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

by Christopher Wylie

And not only did we have all her Facebook data, but we were merging it with all the commercial and state bureau data we’d bought as well. And imputations made from the U.S. Census. We had data about her mortgage applications, we knew how much money she made, whether she owned a gun. We had information from her airline mileage programs, so we knew how often she flew. We could see if she was married (she wasn’t). We had a sense of her physical health. And we had a satellite photo of her house, easily obtained from Google Earth. We had re-created her life in our computer. She had no idea. “Give me another,” said Jucikas. And he did it again. And again. And by the third profile, Nix—who’d hardly been paying attention at all—suddenly sat up very straight. “Wait,” he said, his eyes widening behind his black-rimmed glasses. “How many of these do we have?” “What the fuck?” Bannon interjected with a look of annoyance at Nix’s disengagement with the project. “We’re in the tens of millions now,” said Jucikas. “At this pace, we could get to 200 million by the end of the year with enough funding.” “And we know literally everything about these people?” asked Nix. “Yes,” I told him. “That’s the whole point.” The light went on: This was the first time Nix truly understood what we were doing. He could not have been less interested in things like “data” and “algorithms,” but seeing actual people onscreen, knowing everything about them, had seized his imagination. “Do we have their phone num...