologists, in order to survive in premodern times, humans developed a disproportionate attentiveness toward potential threats.

This is why there are infinite scrolls on newsfeeds—there is very little difference between a user endlessly swiping for more content and a gambler pulling the slot machine lever over and over.

Cambridge Analytica’s findings confirmed his suspicion: America is filled with racists who remain silent for fear of social shunning.

The world did not know it yet, but Brexit was a crime scene.

And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other.

As the primaries continued, it became apparent that Trump’s chances of winning were increasing, and the attitude of people in Ottawa began to shift from “He’s crazy, ha ha,” to “He’s crazy…and he might become president of the elephant next to us.”

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.

Facebook, like the NRA, evades its moral responsibility by invoking the same kind of “Guns don’t kill people” argument.

At the time of America’s founding, a situation where our agency could be manipulated by a motivated and thinking environment was never contemplated as a possibility. For the Founding Fathers, this would have been a power known only to God.

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.

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.