Review of Christopher Wylie's "Mindf*uck: Cambridge Analytica And the Plot to Break America"

If one book had to be designated in order to illustrate the term page-turner, Christopher Wylie's Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America would definitely be among the top contenders. This is a truly impressive book and an absolutely terrifying account by a young tech genius turned whistleblower. The writing is catchy, clever and funny. Moreover, saying the book's actual substance is informative would be the understatement of the year. Through his insider's account of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Wylie opens the pandora box of one of the 21st century's greatest yet still largely unaddressed issues, namely, the weaponization of data and its threat to democracy.

Mindf*ck is indeed, mind-blowing. Its empirical dimension and the very concrete intricate details it provides tell a chilling story about the process through which the firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) came about influencing two major world events in 2016: Brexit and Donald Trump's rise to the US Presidency. Wylie's book impresses also because the author is able to take distance from the actual scandal, providing readers with well-structured, profound and even scholarly psychosocial analysis. When considering the aftermath of the CA scandal, its impact for our societies and what we should learn from it, one passage perfectly captures the depth of Wylie's account: "But simply stopping CA is not enough. Our newfound crisis of perception will only continue to worsen until we address the underlying architectures that got us here. And the consequences of inaction would be dire. The destruction of mutual experience is the essential first step to othering, to denying another perspective on what it means to be one of us" (p. 228).

Wylie explains how CA worked with experts to learn about the biases that affect how people process information and how they impact electoral preferences and voting behavior. Combined with the access to personal data taken from Facebook and web browsing activity, understanding these processes enables analysts to categorize individual internet users according to reccurent patterns. The power of Big Data then enables the targeting of these population segments with targeted ads or political propaganda. In fact, Wylie recalls that during his first weeks working at the UK-based firm SCL (that would later form CA as a subsidiary in order to get involved in the US election process), he was tasked to explore ways to merge "propaganda with ad tech" (p. 47). The thinking was that there there was much the military could learn from the ad tech industry's use of the digital domain, especially in terms of "improving the targeting of narratives at their intended recipients trough profiling and machine learning" (p. 48). In the past two decades, tech companies - and Facebook in particular - were able to monetize "their ablity to map out and organise information" (p. 15) through their unprecedented access to personal data and their increasing capacity to harvest it. In fact, information about personal tastes, fears, biases, secret dreams that would normally take months or year for a parent, partner, friend, or therapist to gather, understand and possibly analyse was now readily available in a ready-to-use raw state thanks to the "trail of detailed personal information" left behind by social media users through clicks (p. 49).

Conversely, internet users have been operating under the false impression that apps and services like Facebook are "free," while in fact "[...] we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention" (p. 15). That grim reality is entirely at odds with what the internet was initially supposed to bring to humanity: lowering barriers to communication and access to information. Instead, we are now faced with a frenzy consisting of people spending "hours on social media, following people like them, reading news articles 'curated' for them by algorithms whose only morality is click-through rates - articles that do nothing but reinforce a unidimensional point of view and take users to extremes to keep them clicking" (p. 227). And here Wylie provides a frightening analogy: in the end, what we observe is a situation in which people "exist in their own informational ghettos [...] If Facebook is a 'community', it is a gated one". Indeed, we are faced with a situation akin to "cognitive segregation" (p. 227).

Using techniques coming from the notorious field of military psychological operations (PSYOPS), CA was therefore able to build a "data-powered arsenal suited to conquer hearts and minds [...] while voters became target[s] of confusion, manipulation and deception. Truth was replaced by alternative narratives and virtual realities" (p. 16). One of the most shocking yet brilliant passages of the book has to do with the concept of perspecticide, which the author defines as "the active deconstructon and manipulation of popular perception [...]" Weaponizing information is no easy endeavor. Unlike the act of dropping bombs that will cause destruction and likely hit some targets, the use of an "information weapon has to be tailored according to multiple factors: language, culture, location, history, population diversity" (p. 48).

And here comes the really chilling dimension of this approach, which Wylie refers to as the month-long process of "breaking down [...] pyschological resilience" (p. 48). In essence, that approach consists no less of a "psychological attack" (p.49), whose intent is to make the individual target confused, distrustful, and angry, while generating a range of other negative emotions such as "envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behaviour" (p.49). Wylie points out that the latter emotions constitute "the 'low-hanging fruit' for initiating the subversion of a larger organisation [...], which would later "serve as one of the foundations for Cambridge Analytica's work catalysing an alt-right insurgenya in America" (p. 49).

One issue that our book club considered and discussed at length is the author's responsibility in his own story. Some pointed out that it is at times somewhat disturbing to read Wylie's insider's and jaw-dropping account of CA's many ethical and legal violations. He also witnessed the meteoric rise of Steve Bannon, who made no secret that his main interest was in "changing culture" (p. 64), gradually becoming "the man who would later stage a mass manipulation of the American psyche" (p.62). It is difficult not to be frustrated with the author when he describes being front and centre in this process, yet continued his work until the tide turned. With that doubt in mind, some passages therefore come across as either dishonest or incredibly naive.

For instance, Wylie explains that one data-based strategy to address Bannon's wish for "culture change" is so "disaggregate [that] culture into individuals, who bec[o]me movable units of that society (p. 65)". He then goes on making an analogy with public health campaigns, which in times of epidemics pioritize the most vulnerable segments of a population for immunization. Usually infants and the elderly come first, followed by those people who are in regular contact with the public, such as health care workers, bus drivers and teachers. Wylie explains that in turn, to make a population more to extremism, one would similarly have to identify those individuals most vulnerable to extremist propaganda, understand what makes them targets of that messaging and then "target them with an incolulating counter-narrative in a effort to change their behaviour" (p. 64). Wylie then concludes, "[I]n theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse - to foster extremism - but that was not something I had even considered [emphasis added]" (p. 65). Given how smart and perceptive the author proves to be throughout the book, that latter statement is hardly believable.

Nontheless, our book club's conclusion was that the author was just a young and impressionable “geek” who got excited by the sheer power and possibilities that the data revolution provided and got in way over his head. He eventually did the right thing when the toxicity of the situation finally hit him, explaining at the outset of the book that, “[I] could not continue working on something so corrosive to our societies, so I blew the whistle, reported the whole thing to the authorities, and worked with journalists to warn the public about was going on” (p. 6).

Ultimately, this is not only a whistleblower's account and testimony. This is also a very important piece of analytical work that helps us understand not only what happened around the CA scandal but also why and how it could happen. In the final analysis, Wylie's act of whistleblowing came at great personal expense, which he still enduring on a daily basis what with death threats, stalking and regular intimidation schemes, or the banning from Facebook-owned social networks (p. 224). In providing this crucial account of the forces at play behind what happened in the critical juncture that was the year 2016, Wylie does a great service to society. His story and this book must be read and shared widely.