Required reading, and not just about Brexit or Britain. It has a whiff of crazy conspiracy about it (Google, Trump and Brexit are all connected by a shadowy computing genius billionaire ? It would make a good movie...), but there's more than enough here to wonder if that whiff is actually coming from something more, err, solid. So when I call it "required reading" I do not mean because I think it has all the answers or is even entirely accurate. I mean you should read it and give it your attention, that's all.
Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.
Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale. The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”... The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.
Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy? “It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election... This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not going to splash $15m on bullshit.”
“It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling. We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”
Palantir is a company that is trusted to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as many other countries. Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Drumpf campaign has said that Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was then at Cambridge Analytica.
This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered ) underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000. This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century.
Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Drumpf, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.
This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
I wonder how these Facebook-delivered messages affected the 'disconnected' elderly and the youngsters moving away from Facebook to more personal and instantaneous Snapchat and messaging apps?
ReplyDeleteMatter Beam In my opinion, in two words ...
ReplyDeleteElderly: fear
Youngsters: apathy
This is, of course, a generalization, but older people tend to watch a lot of TV, especially cable news, which seems more than happy to let Internet misinformation and fear mongering pollute their broadcasts. The young seem much more sophisticated in their online consumption and able to spot a con more often than not, but the common response is to throw up their hands and walk away.
Rhys Taylor Skepticism is always a good initial tack, but I don't find this tinfoil hat-ish at all. Just rich people doing what they do best, fixing the game in their own interests.
Put all this stuff about microtargeting aside, for a moment. Amidst all this somewhat justified bother about Facebook and the Google and Cambridge Analytics, three elephants in the room go completely unnoticed: the three credit reporting agencies. Forget NSA, forget GCHQ, the plastic in your wallet is telling anyone who wants to pay for that information - there are no restrictions on who can buy it or to what ends they can use it, they'll lie to you the consumer, they'll tell the data buyer something else entirely.
ReplyDeletetheatlantic.com - Two Major Credit Reporting Agencies Have Been Lying to Consumers