Bannon wanted his targets to ‘discover themselves’ and ‘become who they really were’. But the tools created at Cambridge Analytica in 2014 were not about self-actualisation; they were used to accentuate people’s innermost demons in order to build what Bannon called his ‘movement’. By targeting people with specific psychological vulnerabilities, the firm victimised them into joining what was nothing more than a cult led by false prophets, where reason and facts would have little effect on its new followers, digitally isolated as they now were from inconvenient narratives.
