“Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” is a new book by Christopher Wylie, the pink-haired, nose-ring adorned computer geek who first helped engineer, then blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica’s nefarious business of perverting the course of democracy.
The plot relied on the dark arts of cybermanipulation of unsuspecting minds to influence public opinion and the behavior of voters. Finding minds to mess with was easy once the company acquired access to data from billions of Facebook users — their likes, their friends, their behavior.
Facebook users were enticed to take fun personality tests that provided myriad personal profiles and opened the door to exponetially more linked to them. Be careful who you friend and what data you expose on-line. Once the company possessed these profiles they could be sorted by scores on their”big five traits” — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
All very interesting, but what the company was really mining for were three additional traits called the “Dark Triad.” These were “narcissism (extreme self-centeredness), Machiavellianism (ruthless self-interest), and psychopathology (emotional detachment).
Once these psychologically damaged creatures were identified they were used as a germ warfare unit might employ mosquitos or ticks to spread a plague. How? “By introducing narratives via Facebook groups, ads, or articles that the firm knew, from internal testing, were likely to inflame the very narrow segments of the people with these traits.”
Once infected with disinformation, these carriers could be counted on to spread the virus of rumors, conspiracy and falsehood to other like-minded malcontents. It was a triumph of what might best be described as Anti-Social Media, the weaponization of toxic ideas to poison minds and cripple democracy.
The reader can hardly help noticing a gigantic irony. The tools of this Mephistophelian trade were used to seek out amoral, narcissists incapable of empathy to tilt an election in favor of an amoral, narcissistic candidate incapable of empathy. If this is better living through technology, shut down the AI factories immediately, get off the grid, share nothing with anyone, click at your own peril.
But the real peril comes not from the instrumentalities people make but the from the minds of those who make them, if they are malign. The cast of characters in the Cambridge Analytica- Facebook-Russian troll farm-Trump campaign nexus is thick with Dark Triad pathology. Here are megalomaniac autocrats, mad billionaires straight out of SPECTRE, greedy political operatives, amoral computer scientists, and partisan zealots who have fallen for their own conspiracy theories, all willing to do anything to remake the world in their own dystopian image. Putin, the Mercers, Steve Bannon, Brad Parscale, Mark Zuckerberg, Alexander Nix, Paul Manafort, and the empty vessel they used to achieve an altered reality — the grotesque New York tabloid, reality TV, Godfather of a crime family — all of them Fredos.
It is worth noting that it looks like the same online psychological warfare techniques that brought America a poisonous Trump presidency, have been employed to skew the Brexit vote toward “Leave,” to undermine European democracies, to fuel the rise of extremist parties, and to recruit Islamic terrorists.
The forces of liberal democracy, secular learning, diversity, tolerance, respect for law and individual rights are losing this fight to kleptocrats, criminality, disinformation, bigotry and nativism. A technology sold as empowering the masses has been hijacked to aid in their exploitation, impoverishment and bamboozlement. And those responsible may be too rich, powerful and untouchable to be stopped.
China, with its technologically-enabled regime of perpetual surveillance and ruthless information control, including a state media that cannot be questioned, is the dystopian, totalitarian future toward which a giant step was taken with the corruption of the 2016 election.
And, as we have seen, the attempt to do the same in the 2020 race is underway. Cambridge Analytica may be gone, but the tricks of its trade have been learned by anti-democratic bad actors around the world and in campaigns close to home.
For additional detail on how technology was used to attack the electon of 2016, see Wylie’s “Mindf*uck,” an excerpt “How I Helped Hack Democracy” in New York Magazine of October 4, available online, and a review of Wylie’s work, “Inside the Unscrupulous World of Social Media” by Clint Watts, former agent in the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, Washington Post, October 11.