Mindf*ck Quotes

“Facebook knows more about you than any other person in your life, even your wife,” Kogan told us.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“We are all vulnerable to manipulation. We make judgments based on the information available to us, but we are all susceptible to manipulation when our access to that information becomes mediated. Over time, our biases can become amplified without our even realising it.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“Scale is the elephant in the room. When Silicon Valley executives excuse themselves and say their platform’s scale is so big that it’s really hard to prevent mass shootings from being broadcast or ethnic cleansing from being incited on their platforms, this is not an excuse—they are implicitly acknowledging that what they have created is too big for them to manage on their own. And yet, they also implicitly believe that their right to profit from these systems outweighs the social costs others bear. So when companies like Facebook say, “We have heard feedback that we must do more,” as they did when their platform was used to live-broadcast mass shootings in New Zealand, we should ask them a question: If these problems are too big for you to solve on the fly, why should you be allowed to release untested products before you understand their potential consequences for society?”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are ‘free’. In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“What Cambridge Analytica did was use complex corporate setups across jurisdictions not only to launder money but to launder something that was becoming just as valuable: your data.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“Jucikas went on to explain that sabering champagne is not about brute force; it's about studying the bottle and hitting the weakest spot with graceful precision. Done correctly, this requires very little pressure—you essentially let the bottle break itself. You hack the bottle's design flaw.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon's animating ideology. Before catalyzing America's dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos through society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on truth influenced Bannon, and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes, “to believe in nonsense is an unforgettable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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 behaviour. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse to foster extremism.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“If we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and Paypal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expanded 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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“Finding ways to blame victims is psychologically prophylactic for some people because it helps them cope with anxiety induced by uncontrollable environmental threats while maintaining a comforting view that the world will still be fair to them.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“We can already see how algorithms competing to maximize our attention have the capacity to not only transform cultures but redefine the experience of existence. Algorithmically reinforced “engagement” lies at the heart of our outrage politics, call-out culture, selfie-induced vanity, tech addiction, and eroding mental well-being. Targeted users are soaked in content to keep them clicking.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“The military just used different terms—modeled influence attribution or target profiles observed acting in concert. But in fashion, we just call that a trend.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“The most susceptible targets are typically the ones who exhibit neurotic or narcissistic traits, as they tend to be less psychologically resilient to stressing narratives.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“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.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

“Hoy en día, la mayoría de los sitios donde podemos encontrar noticias serias ya son de pago, por lo que, poco a poco, la información se está convirtiendo en un producto de lujo. Además, se ha de tener en cuenta que vivimos en un entorno en el que las noticias falsas son gratis.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica. La trama para desestabilizar el mundo

“I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation – how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behaviour better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalise people”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World