What do you think?
Rate this book
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers.
Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals in--excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other through psychological manipulation. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.
Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born.
Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.
Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals in--excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other through psychological manipulation. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.
Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born.
Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published October 8, 2019
About the author
Christopher Wylie
1 book84 followersChristopher Wylie has been called “the millennials’ first great whistleblower” and “a pink-haired, nose-ringed oracle sent from the future.” He is known for his role in setting up—and then taking down—Cambridge Analytica. His revelations exposing the rampant misuse of data rocked Silicon Valley and led to some of the largest multinational investigations into data crime ever. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he studied law at the London School of Economics before moving into cultural data science and fashion trend forecasting. He lives in London, England.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 889 reviews
August 28, 2022
5★
READ THIS: My pick for best non-fiction, true crime, psychological thriller - ever!
Can't believe I wrote so much and didn't once mention Steve Bannon, who is the one who thought to turn this research into psychological warfare.
“I don’t know what else to say other than I was more naïve than I thought I was at the time. . .
When I joined SCL, I was there to help the firm explore areas like counter-radicalisation in order to help Britain, America and their allies defend themselves against new threats emerging online.”
Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. How was ISIS attracting recruits? How could we good guys find out who was a likely target so we could counteract whatever was pushing them towards those bad guys and militant jihadism? Of course it was a good idea.
We’ve all done it. Even as a child, you learn to wait till a grown-up is in a good mood before you ask for a treat. As you get older, you get more manipulative. You put someone in a good mood before asking for a favour.
So it’s still a good idea. But – there’s always a but – when this eclectic bunch of people were gathered together to figure out what information they needed, how to collect it, and what to do with it, most of them had no idea that it could be used to change voting behaviour.
. . . “Facebook’s data was weaponised by the firm, and . . . the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states.”
That’s the word – weaponised. Basically, we’ve all shot ourselves in the proverbial foot, because we were silly enough to believe that rules about privacy were real and that laws could be enforced. So we connected, shared only with Friends of Friends of Friends, or whatever list you chose. YOU chose. Private? Yeah, right.
“Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled* spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behaviour. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.”
*[The asterisk is mine. ‘Surveilled’ is ‘watched’, in case you weren’t aware that in the US, they’ve made a verb from the noun ‘surveillance’.]
Of course we knew Facebook watched what we did so they could put all the right ads up on our pages. Same with Google and other search engines. Personal note.
I don’t mean to make light of this. I have always said anything you put online you should be prepared to see posted on your front door or on the front page of the newspaper. It’s a way to remember to moderate yourself. But like the author, I didn’t figure on a company collecting everyone’s prejudices and hate and putting it all together to post propaganda to foment a general rebellion.
It’s one thing when peasants and serfs rebel against the nobility. They have a common cause about injustice. What Cambridge Analytica did was convince everybody who had a gripe about anything at all that it was the fault of “the system”, so the solution was to “break the system”. Of course, the result is a void which squillionaires and oligarchs are quick to fill. POWER!
They ran focus groups everywhere, finding out what people were upset about. They did this across Africa, Trinidad, and the tentacles spread further and further. The fact that everyone’s complaint is not the same, doesn’t matter. In face, conflicting complaints don’t even matter. This came from a focus group in Louisiana.
“A man named Lloyd, speaking with a Cajun accent that Gettleson found almost indecipherable, came across loud and clear in venting his disgust that the schools in his parish no longer taught his native French. He was furious that his granddaughter was being denied the chance to learn the ‘culture and heritage’ of her Cajun forebears.
It wasn’t fifteen minutes before the same man launched into a rant about Latinos, how even in America they wouldn’t stop speaking Spanish. Somehow, no one in the group saw the disconnect.”
A personal note.
So they know the Cajun man’s soft spot – Latinos.
Absolutely compelling reading. You know those students who seem to highlight so much that entire pages are yellow? I wasn’t one of them. I tend to highlight some key words or passages, because if too much is marked, nothing stands out. Well, this is one book that would be all yellow!
Everyone should be aware of what has happened. I will let Chris’s quotes give you an idea of the rest of the story. It’s a terrific book, and a story that’s hard to believe. Just because it’s possible to create something that is world-beatingly powerful doesn’t mean you should.
Personal note.
The author wanders back and forth between his early days in Canada and today, and early days in England and then back to today, which can get confusing. But it’s necessary, because the different threads of his interests and connections are what made his part in the puzzle unique. He was the one who understood how to make things work – for the better, he’d hoped, but it was really the challenge that hooked him. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks to NetGalley and Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted so much both above and below.
“I provided evidence tying Cambridge Analytica to Donald Trump, Facebook, Russian intelligence, international hackers and Brexit."
. . .
“Although Cambridge Analytica was created as a business, I learned later that it was never intended to make money. The firm’s sole purpose was to cannibalise the Republican Party and remould American culture.”
. . .
“Soon enough, having perfected its methods far from the attention of western media [influencing African elections], CA shifted from instigating tribal conflict in Africa to instigating tribal conflict in America.”
. . .
“The world of psychological warfare of which SCL was a part has been around for as long as humans have waged war. In the sixth century BC, Persians of the Achaemenid, knowing that Egyptians worshipped the cat god Bastet, drew images of cats on their shields so the Egyptians would be reluctant to take aim at them in battle.”
. . .
“I told myself that truly learning about society includes delving into uncomfortable questions about our darker sides. How could we understand racial bias, authoritarianism or misogyny if we did not explore them? What I did not appreciate is the fine line between exploring something and actually creating it.”
HERE IS HOW YOU GET GOD INVOLVED:
“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 pre-existing 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?’
THIS HAS BEEN ME. YOU, TOO?
“We are socialised to place trust in our institutions – our government, our police, our schools, our regulators. It’s as if we assume there’s some guy with a secret team of experts sitting in an office with a plan, and if that plan doesn’t work, don’t worry, he’s got a plan B and a plan C – someone in charge will take care of it. But in truth, that guy doesn’t exist. If we choose to wait, nobody will come.”
But wait - there's more!
5 January 2020
"Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’
Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...
=========
2022
Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age by Ed Coper is an excellent new book that explains a lot about how and why disinformation is spreading and causing division. This is my recent review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
From Mad Men to Math Men
There's an interesting 2017 interview with Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, explaining how data is used to target the right people with the right information to get a desired outcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6PWr...
READ THIS: My pick for best non-fiction, true crime, psychological thriller - ever!
Can't believe I wrote so much and didn't once mention Steve Bannon, who is the one who thought to turn this research into psychological warfare.
“I don’t know what else to say other than I was more naïve than I thought I was at the time. . .
When I joined SCL, I was there to help the firm explore areas like counter-radicalisation in order to help Britain, America and their allies defend themselves against new threats emerging online.”
Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. How was ISIS attracting recruits? How could we good guys find out who was a likely target so we could counteract whatever was pushing them towards those bad guys and militant jihadism? Of course it was a good idea.
We’ve all done it. Even as a child, you learn to wait till a grown-up is in a good mood before you ask for a treat. As you get older, you get more manipulative. You put someone in a good mood before asking for a favour.
So it’s still a good idea. But – there’s always a but – when this eclectic bunch of people were gathered together to figure out what information they needed, how to collect it, and what to do with it, most of them had no idea that it could be used to change voting behaviour.
. . . “Facebook’s data was weaponised by the firm, and . . . the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states.”
That’s the word – weaponised. Basically, we’ve all shot ourselves in the proverbial foot, because we were silly enough to believe that rules about privacy were real and that laws could be enforced. So we connected, shared only with Friends of Friends of Friends, or whatever list you chose. YOU chose. Private? Yeah, right.
“Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled* spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behaviour. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.”
*[The asterisk is mine. ‘Surveilled’ is ‘watched’, in case you weren’t aware that in the US, they’ve made a verb from the noun ‘surveillance’.]
Of course we knew Facebook watched what we did so they could put all the right ads up on our pages. Same with Google and other search engines. Personal note.
I don’t mean to make light of this. I have always said anything you put online you should be prepared to see posted on your front door or on the front page of the newspaper. It’s a way to remember to moderate yourself. But like the author, I didn’t figure on a company collecting everyone’s prejudices and hate and putting it all together to post propaganda to foment a general rebellion.
It’s one thing when peasants and serfs rebel against the nobility. They have a common cause about injustice. What Cambridge Analytica did was convince everybody who had a gripe about anything at all that it was the fault of “the system”, so the solution was to “break the system”. Of course, the result is a void which squillionaires and oligarchs are quick to fill. POWER!
They ran focus groups everywhere, finding out what people were upset about. They did this across Africa, Trinidad, and the tentacles spread further and further. The fact that everyone’s complaint is not the same, doesn’t matter. In face, conflicting complaints don’t even matter. This came from a focus group in Louisiana.
“A man named Lloyd, speaking with a Cajun accent that Gettleson found almost indecipherable, came across loud and clear in venting his disgust that the schools in his parish no longer taught his native French. He was furious that his granddaughter was being denied the chance to learn the ‘culture and heritage’ of her Cajun forebears.
It wasn’t fifteen minutes before the same man launched into a rant about Latinos, how even in America they wouldn’t stop speaking Spanish. Somehow, no one in the group saw the disconnect.”
A personal note.
So they know the Cajun man’s soft spot – Latinos.
Absolutely compelling reading. You know those students who seem to highlight so much that entire pages are yellow? I wasn’t one of them. I tend to highlight some key words or passages, because if too much is marked, nothing stands out. Well, this is one book that would be all yellow!
Everyone should be aware of what has happened. I will let Chris’s quotes give you an idea of the rest of the story. It’s a terrific book, and a story that’s hard to believe. Just because it’s possible to create something that is world-beatingly powerful doesn’t mean you should.
Personal note.
The author wanders back and forth between his early days in Canada and today, and early days in England and then back to today, which can get confusing. But it’s necessary, because the different threads of his interests and connections are what made his part in the puzzle unique. He was the one who understood how to make things work – for the better, he’d hoped, but it was really the challenge that hooked him. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks to NetGalley and Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted so much both above and below.
“I provided evidence tying Cambridge Analytica to Donald Trump, Facebook, Russian intelligence, international hackers and Brexit."
. . .
“Although Cambridge Analytica was created as a business, I learned later that it was never intended to make money. The firm’s sole purpose was to cannibalise the Republican Party and remould American culture.”
. . .
“Soon enough, having perfected its methods far from the attention of western media [influencing African elections], CA shifted from instigating tribal conflict in Africa to instigating tribal conflict in America.”
. . .
“The world of psychological warfare of which SCL was a part has been around for as long as humans have waged war. In the sixth century BC, Persians of the Achaemenid, knowing that Egyptians worshipped the cat god Bastet, drew images of cats on their shields so the Egyptians would be reluctant to take aim at them in battle.”
. . .
“I told myself that truly learning about society includes delving into uncomfortable questions about our darker sides. How could we understand racial bias, authoritarianism or misogyny if we did not explore them? What I did not appreciate is the fine line between exploring something and actually creating it.”
HERE IS HOW YOU GET GOD INVOLVED:
“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 pre-existing 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?’
THIS HAS BEEN ME. YOU, TOO?
“We are socialised to place trust in our institutions – our government, our police, our schools, our regulators. It’s as if we assume there’s some guy with a secret team of experts sitting in an office with a plan, and if that plan doesn’t work, don’t worry, he’s got a plan B and a plan C – someone in charge will take care of it. But in truth, that guy doesn’t exist. If we choose to wait, nobody will come.”
- - - - - - - - - the end- - - - - - - - -
of the world as we thought we knew it
But wait - there's more!
5 January 2020
"Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’
Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...
=========
2022
Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age by Ed Coper is an excellent new book that explains a lot about how and why disinformation is spreading and causing division. This is my recent review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
From Mad Men to Math Men
There's an interesting 2017 interview with Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, explaining how data is used to target the right people with the right information to get a desired outcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6PWr...
November 18, 2019
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie is a cautionary tale about politics, Steve Bannon, Big Data and how to set Americans against one another and the whole thing brought to you by a twenty-four-year-old Canadian whistleblower. This is a classic case of food for thought and this book should be read before the next election.
December 28, 2020
Wow!! Enlightening and scary and brave.
My creative juices have abandoned me in terms of crafting an interesting and creative review. Suffice it to say this is an important book that everyone should read!! We are being manipulated by the social networks and search engines that we see online. It's psychological warfare and it is being waged constantly on fb, twitter, instagram, google etc. Your data is being collected and analyzed creating an online persona crafted to feed you specific information designed to influence your behavior. How they collect your data is tricky. In addition to the cookies that follow your every move, and the friends posts that you like, they also collect it via games that ask you to play that tell you your "spirit animal" or whatever. Particularly on facebook and twitter but also used in search engine results, internet browser add-ons, and other social media. Your malleable political views in this case are extremely manipulated. In the US it was used in the election of Trump. I think most people sense this in the back of their minds. No one would on the basis of his resume alone elect such a man. But what if there are planted stories designed to motivate you based on the ways in which you can be manipulated: fear, resentment, anxiety, entitlement, etc? Mostly negative emotions. These emotions are affirmed and amplified by other articles and posted on fb. Then they flood your new feed with these types of articles that you are predisposed to believe because it reinforces your world view. And they come with hundreds and thousands of likes and hearts implying that your view is the standard/norm. The world view that you may have adapted on the basis of the proliferation of items and views you are constantly seeing on fb, twitter, a google search etc. Fake accounts both post fake articles and like them by the hundreds and thousands amplifying. Then you join in and repost and retweet these false articles giving them a slight bit of credibility among your friends. A vicious circle that perpetuates and reinforces a belief. The end result is polarization and intransigence. Turns out that both US political parties have tried this, but one party has members very susceptible to psychological manipulation. A party that leans authoritarian while claiming patriotism. A party that dislikes nuance and sees the world in exclusionary terms. And guess what, not only are people willing to exploit this; but they don't hide it. They convince that the "other" party are the brainwashed ones. You ever wonder how people can believe that the Democrats stole an election in a state with Republican governance including the responsibilities for the election? How people can turn against values they thought were rock solid. How Evangelicals suddenly only care about abortion and judges etc. The well of psychological warfare runs deep and the ethics are really obvious but if you are a political party that values power over all things and are afraid of losing power based on political positions, the whole exercise becomes Machiavellian. The ends justify the means. Guess whose ethics were malleable from the start: . But in truth the book goes beyond the US. And also, it's hard to be divisive unless a populace was already in a fragile state. Turns out this psychological warfare is used in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, in Europe (Brexit anyone?). The book is a mea culpa for empowering such unethical behavior by developing a technological tool that marries psychological manipulation with data science… and advocating for guardrails. It can't be understated how destructive Cambridge Analytica and other data firms are. They are undermining the ability for people to discern the accuracy and viability of information. If no one can trust any sources, then the truth will be disregarded and there can be no justice or governance. What I've just describe is a small part of the psychological warfare that has been going on.
So basically the book is about the very real acts of psychological manipulation perpetrated by Cambridge Analytica and it's obvious affects on the world as we know it today. Wylie is an interesting, innovative, creative and super smart pawn. Some of his own emotional vulnerabilities proved crucial towards the development of these sinister tools. A very scary book. I don't see any evidence that much has been done to counteract the damage or prevent such things from happening in the future. Cambridge Analytica is gone but there are other firms and this is still being done without many protections. The law is staggeringly lagging behind the technology and it is to everyone's peril that it continues unabated.
4.5ish Stars
Read on kindle
My creative juices have abandoned me in terms of crafting an interesting and creative review. Suffice it to say this is an important book that everyone should read!! We are being manipulated by the social networks and search engines that we see online. It's psychological warfare and it is being waged constantly on fb, twitter, instagram, google etc. Your data is being collected and analyzed creating an online persona crafted to feed you specific information designed to influence your behavior. How they collect your data is tricky. In addition to the cookies that follow your every move, and the friends posts that you like, they also collect it via games that ask you to play that tell you your "spirit animal" or whatever. Particularly on facebook and twitter but also used in search engine results, internet browser add-ons, and other social media. Your malleable political views in this case are extremely manipulated. In the US it was used in the election of Trump. I think most people sense this in the back of their minds. No one would on the basis of his resume alone elect such a man. But what if there are planted stories designed to motivate you based on the ways in which you can be manipulated: fear, resentment, anxiety, entitlement, etc? Mostly negative emotions. These emotions are affirmed and amplified by other articles and posted on fb. Then they flood your new feed with these types of articles that you are predisposed to believe because it reinforces your world view. And they come with hundreds and thousands of likes and hearts implying that your view is the standard/norm. The world view that you may have adapted on the basis of the proliferation of items and views you are constantly seeing on fb, twitter, a google search etc. Fake accounts both post fake articles and like them by the hundreds and thousands amplifying. Then you join in and repost and retweet these false articles giving them a slight bit of credibility among your friends. A vicious circle that perpetuates and reinforces a belief. The end result is polarization and intransigence. Turns out that both US political parties have tried this, but one party has members very susceptible to psychological manipulation. A party that leans authoritarian while claiming patriotism. A party that dislikes nuance and sees the world in exclusionary terms. And guess what, not only are people willing to exploit this; but they don't hide it. They convince that the "other" party are the brainwashed ones. You ever wonder how people can believe that the Democrats stole an election in a state with Republican governance including the responsibilities for the election? How people can turn against values they thought were rock solid. How Evangelicals suddenly only care about abortion and judges etc. The well of psychological warfare runs deep and the ethics are really obvious but if you are a political party that values power over all things and are afraid of losing power based on political positions, the whole exercise becomes Machiavellian. The ends justify the means. Guess whose ethics were malleable from the start: . But in truth the book goes beyond the US. And also, it's hard to be divisive unless a populace was already in a fragile state. Turns out this psychological warfare is used in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, in Europe (Brexit anyone?). The book is a mea culpa for empowering such unethical behavior by developing a technological tool that marries psychological manipulation with data science… and advocating for guardrails. It can't be understated how destructive Cambridge Analytica and other data firms are. They are undermining the ability for people to discern the accuracy and viability of information. If no one can trust any sources, then the truth will be disregarded and there can be no justice or governance. What I've just describe is a small part of the psychological warfare that has been going on.
So basically the book is about the very real acts of psychological manipulation perpetrated by Cambridge Analytica and it's obvious affects on the world as we know it today. Wylie is an interesting, innovative, creative and super smart pawn. Some of his own emotional vulnerabilities proved crucial towards the development of these sinister tools. A very scary book. I don't see any evidence that much has been done to counteract the damage or prevent such things from happening in the future. Cambridge Analytica is gone but there are other firms and this is still being done without many protections. The law is staggeringly lagging behind the technology and it is to everyone's peril that it continues unabated.
4.5ish Stars
Read on kindle
December 18, 2019
This book gets my five stars, simply by opening my eyes to the idea of data as a commodity. The title could not be more apt, the reading experience was a total Mindf*uck and I really feel strongly this should be a compulsory read for those seeking to understand the dark nexus of politics and social media.
December 16, 2019
This book blew my mind.
With the devastating election news from the UK and the rise of bigotry across the world, it is crucial to understand the role of social media. The contest over data in the digital realm is the new playing field where elections and ideologies are made and mapped, and yet these machinations are invisibilized. It has become possible to create an “artificial society,” one in which strangers can hold puppet strings of people across the globe – algorithms do not just structure our online experience, but also redefine our very existence offline. Things are not broken, they are working as they were designed: the maintenance of a coalition between conservative politicians and the private sector to monopolize power.
The agenda is not new, but with social media the strategy and the scale of it surpasses the frameworks we currently have. This is why whistleblowers like Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni are so important. They demystify the natural and expose the materiality of artifice, showing how reality is the product of decisions made by people in power.
In this book Wylie takes us behind the scenes of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. At times reading felt surreal like science fiction – but then I realized the substance of today is precisely that. “Real life” has become a video game.
Here are some important takeaways. It is misleading to dismiss conservatives like Bannon as ignorant, they are well studied in critical theory and understand how to persuade alienated people toward extremist ideology. They understand what many progressives continue to dismiss: peoples’ politics are informed not necessarily by reason or self-interest, but rather by what people feel and what people look like. By using personality models, fashion brands, etc. CA was able to predict people’s political lives and target content/ads accordingly. They began this first in the Global South (digital colonialism) and then brought these methods to the West where they worked to fester dissent just as effectively. Slogans, images and videos were targeted to create and reinforce racial stereotypes and create a national-mirage such that so many were literally seeing different countries. Facebook ads meant that the evidence of this deception was erased and largely unaccounted for. Optics were manipulated to misdirect blame (to the immigrants, the Muslims, etc), build racist solidarities and galvanize support for candidates and policies.
Social media companies are directly responsible for enabling and facilitating this. Wylie calls for holding social media companies accountable, fighting for the right to privacy, and a new code of conduct, ethics + regulation for the digital age.
With the devastating election news from the UK and the rise of bigotry across the world, it is crucial to understand the role of social media. The contest over data in the digital realm is the new playing field where elections and ideologies are made and mapped, and yet these machinations are invisibilized. It has become possible to create an “artificial society,” one in which strangers can hold puppet strings of people across the globe – algorithms do not just structure our online experience, but also redefine our very existence offline. Things are not broken, they are working as they were designed: the maintenance of a coalition between conservative politicians and the private sector to monopolize power.
The agenda is not new, but with social media the strategy and the scale of it surpasses the frameworks we currently have. This is why whistleblowers like Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni are so important. They demystify the natural and expose the materiality of artifice, showing how reality is the product of decisions made by people in power.
In this book Wylie takes us behind the scenes of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. At times reading felt surreal like science fiction – but then I realized the substance of today is precisely that. “Real life” has become a video game.
Here are some important takeaways. It is misleading to dismiss conservatives like Bannon as ignorant, they are well studied in critical theory and understand how to persuade alienated people toward extremist ideology. They understand what many progressives continue to dismiss: peoples’ politics are informed not necessarily by reason or self-interest, but rather by what people feel and what people look like. By using personality models, fashion brands, etc. CA was able to predict people’s political lives and target content/ads accordingly. They began this first in the Global South (digital colonialism) and then brought these methods to the West where they worked to fester dissent just as effectively. Slogans, images and videos were targeted to create and reinforce racial stereotypes and create a national-mirage such that so many were literally seeing different countries. Facebook ads meant that the evidence of this deception was erased and largely unaccounted for. Optics were manipulated to misdirect blame (to the immigrants, the Muslims, etc), build racist solidarities and galvanize support for candidates and policies.
Social media companies are directly responsible for enabling and facilitating this. Wylie calls for holding social media companies accountable, fighting for the right to privacy, and a new code of conduct, ethics + regulation for the digital age.
May 16, 2021
5 ☆ A Billionaire and Russia Hack Democracy
Christopher Wylie's Mindf*ck is a must read for anybody interested in recent national political events and / or the intersection of social media, big data, and cultural undercurrents. Wylie recounts a complicated multinational tale of how one billionaire created Cambridge Analytica to be a psychological warfare tool wielded by an international ultra-conservative political movement.
Wylie had worked for political parties in both his home country of Canada and in the U.K. prior to joining the SCL Group in London in the fall of 2013. The U.K. military hired SCL when it wanted plausible deniability as SCL conducted psychological and influence operations anywhere in the world. SCL's resume included disinformation campaigns to mitigate jihadist recruitment efforts in Pakistan and to decrease narcotics and other illegal trafficking in South America.
The SCL director Alexander Nix was more of an amoral salesperson than someone who knew how to run the actual nuts and bolts of any operation. Nonetheless, Nix wanted SCL to dominate the propaganda trade. In his prior work on election campaigns, Wylie knew the value of acquiring massive amounts of data and, more importantly, the ways to improve SCL's arcane inefficiencies. SCL had been retained by the Trinidad Ministry of National Security, so Nix assigned the small Trinidad and Tobago nation as the pilot project site for Wylie's team. With illegally routed government funds and carte blanche, real time access to their citizenry's mobile internet usage, Wylie's team was able to collect sufficient data to develop artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that could predict behavior. The Trinidad Ministry's initial objective was to look for criminals, but the pilot project's success could be expanded to apply to their elections.
Steve Bannon had been dangling the prospect of millions of investment dollars to SCL and Nix for some time. Wylie presented to Bannon the Trinidad project, showing that cultural trends could be quantified and predicted. At the minimum, the collected data included basic demographics such as sex, age, and ethnicity, internet browsing usage, census tract information, and social media profiles. Bannon was excited by the fact that all of this data was available for identifiable individuals (i.e. not aggregated which would provide privacy to the individuals). Bannon wanted Wylie's team to replicate the Trinidad project for the entire USA but first tested the team with a trial run in Virginia in October 2013. Convinced of SCL's capabilities, Bannon then introduced SCL to his principal, billionaire Robert Mercer, in November 2013.
Mercer invested $15 million for a 90 percent stake in the newly created Cambridge Analytica (C.A.). SCL would be C.A.'s parent company and own 10 percent. Convoluted legal ties were created so that C.A., a U.S. subsidiary, would use staff and resources of the British SCL and SCL could continue its work for the British military. Wylie initially believed that Mercer's interest in C.A. was purely financial. But Wylie eventually realized that deeply held political beliefs were behind Mercer and Bannon's objectives for C.A.
Mercer had articulated a desire to replicate a society in silico - to model a society down to its silicone replications of real people so that the model could run simulations and make forecasts. As the first step, Wylie believed that a true study of the USA would be similar to examining tribal conflicts. To eliminate bias, non - American sociologists and anthropologists conducted focus group research in order to map American rituals, superstitions, mythologies, and ethnic tensions. In 2014, Wylie characterized the
Clinical psychologists are held to the primary medical principle of "do no harm." But C.A. was not constrained any iota in their use of applied psychology. C.A. discovered Americans' hot button issues of religion, gun use, immigration, and race / ethnicity and targeted these as future weaknesses to exploit.
The next step was for C.A. to acquire data so they could identify who should receive their tailored messages. A competitor firm, Palantir, had observed:
In June 2014, C.A. deployed a Trojan horse in order to scrape Facebook user information. This came disguised as a personality test app that offered a payment of $1 - $2 for the test completion and which needed to be run on Facebook's platform. Within two months, less than 300,000 Facebook users completed the personality test on this app. But thanks to Facebook's vast permissiveness, any user of the app would not only have their profile and usage stats but also all their friends' data scraped, collected, and organized by the Trojan horse app. This is how C.A. obtained information on 87 million Facebook users by August 2014.
This wasn't all. To put the "big" in big data, C.A. used AI to combine individual Facebook users with additional database information they had purchased. In the end, C.A. had created complete dossiers which also contained data on a Facebook user's kids, schools, employment, income, mortgage, phone numbers, online shopping, and photos. This is not a complete list. And more importantly, C.A. also knew them by personality because AI algorithms could make a good prediction even for the friends who had not completed the personality test. From a 2015 research paper, a well- designed AI
Bannon had earlier observed that "there is no force more powerful than a humiliated man" and Bannon leveraged that to launch his cultural war. Bannon focused on "incels" (involuntary celibates) who displayed what Wylie labeled "the dark triad" traits. These are maladaptive traits that increase the likelihood of committing crimes or other antisocial behavior: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. C.A. identified persons with the dark triad traits and neuroticism because they would be susceptible to conspiracy theories and impulsive bursts of anger. C.A. filled their Facebook newsfeed with articles that would provoke strong emotional reactions. C.A. exploited humans' adaptive mechanism of noticing the horrible as it would increase the chances of survival against threats. As users "liked" these articles, it confirmed whether they actually fit Bannon's target group. C.A. would then start to fill their newsfeed with fake pages of news, forums, and groups to foster a sense of community among the incels and their supporters. Once sufficient numbers in an area were attained, it was time to arrange a physical meeting in real life. C.A. had employed SCL' s international counter-insurgency tactics on Americans to foster Bannon's alt-right movement.
Wylie's discomfort and misgivings could no longer be rationalized away. He quit C.A. around the end of 2014. But Wylie maintained contact with his team members and other politically placed people in the U.K. Mindf*ck continued with a description of the ultra conservative movement and C.A.'s role in the Brexit campaign and assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016. Through his colleagues' information, Wylie pieced together the Russian influence amd C.A.'s impact on the 2016 American presidential election. Whistleblowing by Wylie and two friends on C.A. erupted onto the public stage in March 2018 and led to massive international investigations.
Wylie concludes Mindf*ck with his suggestions for regulation. Although I don't agree with everything Wylie writes in this section, I strongly agree that some legal action must be taken. Like Wylie, I just don't know what. In the descriptions of psychological warfare in particular, Mindf*ck left me feeling emotionally exhausted. In fact, this book generated my own "dark triad" feelings: dismayed, discouraged, and dumbfounded. And I've never even been a Facebook user; in which instance, I would most likely feel much worse. Have no doubts, Wylie's account of democracy being hacked is not over.
Read Mindf*ck if you don't want to drown in the denial of reality.
Christopher Wylie's Mindf*ck is a must read for anybody interested in recent national political events and / or the intersection of social media, big data, and cultural undercurrents. Wylie recounts a complicated multinational tale of how one billionaire created Cambridge Analytica to be a psychological warfare tool wielded by an international ultra-conservative political movement.
... our identities and behavior have become commodities in the high - stakes data trade. The companies which control the flow of information are among the most powerful in the world.
Wylie had worked for political parties in both his home country of Canada and in the U.K. prior to joining the SCL Group in London in the fall of 2013. The U.K. military hired SCL when it wanted plausible deniability as SCL conducted psychological and influence operations anywhere in the world. SCL's resume included disinformation campaigns to mitigate jihadist recruitment efforts in Pakistan and to decrease narcotics and other illegal trafficking in South America.
The SCL director Alexander Nix was more of an amoral salesperson than someone who knew how to run the actual nuts and bolts of any operation. Nonetheless, Nix wanted SCL to dominate the propaganda trade. In his prior work on election campaigns, Wylie knew the value of acquiring massive amounts of data and, more importantly, the ways to improve SCL's arcane inefficiencies. SCL had been retained by the Trinidad Ministry of National Security, so Nix assigned the small Trinidad and Tobago nation as the pilot project site for Wylie's team. With illegally routed government funds and carte blanche, real time access to their citizenry's mobile internet usage, Wylie's team was able to collect sufficient data to develop artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that could predict behavior. The Trinidad Ministry's initial objective was to look for criminals, but the pilot project's success could be expanded to apply to their elections.
Steve Bannon had been dangling the prospect of millions of investment dollars to SCL and Nix for some time. Wylie presented to Bannon the Trinidad project, showing that cultural trends could be quantified and predicted. At the minimum, the collected data included basic demographics such as sex, age, and ethnicity, internet browsing usage, census tract information, and social media profiles. Bannon was excited by the fact that all of this data was available for identifiable individuals (i.e. not aggregated which would provide privacy to the individuals). Bannon wanted Wylie's team to replicate the Trinidad project for the entire USA but first tested the team with a trial run in Virginia in October 2013. Convinced of SCL's capabilities, Bannon then introduced SCL to his principal, billionaire Robert Mercer, in November 2013.
Mercer invested $15 million for a 90 percent stake in the newly created Cambridge Analytica (C.A.). SCL would be C.A.'s parent company and own 10 percent. Convoluted legal ties were created so that C.A., a U.S. subsidiary, would use staff and resources of the British SCL and SCL could continue its work for the British military. Wylie initially believed that Mercer's interest in C.A. was purely financial. But Wylie eventually realized that deeply held political beliefs were behind Mercer and Bannon's objectives for C.A.
Every system [a computer, a network, even society] has weaknesses waiting to be exploited.
Mercer had articulated a desire to replicate a society in silico - to model a society down to its silicone replications of real people so that the model could run simulations and make forecasts. As the first step, Wylie believed that a true study of the USA would be similar to examining tribal conflicts. To eliminate bias, non - American sociologists and anthropologists conducted focus group research in order to map American rituals, superstitions, mythologies, and ethnic tensions. In 2014, Wylie characterized the
USA as a nation nearing a nervous breakdown.
Clinical psychologists are held to the primary medical principle of "do no harm." But C.A. was not constrained any iota in their use of applied psychology. C.A. discovered Americans' hot button issues of religion, gun use, immigration, and race / ethnicity and targeted these as future weaknesses to exploit.
The next step was for C.A. to acquire data so they could identify who should receive their tailored messages. A competitor firm, Palantir, had observed:
Facebook had the potential to be the best discreet surveillance tool imaginable for the National Security Agency.
In June 2014, C.A. deployed a Trojan horse in order to scrape Facebook user information. This came disguised as a personality test app that offered a payment of $1 - $2 for the test completion and which needed to be run on Facebook's platform. Within two months, less than 300,000 Facebook users completed the personality test on this app. But thanks to Facebook's vast permissiveness, any user of the app would not only have their profile and usage stats but also all their friends' data scraped, collected, and organized by the Trojan horse app. This is how C.A. obtained information on 87 million Facebook users by August 2014.
This wasn't all. To put the "big" in big data, C.A. used AI to combine individual Facebook users with additional database information they had purchased. In the end, C.A. had created complete dossiers which also contained data on a Facebook user's kids, schools, employment, income, mortgage, phone numbers, online shopping, and photos. This is not a complete list. And more importantly, C.A. also knew them by personality because AI algorithms could make a good prediction even for the friends who had not completed the personality test. From a 2015 research paper, a well- designed AI
computer model could predict an individual's behavior better than that person's co-worker (with 10 likes on social media), family member (with 150 likes), or their own spouse (with 300 likes).
Bannon had earlier observed that "there is no force more powerful than a humiliated man" and Bannon leveraged that to launch his cultural war. Bannon focused on "incels" (involuntary celibates) who displayed what Wylie labeled "the dark triad" traits. These are maladaptive traits that increase the likelihood of committing crimes or other antisocial behavior: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. C.A. identified persons with the dark triad traits and neuroticism because they would be susceptible to conspiracy theories and impulsive bursts of anger. C.A. filled their Facebook newsfeed with articles that would provoke strong emotional reactions. C.A. exploited humans' adaptive mechanism of noticing the horrible as it would increase the chances of survival against threats. As users "liked" these articles, it confirmed whether they actually fit Bannon's target group. C.A. would then start to fill their newsfeed with fake pages of news, forums, and groups to foster a sense of community among the incels and their supporters. Once sufficient numbers in an area were attained, it was time to arrange a physical meeting in real life. C.A. had employed SCL' s international counter-insurgency tactics on Americans to foster Bannon's alt-right movement.
Wylie's discomfort and misgivings could no longer be rationalized away. He quit C.A. around the end of 2014. But Wylie maintained contact with his team members and other politically placed people in the U.K. Mindf*ck continued with a description of the ultra conservative movement and C.A.'s role in the Brexit campaign and assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016. Through his colleagues' information, Wylie pieced together the Russian influence amd C.A.'s impact on the 2016 American presidential election. Whistleblowing by Wylie and two friends on C.A. erupted onto the public stage in March 2018 and led to massive international investigations.
Our system is broken. Our laws don't work. Our regulators are weak. Our governments don't understand what's happening. Our technology is usurping democracy.
Wylie concludes Mindf*ck with his suggestions for regulation. Although I don't agree with everything Wylie writes in this section, I strongly agree that some legal action must be taken. Like Wylie, I just don't know what. In the descriptions of psychological warfare in particular, Mindf*ck left me feeling emotionally exhausted. In fact, this book generated my own "dark triad" feelings: dismayed, discouraged, and dumbfounded. And I've never even been a Facebook user; in which instance, I would most likely feel much worse. Have no doubts, Wylie's account of democracy being hacked is not over.
Read Mindf*ck if you don't want to drown in the denial of reality.
November 11, 2019
Too self serving, but the first-hand reports of Cambridge Analytica are worth the price of admission. He makes good regulation arguments toward the end. He really, really, really wants you to think he was different, remorseful, and not as evil as the others: good luck with that.
October 14, 2019
Just... read this book. And then walk through the world. You won't be the same.
January 12, 2020
If you're looking to understand Cambridge Analytica, datamining and their inextricable link with contemporary politics you could probably do a lot worse than this book, where you get the story straight from the (proverbial) horse's mouth. Chris Wylie worked at CA, so has all the intel on how the company excelled to have the wield it did. If I was rating purely on the importance of the topic this would get five stars, easily.
But that's not how I rate books, unfortunately, and I struggled with a few things here. Firstly the tone - it was overly chatty and familiar at times, which is something which (unless done well, and it rarely is) turns me off. Personal preference, maybe, but I also didn't particularly like the tone: Wylie has a story to tell, sure, but he often gets overly defensive about his role in proceedings, how he overlooked or didn't fully understand what was going on in the company, how he stayed longer than he perhaps should've... but I didn't buy it. This overly defensive tone just made me less convinced of his candor.
Despite my misgivings, I think a lot of readers will love this expose on how the people of the US (and a number of other nations) were treated like one big, sick psychological experiment.
Thank you Netgalley and Serpent's Tail / Profile Books for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
But that's not how I rate books, unfortunately, and I struggled with a few things here. Firstly the tone - it was overly chatty and familiar at times, which is something which (unless done well, and it rarely is) turns me off. Personal preference, maybe, but I also didn't particularly like the tone: Wylie has a story to tell, sure, but he often gets overly defensive about his role in proceedings, how he overlooked or didn't fully understand what was going on in the company, how he stayed longer than he perhaps should've... but I didn't buy it. This overly defensive tone just made me less convinced of his candor.
Despite my misgivings, I think a lot of readers will love this expose on how the people of the US (and a number of other nations) were treated like one big, sick psychological experiment.
Thank you Netgalley and Serpent's Tail / Profile Books for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
March 6, 2020
... I said nothing during the meeting, but afterward I went to see Alexander Nix. "This can't be legal," I told him. To which he replied, "You can't expect anything legal with these people. It's Africa."To my way of thinking, the Cambridge Analytica operation explains about ninety percent of both the American and British nightmare scenarios of the last few years: Trump and Brexit. Mr. Wylie was in a position to see the way the company came to be, the disturbing inside track. He is someone who knows it inside out, in the right order, and with the right inflection, because he knew all the players--and was there.
Wylie is something of a tech nerd, who bounced around the various spheres of influence in North America and Britain--basically offering credible social-science number-crunching, for persuasion and turnout in political campaigns. Gigs in Canada for the LPC party, then the US for Obama, then to Britain for the Lib Dems, before the move to the shadowy SCL Corporation in Britain, who did all manner of political analysis, polling and disinformation campaigns, all over the world. If you needed a referendum tipped in the third world, if you needed to target certain demographics in elections, then SCL could arrange all of it discreetly.
(Later in the life of the scam, the head of SCL and its corporate twin, Cambridge Analytica, one Alexander Nix, would be caught in a devastating BBC video sting, offering an array of 'fixes' to an offshore interest. From voter suppression to bribery to honey-traps, Nix assures the would-be clients, SCL/CA could arrange things in ways profitable to all players in the deal.)
It's probably best to let the book speak for itself, in exerpts :
Social Engineering Is Big Business.
Let's start with Breitbart, the disruptive right wing enabler funded by the affluent Mercers, and operated after the passing of Breitbart himself by the ever-calculating, pre-trumpist Steve Bannon.
“When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy.”
“… the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture…”
“At our first meeting, Bannon was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau….
He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid. Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives” imposing their “feminist ideology” onto gaming culture.”
“Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins. Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings” simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels” (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach. This is one of the odder moments in the Cambridge Analytica saga …”
Forging The Weapons For Dismantling The Culture.
“Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society” was by creating simulations: if we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer…. The structure chosen to set up this new entity was extremely convoluted, and it even confused staff working on projects, who were never sure who exactly the actually worked for. SCL Group would remain the “parent” of a new US subsidiary, incorporated in Delaware, called Cambridge Analytica…”
“Nix initially explained how this labyrinthine setup was to allow us to operate under the radar. Mercer’s rivals in the finance sector watched his every move, and if they knew that he had acquired a psychological warfare firm (SCL), others in the industry might figure out his next play—to develop sophisticated trend-forecasting tools—or poach key staff. We knew Bannon wanted to work on a project with Breitbart, but this was originally supposed to be a side project to satiate his personal fixations. Of course, this was all bullshit, and they wanted to build a political arsenal…”
All That Remained Was Finding Targeting Data.
Enough Targeting Data.
“One of the challenges for social sciences like psychology, anthropology, and sociology is a relative lack of numerical data, since it’s extremely hard to measure and quantify the abstract cultural or social dynamics of an entire society. That is, unless you can throw a virtual clone of everyone into a computer, and observe their dynamics. It felt like we were holding the keys to unlock a new way of studying society. How could I say no to that?”
Survey Says: Trust Facebook. Who Knows You Best?
“He typed in a query, and a list of links popped up. He clicked on one of the many people who went by that name in Nebraska – and there was everything about her, right up on the screen. Here’s her photo, here’s where she works, here’s her house. Here are her kids, this is where they go to school, this is the car she drives. She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, she loves Katy Perry, she drives an Audi, she’s a bit basic … and on and on and on. We knew everything about her – and for many records, the information was updated in real time, so if she posted to Facebook, we could see it happening.”
“And not only did we have all her Facebook data, but we were merging it with all the commercial and state bureau data we'd bought as well. And imputations made from the U.S Census. We had data about her mortgage applications, we knew how much money she made, whether she owned a gun. We had information from her airline mileage programs, so we knew how often she flew. We could see if she was married (she wasn't). We had a sense of her physical health. And we had a satellite photo of her house, easily obtained from Google Earth. We had re-created her life in our computer. She had no idea.”
“”Let me get this straight,” I said. “If I create a Facebook app, and a thousand people use it, I’ll get like 150,000 profiles? Really? Facebook actually lets you do that?””
“ … this means that, for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s naturally occurring data. And once you do that, the system itself can reveal patterns in the data that you otherwise would never have noticed. Facebook users curate themselves all in one place, in a single data form. We don't need to connect a million data sets; we don't have to do complicated math to fill in missing data. The information is already in place, because everyone serves up their real-time autobiography, right there on the site. If you were creating a system from scratch to watch and study people, you couldn’t do much better than Facebook…”
And That Only Sets The Stage.
Wylie comes across as sympathetic, believable, and credible on the facts; he terminated his association with SCL/Cambridge within a year of Bannon's taking over, and before the Trump Campaign. If you had any lingering suspicion that the social media, elections or referenda in which you partake might be fair or unobserved by interlopers, you never will again.
Recommended.
“On March 16, 2018, a day before The Guardian and The New York Times pubished my story, Facebook announced that it was banning me from not only Facebook but also Instagram. Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me.”
October 17, 2020
Zapomniałem dodać tutaj swoją opinię, a uważam, że chociaż kilka słów należy o tej książce napisać. Jest to jedna z lepszych pozycji, jakie czytałem w tym roku. Uważam, że żeby lepiej zrozumieć rzeczywistość, w której obecnie żyjemy każdy świadomy czytelnik i obywatel (któremu życie jego i innych członków społeczeństwa nie jest obojętne) powinien się zapoznać z treścią „Mindf*uck”. Wylie przyczynił się do wielkiego bałaganu, a świat zapewne nigdy nie otrząśnie się po tym, co zrobiła CA, ale podziwiam go za odwagę i gratuluję mu klarownego opisania wszystkiego, co się wydarzyło w ostatnich latach w sferze internetowej jak i na arenie międzynarodowej. Brexit to dzieło oszustwa i matactwa. Wygrana Trumpa nie wzięła się znikąd. To nie żadna teoria spiskowa. Taka jest rzeczywistość. O tym dowiadujemy się m.in. dzięki tej książce. Czytało się ją jak dobry thriller. Żałuję, że nie jest tylko fikcyjną opowieścią. Jestem pełen nadziei, że rozwiązania zaproponowane przez autora na końcu książki ktoś kiedyś wprowadzi w życie i prywatność jednostki będzie szanowana. Na ten moment — trzeba uważać na to, co robimy i co oglądamy w internecie. Warto kwestionować wszystko. Warto być świadomym użytkownikiem.
Bardzo polecam.
Bardzo polecam.
April 17, 2021
This book is about mind control and privacy. Not just here in the United States but worldwide. I remember hearing on the news (mainstream TV network news, like ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC) about Cambridge Analytica but didn't understand the implications of its badness. This book is written by the whistleblower, Christopher Wylie.
Now Wylie has me all paranoid and I'm thinking about deleting my Facebook account. It's probably already too late for me. I hope my data hasn't been harvested from Goodreads - although if the Russians and Chinese scrutinize my reading list they will write me off as a fruitcake and leave me alone. But then again, if I read this book correctly, they LIKE fruitcakes. We're easily manipulated. I'm also thinking, can Wylie be trusted? On Wikipedia it said some people think he is a blow hard. And why didn't he write about his own company in this book? AND can Wikipedia be trusted? I think I better go read Jane Austen or something.
Now Wylie has me all paranoid and I'm thinking about deleting my Facebook account. It's probably already too late for me. I hope my data hasn't been harvested from Goodreads - although if the Russians and Chinese scrutinize my reading list they will write me off as a fruitcake and leave me alone. But then again, if I read this book correctly, they LIKE fruitcakes. We're easily manipulated. I'm also thinking, can Wylie be trusted? On Wikipedia it said some people think he is a blow hard. And why didn't he write about his own company in this book? AND can Wikipedia be trusted? I think I better go read Jane Austen or something.
October 10, 2019
This book details the efforts of Cambridge analytica, Steve Bannon, the Mercer’s and Russian intelligence to influence the 2016 U.S. elections and the U. K. Brexit vote. The writer worked for the company and became a whistleblower. Everybody should read this account which rings true and begs the question why did they all get away with it? Why hasn’t anyone one of the principal players gone to jail? Big data and tech companies like Facebook made it possible and clearly the threat is still alive. We need better regulations on tech and enforcement of laws against foreign interference in elections if we are to preserve our democracy.
February 8, 2021
Książka niewątpliwie ważna i potrzebna, ale rozdmuchana do granic możliwości masą zbędnych informacji (od opisów tego kto jak się ubiera po szczegółowe przedstawianie topografii miast i szczegółów architektonicznych) i przesiąknięta miłością własną autora.
Ważna, bo nie wszyscy zdają sobie sprawę jak wielką władzą dysponują dzisiaj media społecznościowe, jak mogą gwizdać sobie na prawo, które nie nadąża za rozwojem technologicznym i jak łatwo przy ich pomocy osiągnąć polityczny sukces - część merytoryczna celna, w punkt i bardzo wartościowa.
Jest jednak druga strona medalu. Ta książka to również rodzaj pamiętnika i manifestu politycznego autora i tutaj doznałem chyba największego dysonansu poznawczego w życiu. Wylie przedstawia siebie jako człowieka otwartego, o liberalnych poglądach, któremu na sercu leży dobro świata, co jednak nie przeszkadzało mu brać udział w projekcie, którego założeniem było śledzenie w sieci wszystkich (!) mieszkańców Trynidadu i Tobago (to znaczy pisze, że źle się z tym czuł, ale co z tego skoro jego złe samopoczucie nie zmotywowało go do zmiany pracy?). W tych wszystkich przypadkach, kiedy Cambridge Analityca zrobiła coś moralnie nagannego pisał o firmie per "oni", natomiast o badania, z których był ewidentnie dumny pisał, że "my coś zrobiliśmy".
Według mnie, niezależnie na jakiego demaskatora czy "sygnalistę" Wylie teraz pozuje, powinien razem ze swoim szefem troglodytą gnić w więzieniu za to co zrobili, bo autor tej książki nie był tej firmie pionkiem, a dyrektorem, a tłumaczenia, że "chciał uczynić świat lepszym" historia słyszała nie raz, zazwyczaj z ust szaleńców albo dyktatorów.
Ważna, bo nie wszyscy zdają sobie sprawę jak wielką władzą dysponują dzisiaj media społecznościowe, jak mogą gwizdać sobie na prawo, które nie nadąża za rozwojem technologicznym i jak łatwo przy ich pomocy osiągnąć polityczny sukces - część merytoryczna celna, w punkt i bardzo wartościowa.
Jest jednak druga strona medalu. Ta książka to również rodzaj pamiętnika i manifestu politycznego autora i tutaj doznałem chyba największego dysonansu poznawczego w życiu. Wylie przedstawia siebie jako człowieka otwartego, o liberalnych poglądach, któremu na sercu leży dobro świata, co jednak nie przeszkadzało mu brać udział w projekcie, którego założeniem było śledzenie w sieci wszystkich (!) mieszkańców Trynidadu i Tobago (to znaczy pisze, że źle się z tym czuł, ale co z tego skoro jego złe samopoczucie nie zmotywowało go do zmiany pracy?). W tych wszystkich przypadkach, kiedy Cambridge Analityca zrobiła coś moralnie nagannego pisał o firmie per "oni", natomiast o badania, z których był ewidentnie dumny pisał, że "my coś zrobiliśmy".
Według mnie, niezależnie na jakiego demaskatora czy "sygnalistę" Wylie teraz pozuje, powinien razem ze swoim szefem troglodytą gnić w więzieniu za to co zrobili, bo autor tej książki nie był tej firmie pionkiem, a dyrektorem, a tłumaczenia, że "chciał uczynić świat lepszym" historia słyszała nie raz, zazwyczaj z ust szaleńców albo dyktatorów.
October 13, 2019
We owe Mr. Wylie a debt of gratitude for coming forward, at considerable personal risk and cost, to tell this story. And he tells it well, and clearly and concisely. What emerges is of course, simply horrific, and at times intensely cringe-worthy. We see upper-class-Brit-twits from, as we say nowadays, central casting destroying the world while having a lovely time and indulging sordid fever dreams of empire. We see the people who crawled out from under diverse rocks seize the tools created by carelessness, callousness, and cupidity and break things, fast. And, perhaps most importantly, Mr. Wylie is utterly convincing when he says we have nothing to hold against this. There are no sufficiently strong regulations or regulators, and the voice of the people is now heard only after it has been tortured and twisted through the instruments of the ruthless and their greedy technocrat allies.
October 17, 2019
The text is rather simplistic. The people are morons, semi-autonomous drones with no will or reason. On the other side there are powerful wizards ready to program these drones to do something that is pure evil. And there is Wylie, the knight in shinny armor ready to slay the dragon.
May 11, 2021
An important book, and one you might read out of duty more than interest just to understand the extent to which (and method by which) social media has been weaponized to manipulate society. Most of us are aware of the Cambridge Analytica exploit, but unless you've read this inside tale by Christopher Wylie - one of its chief architects and perpetrators - you're missing some crucial details.
Wylie himself is an unlikely protagonist for this tale. Starting out as a dyed-hair, gay Canadian kid in a wheelchair - a nerd volunteering in liberal politics - he's about the last person you'd imagine building the tools for Steve Bannon's manipulation of the 2016 election. And yet, that is the world we find ourselves in. After learning to harness the power of data while contributing to Canadian, American (he helped the Obama campaign) and British politics, Wylie became frustrated with how some of these groups fail to take advantage of data science, insisting on outdated methods and manual effort. He was ready to leave that world and focus on his studies in fashion design in the UK when he was recruited to work for Cambridge Analytica. Contrary to the name's implication (but fully consistent with its operation), Cambridge Analytica was in no way associated with Cambridge the school, or even located in Cambridge. One of the fun stories is when Wylie's horrible credit-stealing-and-incompetent boss fakes a staged office in Cambridge, which completely fools (and impresses) Steve Bannon.
The business itself was all about selling actionable data to the highest bidder. It didn't matter if they were feeding opposite sides of the Brexit campaign with advertising slogans or fueling genocidal conflict in Africa (the callous racism in that part of the story is shocking). As long as money was coming in, the applications and implications were someone else's problem. At first they started with focus groups and surveys, but Wylie was able to demonstrate the power of aggregating online data. By setting up surveys or games you could pay people small sums to play and pull useful information. Pretty soon it became clear that Facebook's agreements allowed you to just harvest user data wantonly... as well as the data of a given user's friends if they agreed to participate. And then the friends of those friends. And yes, Facebook was aware this was possible and that this was going on, and didn't stop it. This expanded exponentially, to the point where after a tiny seed investment and a few hours, CA could scrape millions of profiles. In the end, it was something like 87 million US user accounts whose information was pulled into Cambridge Analytica's database and merged with other repositories.
Wylie was able to demonstrate the data's predictive power. Based on likes and clicks and posts and purchases and location data, he might narrow down which people in a given community were self-identified Christians but also yoga practitioners (odd combination, right?). He pulled one such person at random, whom his horrible boss (Nix) called during the meeting, confirming that she matched the predicted description exactly. Then Steven Bannon wanted a try and called another unwitting target. This all took place long before Bannon was a household name, or known to be connected to Donald Trump. At this point, he was just a customer with the financial backing of the Mercers, and an aspiring populist and policy wonk who was thrilled at the prospect of harnessing data for societal change. It was the Cambridge Analytica data, made available to right-wing politicians and Russian intelligence (and yes, WikiLeaks also enters this story), that allowed for high-precision influence campaigns in the US leading up to the 2016 election. This was not just sharing manipulative messages, but knowing with deep insight just which types of manipulations would resonate with which audiences, inciting fear and stoking rage. "Build the wall" and "drain the swamp" were both phrases that CA had vetted that were deployed to buoy Trump's campaign. In Trump's own oddly honest brand of dishonesty, you can hear him admitting that he didn't like "drain the swamp" when it was handed to him by advisors.
From his telling, Wylie was so excited by the prospect of what he could build with the data that he (summoning Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park) never stopped to think if he should. He shares some of his misgivings and discomfort at the various Russian mobsters and foreign military customers walking the hallways, and yet he was unwilling to abandon the project for a very long time. Wylie wasn't even in it for the money, which others in the company were swimming in (there are stories of obnoxious, extravagant parties following the firm's large paydays). When Wylie tries to leave, his boss is shocked that a doubling or tripling of salary isn't incentive enough to keep him. When Wylie does finally leave and expresses his misgivings, he becomes public enemy number one. Much of the book focuses on Wylie's efforts to get this story and information into the hands of journalists and politicians who won't be cowed by Facebook's mountain of lawyers, all while being followed and harassed. While it's hard to forgive him for his role in this mess, we do owe him a lot of gratitude for making this public knowledge.
It's all a fascinating, sobering, and unfortunately true story.
Wylie himself is an unlikely protagonist for this tale. Starting out as a dyed-hair, gay Canadian kid in a wheelchair - a nerd volunteering in liberal politics - he's about the last person you'd imagine building the tools for Steve Bannon's manipulation of the 2016 election. And yet, that is the world we find ourselves in. After learning to harness the power of data while contributing to Canadian, American (he helped the Obama campaign) and British politics, Wylie became frustrated with how some of these groups fail to take advantage of data science, insisting on outdated methods and manual effort. He was ready to leave that world and focus on his studies in fashion design in the UK when he was recruited to work for Cambridge Analytica. Contrary to the name's implication (but fully consistent with its operation), Cambridge Analytica was in no way associated with Cambridge the school, or even located in Cambridge. One of the fun stories is when Wylie's horrible credit-stealing-and-incompetent boss fakes a staged office in Cambridge, which completely fools (and impresses) Steve Bannon.
The business itself was all about selling actionable data to the highest bidder. It didn't matter if they were feeding opposite sides of the Brexit campaign with advertising slogans or fueling genocidal conflict in Africa (the callous racism in that part of the story is shocking). As long as money was coming in, the applications and implications were someone else's problem. At first they started with focus groups and surveys, but Wylie was able to demonstrate the power of aggregating online data. By setting up surveys or games you could pay people small sums to play and pull useful information. Pretty soon it became clear that Facebook's agreements allowed you to just harvest user data wantonly... as well as the data of a given user's friends if they agreed to participate. And then the friends of those friends. And yes, Facebook was aware this was possible and that this was going on, and didn't stop it. This expanded exponentially, to the point where after a tiny seed investment and a few hours, CA could scrape millions of profiles. In the end, it was something like 87 million US user accounts whose information was pulled into Cambridge Analytica's database and merged with other repositories.
Wylie was able to demonstrate the data's predictive power. Based on likes and clicks and posts and purchases and location data, he might narrow down which people in a given community were self-identified Christians but also yoga practitioners (odd combination, right?). He pulled one such person at random, whom his horrible boss (Nix) called during the meeting, confirming that she matched the predicted description exactly. Then Steven Bannon wanted a try and called another unwitting target. This all took place long before Bannon was a household name, or known to be connected to Donald Trump. At this point, he was just a customer with the financial backing of the Mercers, and an aspiring populist and policy wonk who was thrilled at the prospect of harnessing data for societal change. It was the Cambridge Analytica data, made available to right-wing politicians and Russian intelligence (and yes, WikiLeaks also enters this story), that allowed for high-precision influence campaigns in the US leading up to the 2016 election. This was not just sharing manipulative messages, but knowing with deep insight just which types of manipulations would resonate with which audiences, inciting fear and stoking rage. "Build the wall" and "drain the swamp" were both phrases that CA had vetted that were deployed to buoy Trump's campaign. In Trump's own oddly honest brand of dishonesty, you can hear him admitting that he didn't like "drain the swamp" when it was handed to him by advisors.
From his telling, Wylie was so excited by the prospect of what he could build with the data that he (summoning Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park) never stopped to think if he should. He shares some of his misgivings and discomfort at the various Russian mobsters and foreign military customers walking the hallways, and yet he was unwilling to abandon the project for a very long time. Wylie wasn't even in it for the money, which others in the company were swimming in (there are stories of obnoxious, extravagant parties following the firm's large paydays). When Wylie tries to leave, his boss is shocked that a doubling or tripling of salary isn't incentive enough to keep him. When Wylie does finally leave and expresses his misgivings, he becomes public enemy number one. Much of the book focuses on Wylie's efforts to get this story and information into the hands of journalists and politicians who won't be cowed by Facebook's mountain of lawyers, all while being followed and harassed. While it's hard to forgive him for his role in this mess, we do owe him a lot of gratitude for making this public knowledge.
It's all a fascinating, sobering, and unfortunately true story.
October 14, 2019
First: is this memoir better than Edward Snowden's? Yes. They're different and should be treated as such, but, yes, this one is a better book.
This book is better because of its style and how human it is, to me. While Snowden's report on what not only the US government did to its citizens and the rest of the world, together with some of the biggest tech companies on our planet, Wylie's ingeniously written, sly, funny, and extremely dark book touches several very human nerves, including what I believe is the most important one: what have I done and what can I do to better myself and try to end what I've been part of?
I'm very interested in what surveillance capitalism—a superb term coined by Shoshana Zuboff—does to people and the people who govern them, not to mention the current top-earning tech companies that believe they're more powerful than people.
Wylie's book starts off in pomp:
After that, there's a short admittance:
After that, this book becomes interesting.
Earlier this year, Netflix released "The Great Hack", a documentary that focused on Cambridge Analytica/SCL via another former acolyte, Brittany Kaiser. This book delves far deeper than fifty documentaries of that ilk would.
Wylie starts off with running off why he's interested in numbers, and what they actually mean now.
Understanding people by analysing them, converting them to do what you want by understanding them, got it.
Before attempting to subjugate continents to the will of their clients, SCL—the company where Wylie worked under a man named Alexander Nix—wanted to try psychological warfare on a small scale, so they chose Trinidad and Tobago. And went further than possibly any company or government has gone before they did.
To see what people were doing at home, by simply tapping into their use of the Internet, meant nothing to people who worked at SCL; at the very least, they got over their doubts fairly quickly:
Speaking of colonialism via white men:
Wylie writes a bit on Steve Bannon, a man who played a major part in Trump's campaign and id:
Analytical views into how FOX, the Rupert Murdoch-owned media-campaign circus, works, is also interesting, but part of the run-of-the-mill everyday work that SCL did for their customers. And who were they?
What ties Wylie together with Snowden the most interestingly—apart from their vivisections—are their morals. They've both come to places where they've fervently exposed their own ways of thinking and come to the conclusion that something must stop:
In the end, we were creating a machine to contaminate America with hate and cultish paranoia, and I could no longer ignore the immorality and illegality of it all. I did not want to be a collaborator. Then, in August 2014, something terrible happened. A veteran SCL staffer, a longtime friend and confidant of Nix’s, returned from Africa severely ill with malaria. He came into the office red-eyed and sweating profusely, slurring his words and talking nonsense. After Nix shouted at him for being late, the rest of us urged him to go to the hospital. But before he could be seen at the hospital, he collapsed and tumbled down a flight of stairs, smashing his head hard on the concrete. He slipped into a coma. His brain swelled and part of his skull was removed. His doctors worried that his cognitive functioning might never be the same. After Nix returned from visiting the hospital, he asked HR for guidance on liability insurance and how long he had to keep paying his loyal friend, still in a coma and missing part of his skull. This seemed callous in the extreme. It was in that moment that I realized Nix was a monster. Worse, I knew he wasn’t alone. Bannon was also a monster. And soon enough, were I to stay, I worried that I would become a monster, too.
Wylie goes into much detail and eloquently ties ribbons together to explain how not only Trump's people, but other major players—for example, the organisations behind the entire pro-Brexit organisation, Russian organisations, political interests, and companies looking to have Trump voted and Facebook—worked feverishly to goals that would further the few without a care in the world about what they were doing, which was basically PSYOP.
Wylie gives The Guardian's editors a boot for having cut out "how Sophie Schmidt—daughter of Google CEO Eric Schmidt—had introduced Nix to Palantir, setting off the chain of events that led to SCL’s foray into data warfare." More on that:
This book is better because of its style and how human it is, to me. While Snowden's report on what not only the US government did to its citizens and the rest of the world, together with some of the biggest tech companies on our planet, Wylie's ingeniously written, sly, funny, and extremely dark book touches several very human nerves, including what I believe is the most important one: what have I done and what can I do to better myself and try to end what I've been part of?
I'm very interested in what surveillance capitalism—a superb term coined by Shoshana Zuboff—does to people and the people who govern them, not to mention the current top-earning tech companies that believe they're more powerful than people.
Wylie's book starts off in pomp:
It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum. As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning. A former federal prosecutor, he is sharp and precise with his lines of inquiry, and he wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter.
Did you work with Steve Bannon?
Yes.
Did Cambridge Analytica have any contacts with potential Russian agents?
Yes.
Do you believe that this data was used to sway the American electorate to elect the president of the United States?
Yes.
After that, there's a short admittance:
As one of the creators of Cambridge Analytica, I share responsibility for what happened, and I know that I have a profound obligation to right the wrongs of my past. Like so many people in technology, I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to “move fast and break things.” I’ve never regretted something so much. I moved fast, I built things of immense power, and I never fully appreciated what I was breaking until it was too late.
After that, this book becomes interesting.
Earlier this year, Netflix released "The Great Hack", a documentary that focused on Cambridge Analytica/SCL via another former acolyte, Brittany Kaiser. This book delves far deeper than fifty documentaries of that ilk would.
Wylie starts off with running off why he's interested in numbers, and what they actually mean now.
Tanks and bunker busters are useless against viral propaganda and Web-fueled radicalization. ISIS doesn’t just launch missiles; it also launches narratives. Russia compensates for its aging military equipment with “hybrid approaches” of attack, beginning with the ideological manipulation of target populations.
If you’re building a non-kinetic weapon designed for scaled perspecticide—the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception—you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates people.
Understanding people by analysing them, converting them to do what you want by understanding them, got it.
Before attempting to subjugate continents to the will of their clients, SCL—the company where Wylie worked under a man named Alexander Nix—wanted to try psychological warfare on a small scale, so they chose Trinidad and Tobago. And went further than possibly any company or government has gone before they did.
Getting the required data to build Jucikas’s envisioned targeting system would not be easy, but it was possible, due to a fluke of history in some parts of the developing world. Although there was substantial underdevelopment of traditional telecommunications infrastructure, largely stemming from corruption and the neglectful legacies of colonial administrations, some of the world’s poorest countries had leapfrogged generations of technology, achieving impressive advances in mobile networks.
In Kenya, for example, local laws and customs made it difficult for some people to get a bank account, leading to a system in which Kenyans used cash to buy mobile phone credits, which could then be traded as a kind of digital currency. In fact, we found that people in many poorer nations distrusted banks, having lived through economic crises, hyperinflation, and bank collapses, and used the same mobile workaround. This setup meant that everybody needed a phone, and that it needed to work well, so that in otherwise impoverished nations, there’d been rapid investment in relatively decent mobile infrastructure.
One unintended consequence of having large pluralities of citizens connected via mobile phone networks was that everybody could be traced, tracked, profiled, and communicated with. Jihadist networks such as ISIS, AQAP, and Boko Haram had already figured this out, taking advantage of easy access to the minds of future conquests. And that turned the rules of warfare upside down.
Next we needed a case study—a location where we could scale to a nation-state level, to show potential military clients what we were capable of doing. Trinidad and Tobago, with 1.3 million people, fit the bill perfectly. It was an island nation, self-contained yet with a variety of cultures. There was an Afro-Caribbean population, an Indo-Caribbean population, and a smattering of white people, creating an interesting cultural tension to explore. It was an ideal laboratory in which to run our experiments at scale.
To see what people were doing at home, by simply tapping into their use of the Internet, meant nothing to people who worked at SCL; at the very least, they got over their doubts fairly quickly:
Working with a set of contractors, SCL was able to tap into the telecom firehose, pick an IP address, and then sit and watch what a person in Trinidad was browsing on the Internet at that very moment. Not surprisingly, it was a lot of porn. People were browsing everything imaginable, including the culturally specific “Trini Porn.” I can remember sitting around the computer one evening and watching as someone toggled between looking up plantain recipes and watching porn, all while Nix laughed at them. It was a revoltingly giddy laugh, almost infantile. He looked up the IP address and then opened up Google Maps satellite view to see the neighborhood this person lived in.
Speaking of colonialism via white men:
He had inherited tens of millions of pounds and never needed to work. He could have dedicated his life to noble pursuits or simply settled into a life of leisure, sponging off his trust fund. But instead he chose SCL. Nix couldn’t help himself—he was intoxicated by power. Born too late to play colonial master in the old British Empire, he treated SCL as the modern equivalent. As Nix put it in one of our meetings, he got to “play the white man.” “They [are] just niggers,” he once said to a colleague in an email, referring to black politicians in Barbados.
Wylie writes a bit on Steve Bannon, a man who played a major part in Trump's campaign and id:
In 2005, the right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart began Breitbart.com, an online news aggregator, and by 2007 it had grown to publish original content as Breitbart News. The site ran on the undercurrent of Breitbart’s personal philosophy, which has been referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture.
When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy. At our first meeting, he was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau. The logic, as we later learned with Brexit, was that Britain served as an important cultural signifier for Americans. Win the Brits, and so falls America, Bannon later told me, as the mythologies and tropes of Hollywood had crafted an image of Britain as a country of educated, rational, and classy people.
He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid.
Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives” imposing their “feminist ideology” onto gaming culture. Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry, lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins.
Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings” simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels” (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach.
Analytical views into how FOX, the Rupert Murdoch-owned media-campaign circus, works, is also interesting, but part of the run-of-the-mill everyday work that SCL did for their customers. And who were they?
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. And, of course, there was the losing House bid of Art Robinson, the Oregon Republican who collected piss and church organs. In the autumn of 2014, Jeb Bush paid a visit to the office. Despite having received millions from Mercer, Nix never bothered to learn much about U.S. politics, so he asked Gettleson to join him. Bush, who had come alone, began by telling Nix that if he decided to run for president, he wanted to be able to do it on his terms, without having to “court the crazies” in his party.
What ties Wylie together with Snowden the most interestingly—apart from their vivisections—are their morals. They've both come to places where they've fervently exposed their own ways of thinking and come to the conclusion that something must stop:
In our invasion of America, we were purposefully activating the worst in people, from paranoia to racism. I immediately wondered if this was what Stanley Milgram felt like watching his research subjects. We were doing it in service to men whose values were in total opposition to mine. Bannon and Mercer were more than happy to hire the very people they sought to oppress—queers, immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, and people of color—so that they could weaponize our insights and experiences to advance these causes. I was no longer working at a firm that fought against radical extremists who shackled women, brutalized nonbelievers, and tortured gays; I was now working for extremists who wanted to build their very own dystopia in America and Europe. Nix knew this and didn’t even care. For the cheap thrill of sealing another deal, he had begun entertaining bigots and homophobes, expecting his staff not only to look the other way, but for us to betray our own people.
In the end, we were creating a machine to contaminate America with hate and cultish paranoia, and I could no longer ignore the immorality and illegality of it all. I did not want to be a collaborator. Then, in August 2014, something terrible happened. A veteran SCL staffer, a longtime friend and confidant of Nix’s, returned from Africa severely ill with malaria. He came into the office red-eyed and sweating profusely, slurring his words and talking nonsense. After Nix shouted at him for being late, the rest of us urged him to go to the hospital. But before he could be seen at the hospital, he collapsed and tumbled down a flight of stairs, smashing his head hard on the concrete. He slipped into a coma. His brain swelled and part of his skull was removed. His doctors worried that his cognitive functioning might never be the same. After Nix returned from visiting the hospital, he asked HR for guidance on liability insurance and how long he had to keep paying his loyal friend, still in a coma and missing part of his skull. This seemed callous in the extreme. It was in that moment that I realized Nix was a monster. Worse, I knew he wasn’t alone. Bannon was also a monster. And soon enough, were I to stay, I worried that I would become a monster, too.
Wylie goes into much detail and eloquently ties ribbons together to explain how not only Trump's people, but other major players—for example, the organisations behind the entire pro-Brexit organisation, Russian organisations, political interests, and companies looking to have Trump voted and Facebook—worked feverishly to goals that would further the few without a care in the world about what they were doing, which was basically PSYOP.
In calls with the Trump Organization, we heard about declining ratings for The Apprentice and how fewer people were staying at Trump hotels and gambling in the casinos. With the advent of online gambling and the total dependence on Donald Trump’s public image as a sexy, savvy billionaire, it seemed his team was beginning to realize that an outdated casino system and an aging, orange-stained C-list celebrity didn’t conjure “sexy and fun” for potential new customers. The Trump brand was on a downturn, and the company needed to figure out how to give it a boost.
Wylie gives The Guardian's editors a boot for having cut out "how Sophie Schmidt—daughter of Google CEO Eric Schmidt—had introduced Nix to Palantir, setting off the chain of events that led to SCL’s foray into data warfare." More on that:
December 28, 2019
Mixed feelings about this. Wylie seems quite full of himself - he's the center of everything, the mind behind the data of the f*ck, as it were, or so he makes it seem. But there are many points here where the timeline is quite inconsistent, and one British government inquiry noted that Wylie was actually on contract as an intern, and left in July 2014, at a point when much of Cambridge Analytica's meddling in the U.S. elections of 2014 had yet to occur. There's plenty here that just doesn't add up.
That said, the final chapter and epilogue are worth reading. They're a warning about how our social media data is being used against us (stop taking those quizzes!) as political forces try to reinforce the views of some and discourage others from participating in democracy. These efforts were successful in the U.S. in 2014 and 2016 and in the Brexit vote.
Wylie offers some solutions in his epilogue, such as requiring social media platforms to use "choice enhancing design" and ban "dark pattern design" that "confuse, deceive or manipulate users." Whether the platforms or lawmakers will take up such solutions is another question.
That said, the final chapter and epilogue are worth reading. They're a warning about how our social media data is being used against us (stop taking those quizzes!) as political forces try to reinforce the views of some and discourage others from participating in democracy. These efforts were successful in the U.S. in 2014 and 2016 and in the Brexit vote.
Wylie offers some solutions in his epilogue, such as requiring social media platforms to use "choice enhancing design" and ban "dark pattern design" that "confuse, deceive or manipulate users." Whether the platforms or lawmakers will take up such solutions is another question.
November 6, 2019
Thanks, I hate it.
This is one of the most horrifying books I've read in recent years, but it's certainly fascinating and informative.
That said, I'm certainly no happier for having learned in more detail about Cambridge Analytica's data-driven psychological warfare and the ways in which Facebook was weaponized to skew recent elections.
Christopher Wylie is a complex person who seems to be trying to atone for his misdeeds through publicly exposing the dirty work he engaged in. Whether or not he completely succeeds in that atonement is rather left to the reader. He's not infallible (who among us is completely pure in motive and deed?) but I'm still thankful he saw the light and decided to come clean.
This is one of the most horrifying books I've read in recent years, but it's certainly fascinating and informative.
That said, I'm certainly no happier for having learned in more detail about Cambridge Analytica's data-driven psychological warfare and the ways in which Facebook was weaponized to skew recent elections.
Christopher Wylie is a complex person who seems to be trying to atone for his misdeeds through publicly exposing the dirty work he engaged in. Whether or not he completely succeeds in that atonement is rather left to the reader. He's not infallible (who among us is completely pure in motive and deed?) but I'm still thankful he saw the light and decided to come clean.
May 27, 2020
Horrifying. The title says America, but it is happening everywhere. Hard to think positively after reading this book, very well-written as it is. Might write full review later, but sheesh. I need a hot choco and cuddling with my dog now.
October 16, 2019
I’ve read over and over again that our data is the new oil/gold, but never really understood why until I read this book. A truly terrifying tale about how the billionaires are trying to recreate cultures to their way of thinking, and how we are letting them. I think this story needs to be taught to every high school student in America.
September 2, 2024
boy are we doomed (highly recommend though, super interesting read and docked only for how ludicrous it is to invent and propagate microtargeted psychological warfare and then say “oops i didn’t know anything bad would happen”)
July 28, 2020
Christopher Wylie was the Canadian-born whistleblower of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Facebook's foundations a couple of years ago. As a self-professed tech-nerd, you may expect his writing to be dry, dense and jargon-filled, but it was not. Although I found Wylie frequently wandered off on tangents from his main storyline, which is somewhat of an apologia for his role in setting social media off on a rather evil course, his tangents are excusable, as there are just so many interesting ones. His writing style is actually quite accessible, at times brilliantly philosophical, and the book outlines the events and techniques of unscrupulous players who are playing all of us through our social media accounts.
Wylie presents a damning case not only of Facebook, but the British Brexit campaign, the Trump 2016 campaign, and a whole host of slimy background players, such as the Mercer family, Steve Bannon, and Andrew Nix the owner of SCL, which was the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Indeed, a lot of alt-right folks show up in the book, as you'd expect. The lines to social manipulation are very clearly drawn. Sadly, Wylie also damns the inept inaction of the British and American justice systems to apply their own laws to the whole complicated mess. The corporations involved in these types of shenanigans already had it figured out back when they realized how to avoid paying taxes: base your company headquarters here in this tax haven, base your employees here where there are slack privacy laws, base your computer servers in the cloud where jurisdiction is fuzzy, and so on.
I've often wondered why so few people seemed aghast while Britain made one of the largest changes to its social and economic structure, based on the outcome of a referendum that was not only the slimmest of majorities, but also clearly fiddled with. Yet, two prime ministers have waved that aside and have "got on with it". The influence of Cambridge Analytica's careful Facebook targeting is not just a vague allegation. The Leave campaign were found by the courts to have made illegal payments, over and above their campaign spending limits on paying for these services, as Wylie points out. Sadly, Wylie also points out that the people who were made liable in this were often unwitting interns and low-level clerks. The upscale politicos who made the decisions were very careful to protect themselves from the dirt.
I apologize that my review is tending to ramble here, but I realize that this book has actually made me quite angry and upset, there is just so much involved here. Yet the world keeps turning without change. Just like after the multiple wrongdoings of the finance and banking industry back in 2008, we the little people are being played, and we pay the price, while the bigwigs laugh, accept their bonuses, and move on to their next creative project in fleecing us.
If you want to understand how data-targeted social media manipulation works, read this book. I thought of myself as relatively tech-savy and aware of what is possible, but Wylie showed me that the techniques of data harvesting for the purposes of fine-tuned social manipulation are much further ahead of my worst fears.
If you want to see how the US alt-right worked their butts off in gas-lighting their nation, read this book. Although Wylie was no longer working for CA by the time of both Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, he personally met many of the key players that asked his company for techniques in mining social media account data and using it to manipulate public opinion: Steve Bannon, the Mercer family, Nigel Farage and all the usual suspects show up, all with deep ties to the Trump campaign.
If you want to know where phrases, such as "Drain the swamp" or "Build the wall" came from, read this book! It practically points out the date of their creation in various focus groups CA was associated with.
Lastly, if you want to know what Christopher Wylie thinks of his role in this sad state of affairs, and how we might build some useful safeguards to the remains of Western democracy, then read this book!
Wylie presents a damning case not only of Facebook, but the British Brexit campaign, the Trump 2016 campaign, and a whole host of slimy background players, such as the Mercer family, Steve Bannon, and Andrew Nix the owner of SCL, which was the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Indeed, a lot of alt-right folks show up in the book, as you'd expect. The lines to social manipulation are very clearly drawn. Sadly, Wylie also damns the inept inaction of the British and American justice systems to apply their own laws to the whole complicated mess. The corporations involved in these types of shenanigans already had it figured out back when they realized how to avoid paying taxes: base your company headquarters here in this tax haven, base your employees here where there are slack privacy laws, base your computer servers in the cloud where jurisdiction is fuzzy, and so on.
I've often wondered why so few people seemed aghast while Britain made one of the largest changes to its social and economic structure, based on the outcome of a referendum that was not only the slimmest of majorities, but also clearly fiddled with. Yet, two prime ministers have waved that aside and have "got on with it". The influence of Cambridge Analytica's careful Facebook targeting is not just a vague allegation. The Leave campaign were found by the courts to have made illegal payments, over and above their campaign spending limits on paying for these services, as Wylie points out. Sadly, Wylie also points out that the people who were made liable in this were often unwitting interns and low-level clerks. The upscale politicos who made the decisions were very careful to protect themselves from the dirt.
I apologize that my review is tending to ramble here, but I realize that this book has actually made me quite angry and upset, there is just so much involved here. Yet the world keeps turning without change. Just like after the multiple wrongdoings of the finance and banking industry back in 2008, we the little people are being played, and we pay the price, while the bigwigs laugh, accept their bonuses, and move on to their next creative project in fleecing us.
If you want to understand how data-targeted social media manipulation works, read this book. I thought of myself as relatively tech-savy and aware of what is possible, but Wylie showed me that the techniques of data harvesting for the purposes of fine-tuned social manipulation are much further ahead of my worst fears.
If you want to see how the US alt-right worked their butts off in gas-lighting their nation, read this book. Although Wylie was no longer working for CA by the time of both Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, he personally met many of the key players that asked his company for techniques in mining social media account data and using it to manipulate public opinion: Steve Bannon, the Mercer family, Nigel Farage and all the usual suspects show up, all with deep ties to the Trump campaign.
If you want to know where phrases, such as "Drain the swamp" or "Build the wall" came from, read this book! It practically points out the date of their creation in various focus groups CA was associated with.
Lastly, if you want to know what Christopher Wylie thinks of his role in this sad state of affairs, and how we might build some useful safeguards to the remains of Western democracy, then read this book!
January 18, 2021
W obecnych czasach jesteśmy świadkami, jak coraz bardziej radykalne nastroje społeczne powodują coraz głębsze podziały. Dochodzi też do przemocy, zarówno słownej, jak i fizycznej. O tych przemianach świadczą, chociażby wydarzenia, które miały miejsce w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Dlaczego tak się dzieje? Czy komuś zależy na tym, by ludzkość szła w takim kierunku? Na te pytania odpowiada reportaż o jednej z najgłośniejszych afer ostatnich lat – Mindf*ck. Cambridge Analitica, czyli jak popsuć demokrację. Książkę wydało Wydawnictwo Insignis.
Cambridge Analitica to główny bohater głośnej sprawy związanej z kradzieżą i wykorzystaniem danych użytkowników Facebooka w celu wpływania na nastroje społeczne i wynik wyborów w kilku państwach świata, takich jak Nigeria, Trynidad i Tobago, Bliski Wschód, Birma a nawet USA. Za pomocą mikrotargetingu i algorytmów firma dostarczała użytkownikom materiały, które miały wpłynąć na ich opinię i zachowania. Firma działała mając jasne intencje, miała źródło finansowania od osób, którym zależało na danym procesie, a jej pracownicy nie mieli żadnych zahamowań.
O tym, jak wyglądały kulisy powstania firmy i jej działań oraz dążenie do ujawnienia sprawy opowiada Chris Wylie, pracownik firmy. Autor pozwala nam śledzić swoją działalność od samego początku swojej kariery związanej z polityką i analizą oraz segregacją danych. W opisywanej sprawie był demaskatorem – to dzięki jego staraniom działania Cambridge Analitiki ujrzały światło dzienne. Zanim jednak został demaskatorem, był twórcą mechanizmów służącym zbieraniu i profilowaniu danych – co czyni go odpowiedzialnym, ale i kompetentnym do wyjaśnienia punkt po punkcie jak do tego doszło.
Lektura nie jest ani łatwa, ani przyjemna, lecz aktualne wydarzenia pokazują jak bardzo ważna. Świadomość na temat wykorzystywania danych jest potrzebna każdemu użytkownikowi Internetu. Jednak refleksje jakie wywołuje czytanie są głównie gorzkie.
Pierwsza z nich jest taka, że ani rządzący, ani prawo, ani społeczeństwo nie jest wystarczająco wyposażone w normy i reguły, które powinny rządzić w świecie wirtualnym. Dotychczas był on rozumiany przede wszystkim jako przestrzeń rozrywki i wyszukiwania informacji. Wydarzenia związane z aferą Cambridge Analitica oraz polaryzacja społeczeństw na świecie dowodzi, iż niekontrolowany przepływ informacji może doprowadzić do chaosu, a w skrajnych przypadkach do przemocy – nie tylko wirtualnej, lecz także realnej.
Mankamentem lektury jest tendencja autora do zbaczania z tematu i wtrącania miejscami zupełnie niepotrzebnych wątków autobiograficznych. Przeszkadza to szczególnie w momentach, gdy opisywane są punkty kulminacyjne w działalności firmy i takie zdarzenia poboczne zbiegają się z nagromadzeniem informacji. Natomiast zdecydowaną wartością jest szczegółowość na jaką może pozwolić sobie jedynie bezpośredni uczestnik wydarzeń. Ze względu na bardzo dużą ilość informacji, zarówno wyjaśnień różnych procesów, jak i danych liczbowych lekturę warto sobie dawkować. Dostarcza ona wielu emocji, na przykład przerażenie i oburzenie, ale też skłania do refleksji nad problemami współczesności. Tym razem człowiek się nie zmienił, tylko wykorzystywane są jego dobre i złe odruchy, a „tradycyjne’’ narzędzia polityki, mediów czy reklamy zastąpiły media społecznościowe.
Mindf*ck. Cambridge Analitica, czyli jak popsuć demokrację wpisuje się w trend występujący ostatnio w nowościach wydawniczych i produkcjach filmowych. W podobnym tonie utrzymany był reportaż Nienawiść sp. z o.o. Jak dzisiejsze media każą nam gardzić sobą nawzajem oraz dokument Dylemat społeczny wyprodukowany przez Netflix. Każdy z wymienionych przedstawia przyczyny i skutki polaryzacji nastrojów społecznych wywołanych przez media – tradycyjne i nowe. W czasach, gdy informacja staje się produktem starannie dopasowanym pod zamknięcie widza/słuchacza/użytkownika w jego własnej światopoglądowej „bańce’’ warto postawić sobie pewien cel. Algorytm nie jest ludzki, nie myśli i nie ma norm moralnych. Ale my powinniśmy.
October 20, 2020
First of all, it's great to have a comprehensive chronicle of the CA story. Especially written by someone from the very 1st row of the scene - the actual whistleblower.
The book is quite well written and very approachable for anyone w/o technical (programming/data-related) knowledge. Sadly, it's not without consequences - I felt that it's too high level, too general, simplified and full of understatements. To be fair - it's understandable: Wylie had to be very careful when e.g. writing something that could have been treated as a direct accusation of a prominent political figure (including POTUS). We need to keep in mind that many (of potentially guilty individuals) didn't even face any charges. Wylie didn't explore the "Russian thread" too much either - probably he had limited access to hard facts, but I bet he also highly values his personal safety.
As a result: we have a book that condemns CA, Nix in personal, Bannon, and that's pretty much about it. It also completely wipes the responsibility of the Wylie himself - rendering him completely unaware, naive & innocent. While in fact he'd probably do nothing (regarding whistleblowing) if he wasn't forced by the persistent Guardian journalist who've pretty much put him in the very epicenter of the story.
In the end - Mindf*ck is definitely worth reading, there are some really good chapters on mechanisms of manipulation and what it does matter, but I couldn't help feeling dissatisfied after reading int.
The book is quite well written and very approachable for anyone w/o technical (programming/data-related) knowledge. Sadly, it's not without consequences - I felt that it's too high level, too general, simplified and full of understatements. To be fair - it's understandable: Wylie had to be very careful when e.g. writing something that could have been treated as a direct accusation of a prominent political figure (including POTUS). We need to keep in mind that many (of potentially guilty individuals) didn't even face any charges. Wylie didn't explore the "Russian thread" too much either - probably he had limited access to hard facts, but I bet he also highly values his personal safety.
As a result: we have a book that condemns CA, Nix in personal, Bannon, and that's pretty much about it. It also completely wipes the responsibility of the Wylie himself - rendering him completely unaware, naive & innocent. While in fact he'd probably do nothing (regarding whistleblowing) if he wasn't forced by the persistent Guardian journalist who've pretty much put him in the very epicenter of the story.
In the end - Mindf*ck is definitely worth reading, there are some really good chapters on mechanisms of manipulation and what it does matter, but I couldn't help feeling dissatisfied after reading int.
October 13, 2019
Well documented account of Cambridge Analytica’s Tactics.
This insider tale of Bannon’s, Mercer’s and other Big Money interests’ perversion of a powerful technology to destroy the integrity of the US 2016 and British Brexit elections as well as other elections around the world. But much more importantly, a well-reasoned warning to the World of the power of Technologies like Facebook and Data Mining to tear apart any semblance of Privacy Rights and ultimately of Human Free Will.
Brilliantly Scary.
If you don’t read the whole book, read Chapter 12! It will change your perception of the role of Social Media in your life, now and in the VERY Near Future!
This insider tale of Bannon’s, Mercer’s and other Big Money interests’ perversion of a powerful technology to destroy the integrity of the US 2016 and British Brexit elections as well as other elections around the world. But much more importantly, a well-reasoned warning to the World of the power of Technologies like Facebook and Data Mining to tear apart any semblance of Privacy Rights and ultimately of Human Free Will.
Brilliantly Scary.
If you don’t read the whole book, read Chapter 12! It will change your perception of the role of Social Media in your life, now and in the VERY Near Future!
September 15, 2020
the writing is pretty crude, and the information isn't all that much more informative than articles i have read - a bit more behind the scenes, but i found that wylie tends to repeat himself a few times before moving on to the next item for discussion.
October 25, 2019
I couldn't decide, is this a horror story or a tragedy?
The bottom line is this, this book scared me, it will always haunt me and it has proven that monsters are REAL.
The bottom line is this, this book scared me, it will always haunt me and it has proven that monsters are REAL.
December 1, 2019
Brilliant. And much more insight than Netflix's The Great Hack. Frightening in it's eye-openingness.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 889 reviews