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.

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.

The data has become more and more valuable, with Facebook making on average $30 from each of its 170 million American users. At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are “free.” In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.

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

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

But if you want to be able to quantify and predict a trait, you have to be able to create a definition of it. 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.

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

In management, they always say there is a golden rule for running any project: You can get a project done cheap, fast, or well. But the catch is you can choose only two, because you’ll never get all three. For the first time in my life, I saw that rule totally broken—because the Facebook app Kogan created was faster, better, and cheaper than anything I could have imagined.

College-educated city dwellers, accustomed to living among immigrants and working in businesses that benefit from their skilled labor, rejected right-wing fearmongering and generally supported Remain. Lower-income Britons and those who lived in rural areas or old industrial heartlands were much more likely to support Leave. National sovereignty has always been a core part of British identity, and the Leave campaign argued that EU membership was undermining that sovereignty.

Dom Cummings—not a porn name, though it would be a good one—had made a reputation at the Department for Education in the coalition government as a Machiavellian operator and a very difficult character.

Cameron, the prime minister at the time, would later suggest that Cummings was a “career psychopath.”

He looked a bit dazed, or maybe a bit blazed, like he was either stuck trying to solve a puzzle or had just dragged an epic joint—I could never quite tell.

What I liked about meeting Cummings was that we didn’t talk about what people in politics usually obsess about. Cummings understood that more people are busy watching the Kardashians or Pornhub than following the political scandal du jour on BBC Newsnight.

After the referendum, Borwick revealed that Vote Leave and AIQ had together disseminated more than a hundred different ads with 1,433 different messages to their target voters in the weeks leading up to the referendum. Cummings later revealed that these ads were viewed more than 169 million times, but only targeted at a narrow segment of a few million voters, which resulted in their newsfeeds being dominated by Vote Leave messaging.

The history of warfare is the history of new inventions and strategies, many of which were born out of necessity.

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.

In this new economy of surveillance capitalism, we are the raw materials.

Privacy is not about hiding—privacy is about human growth and agency.

The Electoral Commission later conceded that even if the vote was won with the benefit of illegal data or illegal financing, the result still stands.

After I came forward with the Cambridge Analytica story, Brittany Kaiser rebranded herself as a whistleblower and hired a PR manager to start booking interviews. She attended a parliamentary hearing in which she admitted to being involved in the Nigeria project, said that Cambridge Analytica likely retained Facebook data, and outlined her relationship with Julian Assange. (Later, it would emerge that she visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.) Immediately after Kaiser’s testimony concluded, Nix texted her, “Well done Britt, it looked quite tough and you did ok. ;-).” The next day, she flew to New York and held a press conference to plug her new data project, which launched something called the Internet of Value Omniledger, apparently intended to unleash our “data freedom.”

If we as software engineers and data scientists are to call ourselves professionals worthy of the esteem and high salaries we command, there must be a corresponding duty for us to act ethically.