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

by Christopher Wylie

When Bannon said he was interested in changing culture, I asked him how he defined culture. There was a long pause. I told him that 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.

When a communicable disease threatens a population, you immunize certain vectors first—usually babies and old people, as they are most susceptible to infection. Then nurses and doctors, teachers and bus drivers, as they are most likely to spread a contagion through wide social interaction, even if they do not succumb to the disease themselves. The same type of strategy could help you change culture. To make a population more resilient to extremism, for example, you would first identify which people are susceptible to weaponized messaging, determine the traits that make them vulnerable to the contagion narrative, and then target them with an inoculating counter-narrative in an effort to change their behavior. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse—to foster extremism—but that was not something I had even considered. —

A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. This flawed logic extends into a perception that attention paid to other groups will ultimately mean less attention for people like them. Either way, minorities seemed to be “threats”—identity threats or threats to resources. Following this hypothesis of an underlying sense of threat, we wanted to see if we could mitigate some of these feelings, and we did so by trying to reduce the sense of threat. We would ask people in one study to imagine they were invincible superheroes who couldn’t be harmed or killed. We then asked them about types of people they ordinarily considered threatening—gays, immigrants, people of other races—and found that they had a more muted response to those “threatening” stimuli. If you are invincible, nothing can threaten you, not even the gays.

Lots of reporting on Cambridge Analytica gave the impression that everyone was targeted. In fact, not that many people were targeted at all. CA didn’t need to create a big target universe, because most elections are zero-sum games: If you get one more vote than the other guy or girl, you win the election. Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread.

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood.

CA then discovered that for those with evangelical worldviews in particular, a “just world” exists because God rewards people with success if they follow his rules. In other words, people who live good lives won’t get preexisting conditions, and they will succeed in life, even if they are black. Cambridge Analytica began feeding these cohorts narratives with an expanded religious valence. “God is fair and just, right? Wealthy people are blessed by God for a reason, right? Because He is fair. If minorities complain about receiving less, perhaps there is a reason—because He is fair. Or are you daring to question God?”

But in this next iteration of capitalism, the raw materials are no longer oil or minerals but rather commodified attention and behavior. In this new economy of surveillance capitalism, we are the raw materials. What this means is that there is a new economic incentive to create substantial informational asymmetries between platforms and users. In order to be able to convert user behavior into profit, platforms need to know everything about their users’ behavior, while their users know nothing of the platform’s behavior. As Cambridge Analytica discovered, this becomes the perfect environment to incubate propaganda.

Why should we care so much about a mere £700,000? Let’s be clear on this point: Vote Leave’s scheme was the largest known breach of campaign finance law in British history. But even if it wasn’t, elections, like a 100-meter sprint in the Olympics, are zero-sum games, where the winner takes all. Whoever comes first, even if it’s by just a few votes or milliseconds, wins the whole race: They get to sit in the public office. They get the gold medal. They get to name your Supreme Court justices. They get to take your country out of the European Union. The only difference, of course, is that if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. 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.

It turns out cheating is a pretty good strategy to win, as there are very few consequences. 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.

Facebook learned that, despite the wrath of the media storm, there were actually very few consequences for simply ignoring the parliaments of the world—the company learned that it could behave like a sovereign state, immune from their scrutiny.

I used to believe that the systems we have broadly work. I used to think that there was someone waiting with a plan who could solve a problem like Cambridge Analytica. I was wrong. Our system is broken, our laws don’t work, our regulators are weak, our governments don’t understand what’s happening, and our technology is usurping our democracy.