... 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'
... 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.”...more
He nuzzled his head between her breasts, his hair cold and dead. "Baby, I had a hard day. You just believe it, I had a hard day. I'm gonna quit it, I'He nuzzled his head between her breasts, his hair cold and dead. "Baby, I had a hard day. You just believe it, I had a hard day. I'm gonna quit it, I'm gonna give this bag up, you just watch and see, baby." A long time ago, she had been a very fast girl, quick to catch on, popular in the girls' club at school, sought after, kissed and petted and loved. Right now it seemed almost silly that she should be hooked, with scars on her arms, with nothing but a housedress on because she felt too lazy and sluggish to dress in the mornings, with an ugly little black man who held the bag containing all the riches and loves and romances she had ever dreamed of, held them in condensed version, powdered form...
Tough 1960 urban crime and addiction novel, set almost entirely within an African American setting. Comes on like blaxploitation at first, but get beyond that-- there was no such thing as blaxploitation in 1960, that was a much later complication. A lot of the slang and drug patter here would have read like Martian-language back in 1960 to anyone outside of the inner city drug milieu. The narrative itself reads and feels authentic, a painfully extracted biopsy along the axis of race and drug abuse, in the America that fancied itself the grand accomplishment of the postwar era world.
Author Cooper spoke from experience, and wrote without sparing anyone's sensibilities; he was a user and a convicted narcotics offender himself. The Scene was written while incarcerated and kicking heroin in prison. He died destitute and alone in 1978. ...more
Couldn't go along with this. Perhaps due to translation, though every effort seems to have been made in that direction. Perhaps due to the heroine beiCouldn't go along with this. Perhaps due to translation, though every effort seems to have been made in that direction. Perhaps due to the heroine being a prototype violent-hipster-I-don't-care chick, and one that sort of prefigures the one in the Girl-Who series by Stieg Larsson. Of which I am not enamored.
Wants to be anarchic, searing, nihilist, hard-edged modern. Alain Robbe-Grillet packing heat. Comes off as a kind of homage to pulp or B-films with a veneer of philosophy to smear genres. Or something.
What makes me dislike this more than absolutely necessary: Quentin Tarantino would really really love it. Case closed. ...more
She had her child. She had her income. She had her youth and beauty. She had Portray Castle. She had a new lover -- and if she chose to be quit of himShe had her child. She had her income. She had her youth and beauty. She had Portray Castle. She had a new lover -- and if she chose to be quit of him, not liking him well enough for the purpose, she might undoubtedly have another whom she would like better. She had hitherto been thoroughly successful in her life. And yet she was unhappy. What was it that she wanted? She had been a very clever child--a clever, crafty child; and now she was becoming a clever woman. Her craft remained with her; but so keen was her outlook upon the world, that she was beginning to perceive that craft, let it be never so crafty, will in the long run miss its own object.
A 19th century reboot of Moll Flanders, not such a waif cast upon the cruel world, but the same hard schemer at heart. Dickens certainly did "endearingly crooked" better, and Thackeray did satire at least as well, but Expediency and Opportunism-- have their bard in Anthony Trollope.
From there we go downhill, I'm afraid. Trollope's wide cast of greedy, dispassionate, feckless characters, nearly all with dubious backgrounds, are entertaining and distracting enough, but they don't necessarily energize the story. Everyone is devious and deceptive, operating on pure self-interest, and the rare exceptions are more or less walking sugar-comas in progress. The atmosphere of crass & tawdry actually begins to disallow savage satire if it is the general norm. So we hunt for any ripple of development, a pivot toward altruism. It does not come.
In its defense, this novel has perhaps the greatest, most single-minded McGuffin of all time, in the diamonds, and their ability to prompt the worst motives. Still, a lot to ask, given we are to dedicate ourselves to 750 pages of wondering about them.
A recurring highlight is Trollope's way with written correspondence-- letters between characters. These are little works of wonder, multi-faceted and funny, (meant to be, unconsciously so, and otherwise), cruel and manipulative, fawning and predatory, each a master class in how to compact a character's contradictions into one short note. For this reader, the brevity and insight of the letters has a thing or two to teach the novel, or its editor. (Trollope evidently edited himself here.) This could have been one of the greatest novels ever, with about four hundred pages trimmed away. A non-sugar shot of human warmth here or there might have balanced a lot, as well.
But in the chase for the Diamonds, and all they may represent, no well-intentioned gesture goes unpunished, and every bit of luck is accompanied by remorse or guilty schadenfreude. Enough to void the initial or eventual glow of their original promise. Trollope pulls the rug out, every single time....more
This must be called Experimental Fiction, conflicted and preoccupied as it is with 'equivalent' ways of telling the story.. Let's star*Spoilers here.*
This must be called Experimental Fiction, conflicted and preoccupied as it is with 'equivalent' ways of telling the story.. Let's start again.
For some reason author Böll hits on the idea that mindless categorizing, cross-filing, a relentless focus on hierarchies and designations... an accountant's myopia, of receipts and stubs .. well, no, there is some method to all that.. Once again.
A book so willingly obtuse, bloodyminded and so obsessively nitpicking that .. no, once more.
There are somewhere near 125 persons who come into play in Heinrich Böll's experimental novel Group Portrait With Lady. Sixty-one of them are outlined in the helpful List Of Characters in the front of the book.
By surreptitiously refocusing (or maybe zooming out) from his central character (the lady) Böll manages to render the collective insanity of Germany in the war years and thereafter, or maybe it is the madness of a century that produces this Germany. By overdoing the scrutiny on the minima of the era, the author is able to slowly reveal the wider impact. Somehow the war and horror is more felt than told-- when detail is so foreground that the reader must read into the subtext for the headline events. There is so much raw data being racked up that the reader has to listen for reverberations trailing in the distance to get any sense of the overall world at hand.
As mentioned, there dozens of characters, which means dozens of narrators, dozens of threads; they are called informants in the book, witnesses nearly all so unreliable that truth seems laughable. As may be appreciated, these add up to a very palpable sense of the wartime realities of these people-- only detail and minima in the frame, and yet danger and moral collapse an epidemic all around.
The cruelty of wartime scam and black marketeering, fantasias like the Siegfried Line, forced labor for unknown beneficiaries ... the morbid fakery wherein wartime Memorial Wreaths are switched out post-funeral to new clients as they enter the cemetery, and billed for each appearance... stolen papers, false IDs, mislabeled gravesites begin to exert the kind of grim wear & tear on the reader that leads to insight.
Böll has written a grandly complex novel here, something that touches along the lines of the cinema's Sorrow And The Pity and The Third Man. But he's got little bits of insanity to include.
The flow chart of the book goes from the cited 'raw data' approach, the listings and dry analyses-- which begin to form the ground on which his agents will move, characters who will work randomly against any set storyline-- toward human folly and delirium. A centerpiece at this point is the 'miracle of the roses' event, which provides a kind of mystical comic relief, after and because of which -- our author (author-in-the-book) sees fit to passionately kiss a catholic nun. His attentions are unexpectedly requited, without much ado, and she is swept into the narrative.
At times Böll seems mad, but he's after bigger game than just injecting an absurdist touch; his book is at once a Great-Big-Unrelenting-Shop-Of-Horrors, but also a sly rendition of the fragility of human ties, the lightning-quick sting of reversed allegiances. A difficult read, but intriguing. Nobel Prize for literature, 1972. ________________
I gather from what I've read elsewhere that there are intricacies of Translation that may not show Böll's work to it's best effect; an example that has been noted is that this translation gives the writer-character's interjections the title of 'author' whereas the German tilts more toward 'editor'. That might be a very big shift in what transpires here, or maybe not so much. Regardless, I'm taking a one-star rain check here; the German text may plainly be well worth another star or more if the tone has been so altered....more
Why all the worry ? ... fraudulent crypto-religious anonymity-craving 'obedience' cells pledging loyalty to nothing but the authoritarian power structWhy all the worry ? ... fraudulent crypto-religious anonymity-craving 'obedience' cells pledging loyalty to nothing but the authoritarian power structure of the right wing ... secretive, coded rationales wrapped in paper-thin guises to resemble christianity ... fundamentalisms elite & populist, country-club and speaking-in-tongues, both at the service of a reactionary vision for the U.S. ... clandestine rearrangements of foreign policy, quasi-faith groups false-fronting crude laissez-faire morality that supports bloodshed & totalitarian regimes overseas ... religion utilized for private gain, quietly, privately intermingled with government to maximize profit, discipline the ranks, and polarize the country ... ? ... generally working covertly but very often at taxpayer cost .. ? What's the big worry, there, skeptic, sinner, unbeliever ? Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars. A million. A lifetime appointment. The word is faith-based.
Sharlet's book is nothing if not ungainly and too-loosely organized, too many follow-on subplots that don't quite lead back to their original sub-theses, but it doesn't matter. The point of his effort is not missed or misconstrued by any sensible reader.
The smiling sanctimony of the right-winged, toupee-wearing morality merchants described here is atrocious, and more reporting, better organized, more focussed, should be done to look inside the beast. A walk on the really atrocious side at least for moderate Americans who will see through the smokescreen of money & influence to the absolutely sleazy side of the national character, disguised and redeemed by religious camouflage.
Is that your Prayerbook in your pocket, Senator, or are you just carrying a large stack of cash ?
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