Mindfuck - A Review
- ryan book
- Nov 1, 2020
- 11 min read
Updated: Dec 30, 2020
Author of the book: Christopher Wylie
Synopsis: 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.
Abstract: Mindf*ck takes you through the life of one of the founders of the infamous technology company, Cambridge Analytica (CA). Although it doesn't go too deep into what exactly CA did it provides us with a good look into the dirty world of political campaigning. The book is jam-packed with details, taking you through Wylie's life and using pertinent examples to accurately convey what truly happened. If you are interested in politics, this is a must-read.
Full Review:
Introduction
I want to start by explaining what this book is truly about, it is not a technical book explaining in depth the algorithms that built Cambridge Analytica (CA) that would melt most people brain. Instead, it is a journey through Christopher Wylie's life from his roots to how he ended up building some of the most dangerous technology there is out there. During the course of the journey, Wylie serves up some very pertinent socio-political commentary and going in-depth with relevant examples and analogies. I will be dividing the review into 7 different sections or chapters that help us to navigate this book. The sections are as follows:
Wylie's Early Life
Working for the Liberal Democrats
Working for SCL
Steve Bannon
Formation of Cambridge Analytica
Russian Interference
Brexit and Trump
Wylie's Early Life
Wylie starts off the book, by introducing himself, summarising how a wheelchair-bound queer teen found himself so attracted to politics and technology. This leads him to join politics in his home country of Canada. While working there he observes how the Obama campaign made use of technology to unite a divided country. This is where he sees how technology can be used to influence politics. One thing Wylie does throughout the book that there will be paragraphs in between chapters that give like very interesting facts that fit right in without being specifically relevant. At one point in the early chapters, he explains how new additions to social media result in silicon valley acting as a casino by using features such as bright colours and infinite scroll.
Working for the Liberal Democrat Party (England)
As this book takes place in a chronological sequence, the next jump is to when Wylie escapes politics in Canada moves to England, specifically the London School of Economics to study law. While in London he could not resist the allure of politics and ended up joining the Liberal Democrats (more commonly known as LibDems) as a technology consultant. Wylie describes the reluctance of parties worldwide to adopt technology. Specifically the LibDems antiquated technique of campaigning, including the method of leafletting. This was basically just spamming people with LibDems brochures which ended up backfiring on them and was basically their demise. Wylie decided to take things into his own hands to build a voter profile to target specific voters. To do this he had to figure what LibDems voters were like. Wylie said, "I could visualise Tories ( another British political party) who in the most general sense were either posh, rich or working-class anti-immigrant types. Labour voters were northerners, union members or the public sector types." To characterize Libdems he had to manually build a profile. So Wylie went around Britain interviewing LibDems to figure out some connection between them. However, due to them being such a diverse group, conventional classification systems didn't work, until he stumbled upon the 5 Factor Model of personalities to profile people. Consequently, this personality profiling tool ended up being the backbone of CA. The Five-Factor Model is made of the five most commonly observed personality traits from a list of 16 personality traits. These are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (aka OCEAN).
Wylie figured out that LibDems scored higher on openness and lower on agreeableness. As Wylie put it, " they were a bunch of curious open-minded but stubborn people." This is also where Wylie points out there needs to be much more nuance when it comes to politics, instead of classifying people by their race, sexual orientation or gender but instead by looking deeper and using personalities, voters could be better understood by all parties.
Wylie brings this data to the higher up LibDems and they refuse, letting their ego get in their way, not wanting to be told what to do by a teenager with purple hair. Wylie ends of this section with a scathing remark, " the LibDems lost 49 out of 57 seats in parliament, their entire parliamentary caucus could have comfortably fit in a van."
Working for SCL
SCL is a British military contractor and more importantly Cambridge Analytica's parent company. For all intents and purposes, CA was merely a subdivision of SCL but they named it differently for legal reasons. This section introduces us to a new eccentric character, Alexander Nix. Nix was one of the executives as SCL and founder of CA. To put it bluntly, Nix was quite the character, Wylie characterises him through the many weird and often scary encounters he had with him. Nix described what SCL did as " projects that governments couldn't officially undertake themselves, we win hearts and minds over there (poor countries), you know however means through which that has to happen." Establishing to us the reader, early on that SCL is a shady ass company and that they help to do the dirty work of psychological warfare for governments. Throughout this book, Wylie offers us stories of the fucked up things that they did during such projects. From Kenya to Nigeria, they meddled in all their elections just so they could profit off of all these corrupt governments.
Wylie describes psychological warfare as a commonly overlooked pillar of warfare. When we think of war, we may be thinking of guns, submarines and tanks, but Wylie argues that psychological warfare can be way more lethal.
Wylie and a coworker had the idea to build an automated data harvesting utility that would scrape the web for data of an individual, compile it and use artificial intelligence to predict their next move. However to feed this system they needed data, which they procured (unethically) from the government and telecoms company of Trinidad and Tobago using their private data to spy on them. Wylie also describes the other unethical stuff that SCL did that he now regrets taking part in.
Steve Bannon
You might have heard of the name Steve Bannon. He was the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an alt-right hate-fuelled news outlet, he was also the White House chief strategist for the first 7 months of the Trump presidency. Most importantly he was also one of the founders of Cambridge Analytica. In fact, CA was named as such due to Bannon wanting to see himself as an intellectual and thus he wanted his company to be named after an intellectually prestigious area such as Cambridge. Bannon was interested in creating a similar system to which they had developed in Trinidad but not only to predict behaviours but to influence them. What he essentially wanted to do was create a simulation of America to target voters and to influence them to vote republican. To test if a simulation would work they went to set up a mini simulation by gathering data by interviewing people in Virginia. Throughout the book, Steve plays a huge role in making CA into what it became.
Formation of CA
Once they had secured funding to build their simulation from a rich conservative billionaire, Robert Mercer, they started to work on their project. One of the things that Wylie noticed while gathering data for his Virginia simulation was that Fox News had a distinct impact on voters. Wylie states, " The network was conditioning peoples sense of identity into something that could be weaponized. Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic arguments because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion. It's the same bias that makes people say things that they may regret later. During that fit of anger, they are in fact, thinking differently." People like us who don't consume fox news may look at those who do as, uneducated stupid hillbillies, however maybe these viewers are being primed to consume such misinformation, such that stay glued to their screen. Through no fault of their own, these viewers are sucked in. Zooming out, Wylie comments on the entire political environment present in America which alienates people by classifying them. " If you are a white man living in a trailer, for example, you are probably going to get angry when you are shown people on TV who are insisting that white people are super privileged." This, in turn, stifles political discourse as affect heuristic from that anger starts to kick in.
Wylie then moves back to talking about their simulation and a big stumbling block that they now faced. Data. To reliably create a simulation of America, they had to get access to a lot of personal data, which was much harder to obtain than in Trinidad, or so they thought. This is where a lot of the major controversy around CA begins. This is also where a very important character steps in, Dr Alexsander Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge, who spent the majority of his upbringing in Moscow and was researching the use of social media in psychological profiling. Kogan himself proclaimed that "Facebook knows more about you than any other person in your life."Wylie was immediately mesmerised by Kogan’s work and asked him to join him at SCL. At SCL Kogan and Wylie decided that the best place to obtain this data would be through Facebook. They built an app that gave you a personality quiz and while you were doing that quiz, the app collected as much data about you as possible. To get people to download the app they paid them through an Amazon service that pays people small amounts of money (1-2 dollars) to complete micro-tasks like downloading an app. The real kicker was that not only did it take your data ( which you sold to them for $1-2) it also accessed all your friend's data without their permission. Although Facebook’s lawyers have painted this as a breach of trust, this was very much an intended feature that Facebook made available. “Facebook wants people to use this data, the more this happens, the more it can monetise users” and also “Facebook viewed being a user of Facebook as enough consent to share your personal data to anyone- even if your friends had no idea an app that their friend downloaded was harvesting their data.”
A 2015 study found that using Facebook likes, a computer reigned supreme in predicting human behaviour. Wylie explains why this is true by explaining that we all have different personalities around different people. That is one of the things that makes us human. However unlike people, Facebook has no expectations from us, hence we tend to behave like our true selves on the internet, with no facade whatsoever, making us very vulnerable to these very same social media companies. The scary part is that the data gathered was so accurate they could quiz people and already know their answers before they could answer. By late 2014 CA had procured data from 87 million users mainly from America.
Another piece of commentary that Wylie made was how shifting social norms have closeted racist and misogynistic people. His argument is that previously there was this huge percentage of the population, straight white males, were able to get away with horrendous stuff such as sexual harassment and using derogatory terms. However as social norms have shifted, these people have had to moderate themselves. These people begin to feel censored and that they can’t truly express themselves. “These men began to experience the burden of the closet and they did not like the feeling of having to change themselves.” Just like how a gay person may feel unable to truly express themselves.
When many of us hear the term “make America great again”, we may gloss over it. However deep within these slogan lies an insidious message. When we refer to 'again', we need to think what was so great about America 50 years ago. Was it the slavery, gender inequality or the homophobia? At surface level this may seem like looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, however to these closeted straight white males, there lies a different meaning, that America is going to go back to its ugly past where they were worshipped and could do as they please.
Going back to Cambridge Analytica, they had started to weaponise these men. They knew their personality traits and thus knew what made them angry. So instead of just giving them conventional advertisements that are informative, they fed them misinformation to anger them and to mobilise them into a vocal and angry group of voters. Facebook had no objection to this whatsoever, as long as CA was generating more engagement, they were satisfied. CA used misinformation with many demographics of people, from staunchly religious people to gun nuts, to make them so angry that their rational thought processes became impaired. When Wylie started to see this, he realised it was time to leave and left CA to go to Canada to work for Justin Trudeau.
Russian Interference
In 2014, SCL started working with executives from a Russian company called Lukoil which is known to be a front for the Russian government. Wylie was very confused about what they were doing there."Why would a Russian oil company with virtually no presence in the US want access to our US data assets." At this point of time, Wylie was in the process of leaving so he did not think too hard about it, but in hindsight, he realised that the Russians were looking to put a pro-Russia man in the white house after how hard Obama had been with Russia. Hence they set out on their own disinformation campaign, using their vast array of hackers to spread misinformation, to malleabelise the American public into accepting Putin.
Brexit and Trump
Fast forward to 2016, Wylie has now left CA. At the same time, there seems to be a shift in British politics, more and more people are becoming sceptical of the European Union. Wylie describes how the Vote Leave campaign broke campaign finance laws while working with CA, information he received from friends that were still working for CA. CA used the same tactics they did in America to anger British voters into thinking that the European Union was stealing from them. One of the main issues with social media advertising campaigns was that they weren't regulated. If an advertisement was placed on TV, radio or print, everybody could see what was being advertised and hence these advertisements can be held accountable. However, the problem with targeted campaigning is that only the end-user saw the advertisement. It was revealed that Vote Leave used 1443 different ads to target users. Wylie argues that when it is revealed that an Olympian has cheated his medal is taken away, why doesn't this apply to politics. Even when the Elector Commission of England found that the Brexit vote had involved cheating, Brexit still took place. A good way to find out what happened in Britain is to watch Brexit; the uncivil war.
The book also reveals that Republican campaigns paid CA millions of dollars to do targeted advertising. This is how Donald Trump got elected to the highest office in America. Some of Trumps most famous slogans were crafted not by politicians but scientists and psychologists working at CA and SCL. Not only did they weaponize the American public to divide them, but they also used social media to do targeted voter suppression. In one instance targeting African American voters with advertisements telling them the polls had closed, voters they knew tended to vote democratic. This kind of cheating is abhorrent, as Wylie describes it, "it was the death of democracy." Wylie also goes on to lambast Facebook that tried to cover up its involvement, always playing the victim card when it was clear that they were very much involved in letting such a breach of trust of the public.
Conclusion
The book ends off by explaining the lengths that Wylie has to go to whistleblow, undergoing attacks from ardent supporters, seeing him part of some left-wing conspiracy that is trying to overthrow their beloved leader. This book illustrates that if something is not done, democracy is truly dead. In just a few days the US election will take place, which will have a ripple effect across democracies all over the world. Wylie ends off by apologising for what he has created, just like Oppenheimer regretted his work, Wylie admits his thirst for academic progress blinded him to what was truly happening at CA.
"The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to filter and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers" - Christopher Wylie
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