The title of this post is the title of a new book, written by a guy who worked for Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that took Facebook data and used it in a psy-ops campaign to try to throw the election to Trump.
The connection to yesterday’s post on the coming extinction comes through the idea of consumer capitalism, and how your digital life and mine can be exploited, if we let it be, to support consumer capitalism and therefore pale evil in opaque and novel ways.
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WYLIE: Steve Bannon, you know, discovered that there’s nothing more powerful than a humiliated man. And that, you know, when you looked at a lot of the narratives that emerged originally from the anthropological research that was happening and then later got verified in more quantitative research, that there were groups of typically heterosexual white men who sort of felt that, because they could no longer be, quote-unquote, ‘a real man,’ they couldn’t show who they, quote-unquote, ‘felt like they really were,’ they almost felt closeted.
And it was really interesting to look at people in, you know – who are very privileged in many respects – racially and, you know, with their sexual orientation and everything – you know, to be a straight white man in America is to have, you know, the world in front of you. But at the same time, there was a group of people who felt like they couldn’t be who they were. And the pent up sort of…
In other words, Trump and the right more generally are very aware of how scared and spiritually bereft (old, white) America really is, and they are very craftily playing on the fear to amass grassroots power. Meanwhile, Facebook and the other large social media sites are selling out their users for a buck, because to them money is all that actually matters.
WYLIE: So there’s no such thing as sort of a silver bullet – like, if you like this one thing on Facebook, that means that you’re going to be an alt-right target. But there are certain sort of common features, you know? For example, certain kinds of movie viewing, right? So if you look at movies with Adam Sandler in it – not to, you know, bash Adam Sandler or to associate him in any way with the alt-right – there were certain kinds of films, for example, where, if you actually looked at the narratives within those films, you know, it’s guy gets girl.
What you watch, read, write, stew in, are all markers that give away your pressure points and make you vulnerable to being manipulated. Letting that information be free and go wherever it wants is a bad idea, not because you might get a virus or even so much because “ads” will be targeted at you. It’s a bad idea because it lets the manipulators alter not just how you spend, but perhaps what you care about, who you vote for, and even what you think. This is the real cybersecurity crisis, and no one talks about it.
WYLIE: One of the things that the company started to unpack was just, you know, how much hurt and pain there are in all kinds of different groups in the United States. There’s a lot of resentment across the board in different groups …
So much hurt and pain. Because the system is broken, and literally no one cares about the people and their well-being, and they know it very well.
WYLIE: But really, one of the things that I just remember is seeing videos of people from focus groups and events that Cambridge Analytica was doing who had been targeted and sort of massaged online into believing certain kinds of conspiracies. And just to see, like, the rage in their eyes – that they – how angry these people were, how they started engaging in highly racialized thinking. And to see people – the actual effect of people – you know, to see their faces and what that looks like, what a manipulated person looks like, for me, was really eye-opening. You know, when you sit in London and you work on a computer, you don’t necessarily always think about that these records in a database are, like, actual human beings. And you know, it was seeing that that I think really worried me about what it was doing. And so I left.
Find the mad, make them madder, point their rage at the blacks or the jews or the gay or muslims or the mexicans, and profit from increasing the hurt and the pain and the division among the lowly. Tell me it’s not satanic.
WYLIE: You know, my concern is that even if Cambridge Analytica has dissolved as a company, its capabilities haven’t. And you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book is to serve as a warning, particularly to Americans, to sort of look at, like – we have a completely unregulated digital landscape. There is almost no oversight. We are placing blind trust in companies like Facebook to do the honorable and decent thing, which is to pay attention to what’s happening on their platform.
And really, even if Cambridge Analytica doesn’t exist anymore, what happens when China becomes the next Cambridge Analytica? What happens when Iran or North Korea or, indeed, Russia becomes the next Cambridge Analytica? Just because the company has dissolved doesn’t mean its capabilities have dissolved. And this really gets to a lot of the responsibility of, you know, companies like Facebook to actually do their job and, you know, respect the democracies and the societies that allow them to be a business and actually, you know, prevent scaled manipulation and disinformation, you know, from existing on their platforms.
Some little adjustment to the stated policy, some little fine paid–it makes no difference at all, because the technology exists, and there will always be people out there who are willing to pervert it to pile up money or power or both, and there will never be a shortage of people at the bottom who need ‘good jobs’ to work for them and do their bidding for a paycheck. Just trying to feed my kids, y’know?
Yep. I know.
Get off the bus.
Rebel for real.