Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

by Christopher Wylie

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 US 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.’