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Alok Vaid-Menon's Reviews > Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by
by
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.
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