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.

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.

But with the advent of the Internet, it became possible to create commodities out of our lives—our behavior, our attention, our identity. People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex.

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

I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to “move fast and break things.” I’ve never regretted something so much. I moved fast, I built things of immense power, and I never fully appreciated what I was breaking until it was too late. —

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.

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

Terror groups use social media to recruit new members, who then use guns and bombs to achieve their ends.

started to think more deeply about personality as a construct. Politics and fashion were built on the same foundation, I realized, in that they were both based on nuanced constructs of how people see themselves in relation to others.

We all care about what we wear—even the straight old man from Minnesota who never wears anything but a gray T-shirt and jeans. He doesn’t think he cares about how his clothes look, until you offer him a kimono or a dashiki.

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.

if you can’t define something, you can’t measure it, and if you can’t measure it, you can’t know if you are changing it.

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.

he made sure we had a case of champagne in the office at all times for just such occasions. He had grown up extremely poor on a farm in the waning days of the Lithuanian SSR, and over the years he had remade himself into a Cambridge elite, a dandy whose motto seemed to be live it up today, because tomorrow you might die.

It was surreal to think that these people were sitting in their kitchen in Iowa or Oklahoma or Indiana, talking to a bunch of guys in London who were looking at satellite pictures of where they lived, family photos, all of their personal information.

This was an epic moment. I was proud that we had created something so powerful. I felt sure it was something that people would be talking about for decades.

Dom Cummings—not a porn name, though it would be a good one—had

As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke.

Facebook may say: If you don’t like it, don’t use it. But there are no comparable alternatives to the dominant players on the Internet, just as there are no alternatives to electric, telecommunications, or water companies. To reject the use of platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Amazon would be to remove oneself from modern society.

“that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

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, he said, because “anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”

We need new rules to help create a healthy friction on the Internet, like speed bumps, to ensure safety in new technologies and ecosystems.

Technology is powerful, and it has the potential to lift up humanity in so many ways. But that power needs to be focused on constructive endeavors.