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.

The infrastructure for processing all this data came from a company then called the Voter Activation Network, Inc. (VAN), which was run by a fabulous gay couple from the Boston area, Mark Sullivan and Jim St. George. By the end of the 2008 campaign, thanks to VAN, the Democratic National Committee would have ten times more data on voters than it had after the 2004 campaign. This volume of data, and the tools to organize and manipulate it, gave Democrats a clear advantage in driving voters to the polls.

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 newly formed Cambridge Analytica became that arsenal. Refining techniques from military psychological operations (PSYOPS), Cambridge Analytica propelled Steve Bannon’s alt-right insurgency into its ascendancy. In this new war, the American voter became a target of confusion, manipulation, and deception. Truth was replaced by alternative narratives and virtual realities.

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.

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.

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

This in turn triggers a reactance effect, whereby alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. The more Democrats criticized Fox’s bait, the more entrenched the audience’s views and the angrier they became. This is how, for example, viewers could reject criticism of Donald Trump for saying racist things: They internalized the critique as an attack on their own identity rather than that of the candidate. This has an insidious effect in which the more debate occurs, the more entrenched the audience becomes.

There’s a tendency among Americans to see their country as exceptional, but we wanted to study it like we would study any country, using the same language and sociological approaches.

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.

They were pioneers in social-media-enabled psychological profiling. In 2007, Stillwell set up an application called myPersonality, which offered users a personality profile for joining the app. After giving the user a result, the app would harvest the profile and store it for use in research.

Facebook did not require express consent for apps to collect data from an app user’s friends, as it viewed being a user of Facebook as enough consent to take their data—even if the friends had no idea the app was harvesting their private data. The average Facebook user has somewhere between 150 and 300 friends.

In fact, a 2015 study by Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell showed that, using Facebook likes, a computer model reigned supreme in predicting human behavior. With ten likes, the model predicted a person’s behavior more accurately than one of their co-workers. With 150 likes, better than a family member. And with 300 likes, the model knew the person better than their own spouse.

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

Bannon had a starker, more aggressive take on this idea: He believed the Democrats were simply using American minorities for their own political ends. He was convinced that the social compact that emerged after the civil rights movement, where Democrats benefited from African American votes in exchange for government aid, was not born out of any moral enlightenment, but instead out of shrewd calculation. In his framing, the only way the Democrats could defend what he saw as the inconvenient truths of this social compact was through political correctness. Democrats subjected “rationalists” to social shame when they spoke out about this “race reality.”

Cambridge Analytica had connected with a man named Sam Patten, who had lived a colorful life as a political operative for hire all over the world. In the 1990s, Patten worked in the oil sector in Kazakhstan before moving into Eastern European politics. When CA hired him, he had just finished a project for pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine. At the time, he was working with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, a former officer of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (the GRU). Although Patten denies that he gave his Russian partner any data, it was later revealed that Paul Manafort, who was for several months Donald Trump’s campaign manager, did pass along voter polling data to Kilimnik in a separate instance. Patten and Kilimnik had met in Moscow in the early 2000s and later worked in Ukraine for Paul Manafort’s consultancy.

CA’s client list eventually grew into a who’s who of the American right wing. The Trump and Cruz campaigns paid more than $5 million apiece to the firm. The U.S. Senate campaigns of Roy Blunt of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas became clients.

The super PAC of future national security adviser John Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1 million to explore how to increase militarism in American youth. Bolton was worried that millennials were a “morally weak” generation that would not want to go to war with Iran or other “evil” countries.

IN FEBRUARY 2013, a Russian military general named Valery Gerasimov wrote an article challenging the prevailing notions of warfare. Gerasimov, who was Russia’s chief of the general staff (roughly equivalent to chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff), penned his thoughts in the Military-Industrial Kurier under the title “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight”—a set of ideas that some would later dub the Gerasimov Doctrine. Gerasimov wrote that the “ ‘rules of war’ have changed” and that “the role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown.” He addressed the uses of artificial intelligence and information in warfare: “The information space,” he wrote, “opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy.” 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. “It would be easiest of all to say that the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ are not war, and so there are no lessons for us—military men—to learn. But maybe the opposite is true—that precisely these events are typical of warfare in the twenty-first century.”

Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and PayPal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, 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.”