Mindf*ck, Christopher Wylie

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America by Christopher Wylie was something my wife thought I might be interested in learning more about.

Started: 3/16/2020
Completed: 3/19/2020
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: My Wife

Words for which I sought help:

fungible -- able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable

Review:

This book is just unbelievable.  It is staggering how effectively Cambridge Analytica created a method for simply destroying any sense of honor in American society.  This was done systematically, intentionally, and led to the horror of the current Republican president, Brexit, and numerous other abuses in smaller countries.

After a series of interviews and focus groups, Wylie said, "It turns out that Republicans can accept a bat-shit, insane candidate so long as it is consistent insanity."  Being able to develop this kind of hypothesis and then test it in focus groups is classical political strategy.  Being able to expand the focus group to near the entire population (as Cambridge Analytica did via Facebook data) means that message testing can be done on a 1:1 scale.  As daunting as that is, it turns out that being able to identify what message to send to individuals in order to change their perspective and then being able to send that message anonymously can cause individuals to hew to another's belief.  What is more, certain individuals (thought influencers if you will) can be bombarded with completely false, but logically consistent narratives until those vulnerable individuals start to share the false narrative with others.  Through incremental change, large shifts in perception can be implemented.

We all feel that we should be protected from this kind of influence.  The problem, however, is that there is no penalty for cheating in this way.  "The integrity of the sport demands a clean race.  But, in politics we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite for our democracy."  In politics cheating is fine if you win because, having won, you can insulate yourself from the reasonable consequences of your criminal behavior.  This is a new perspective to me and though I should have seen it, I simply did not.

At the end of the book, Wylie calls for software engineers to be held accountable for ethical behavior.  This is a good idea.  There is a problem, however, based upon code reuse (one piece of code can be used in many, many different ways never envisioned or intended by the original author), but I think that can be handled.  At least it is a start.

I feel, however, that politics should also demand integrity.  Integrity should be a prerequisite for democracy.  Politicians should also have a code of ethics that is enforceable on every level.  With the risk that the powerful/rich can literally generate favorable opinions through false narratives, the penalty for attempting to do that should be brutal.  How to make that happen is something else entirely...maybe this requires some sort of Constitutional amendment in  the United States involving ill-gotten political gains.

FWIW, Trump has hired the data experts from Cambridge Analytica with a new company name for his 2020 reelection bid.