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< | In Defence of Cambridge Analytica |
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> | What the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Reveals About the State of Our Global Commons |
| | -- By JakeTaylor - 08 Oct 2019 |
| | Introduction
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< | Unfortunately, Cambridge Analytica did not steal Brexit. |
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> | The internet is our new global commons. Through a variety of interconnected applications, we have an online persona that allows us to speak to one another without eye contact, to find love without the anxiety-inducing fear of rejection and to receive the information from (only) where and (only) whom we want to listen to. |
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< | The leap from the intentional harvesting of user data and subsequent micro-targeting of voters, to the dishonest appropriation of an election, is a charge too far. No, what took place in 2016 is a symptom of something far more subversive. |
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> | The Cambridge Analytica scandal, unlike few other episodes in modern history, has exposed the public to the vulnerabilities of our democracy (and traditional election process) to the data harvesting machine that our commons, as presently constructed, is built upon. Moreover, the scandal introduces us to the more pervasive impact of mass data collection on the notion of democratic self-governance itself. |
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< | Brexit remains the lifechanging, generation-transcending, constitution-breaking moment that ripped up the political playbook, rendered traditional political parties and their processes obsolete and has torn apart my friends and family. Nevertheless, the impact of Cambridge Analytica on this lived reality is limited, either to the narrow number of ‘persuadables’ or, as a seminal new study suggests, that it may have had little or no impact on voters. |
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< | To focus on the role of Cambridge Analytica and to revel in the satisfying conviction in the court of public opinion of Alexander Nix, is to miss the more terrifying present. The digital commodification of thoughts, ideas, anxieties and opinions leading to mass behavioural modification is already entrenched in the last remaining generation that was not born into it. |
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< | What Cambridge Analytica did “was much less important than how the media has portrayed it because… it was nothing shocking or radically unexpected,” The Cambridge Analytica story has laid bare the level of pervasiveness of Facebook’s (as well as other digital oligarchs’) data collection structure, but has not galvanized the necessary questioning of the impact of technology on the ability to formulate earnestly held political views.
The New Politician: September 26, 1960
Politics has changed. The advent of the heyday of television saw the initial seismic shift whereby it was no longer the idea or the politic that mattered, it was the messenger. The United States led; the world followed. Of the early Kennedy/Nixon debates, the late John Perry Barlow observed that “from that point on, the President of the United States become more a movie star than a leader, more myth than a manager, more affect than intellect”.
Television, or at least the classic conception of this medium, is increasingly redundant. This is only because television’s purpose or valuable currency - maintaining human attention, has been usurped by far more effective technology. Perry Barlow prophesized of television: “this medium has defined our national agenda in ways that were often at odds with what might have been dictated by either sense or experience, until what we’re left with today is what I like to call Government by Hallucinating Mob”. If television created the hallucinating mob, the internet as we know it, weaponized it.
The Irrelevance of Mr. Nix |
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> | The Internet as Commons |
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< | The underlying cultural, political and historic tensions that informed an individuals’ vote in the Brexit referendum are myriad. Within this, the persuadables in the UK amounted to a small proportion of the electorate. |
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< | Moreover, in a seminal new paper, political scientists, Kalla & Broockman summarise 49 research studies and concluded that: “The best estimate for the persuasive effects of campaign contact and advertising-such as mail, phone calls, and canvassing--on Americans' choices in general elections is zero. Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero”. |
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> | Within the online commons, we have already seen the benefits of a de-centralized and non-linear space for public discussions. We have Wikipedia - we have the potential for unencumbered access to thoughts as well as the space to discuss, dissect and develop the ideas that naturally flow. This conceptualization of the internet is more than a marketplace for thoughts and ideas, it is the world’s university. Here, the potential for the development of humanity is unheralded. |
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< | This is not to suggest that the scraping of data and the use of lax permission regulation to accumulate 50 million data profiles equates to ‘engaging in good faith to legally supply data for resale’ it is merely to look more closely at the mob itself. |
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> | Nevertheless, a number of private entities or technological oligarchs have been incredibly successful at taking this notion of commons, packaging it in distinctive colors, branding it, subjecting it to hierarchy, closing it off from alteration and marketing it as ‘community’, ‘hangouts’ or ‘the [twitter]sphere’. Most significantly, they have been able to monetize the commons itself in order to become some of the most lucrative private companies in history. |
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< | Whilst the UK clearly needs to grapple with the entrenched deficiencies in its campaign finance laws, and questions of how political campaigns operate in the future, to focus on the mis-deeds of Cambridge Analytica plays into the ‘unhelpful fable’ that the public vote for right-wing authoritarians because they are being manipulated by the media. |
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> | The sheer parasitic brilliance of these services is that the cost of access for individuals is not in dollars, but in something far more valuable – personal information (a commodity more valuable than oil).
The ubiquity of the smart phone has facilitated this relationship. No longer a phone and far more than computer, these devices are a pod for: analysis, research, resale and targeted advertising: the ‘Parasite with the Mind of God’. |
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< | To look beyond Cambridge Analytica is to question whether there was an inevitability to this, given the lack of understanding as to what was going on with licensed data - Cambridge Analytica was merely the most effective at marshalling the information and, at the very least, manipulating a situation. Within this context, it is that lack of understanding of the internet society that presents the real underlying crisis – the nature of the internet that we have allowed to grow. Put another way, how we have allowed ourselves to become the weaponised hallucinating mob through it. |
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> | What the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows us is that this can and has been weaponized against segments of society, impacting upon democracy itself. |
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< | The Underlying Crisis |
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< | We live within a completely unregulated landscape – by default or design, our new ‘global commons’ is digital and online. The majority have no idea how it works. |
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> | The Impact of Cambridge Analytica on Our Understanding of the Commons |
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< | The online commons is built upon a model where the information and structures have been centralized. In this way, the Terms of Service can be seen as a new digital ‘social contract’. The contract requires, in exchange for interconnectedness, the commoditization of personally identifiable information and the blind trust in information oligarchies who hold that information. The cost of being able to see an ex-girlfriend’s photos or to wish a distant relative happy birthday is the keys to warehouse – the knowledge of human habit and thought, on both a macro and micro level. With that comes the ability to document, implant and change ideas, not only through micro-targeting, but by being the gatekeepers of thoughts and information itself. |
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> | In the election context, most prominently in the Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica was able to rely upon the personal and personalized information of approximately 50M people, from information scraped from Facebook, and use psychographic tools to target individuals (through online advertisements) with customized content designed to pray on their fears and/or hopes based on its analysis of voters’ personality traits. |
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> | In the Brexit context, those targeted - the persuadables, amounted to a small proportion of the electorate. The referendum was nevertheless impacted by small margins. However, to limit discussions regarding the actions of Cambridge Analytica as to whether the company’s actions were outcome-determinative in one electoral incident, is to miss the more generally relevant point relating to psychographically-targeted "push communications," and how they effect human behavior. The desire to purchase or to not, the decision vote or not, both fall on a spectrum of susceptibility to targeted influence. |
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< | Are My Ideas Even My Own? |
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> | Away from the election context, the Cambridge Analytica scandal has nevertheless laid bare the level of pervasiveness of Facebook (as well as other digital oligarchs’) data collection structure. In this way, the Terms of Service can be seen as a new digital ‘social contract’. The contract requires, in exchange for interconnectedness, the commoditization of personally identifiable information – privacy - and the blind trust in information oligarchies who hold that information. |
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< | If one accepts as a starting proposition that the majority of human activity is unconscious, how can a mind that has been subjected to the use of military technology, social psychology and manipulation by devices more in tune with my worst compulsive anxieties than any human being could ever be, be capable of genuine earnest political thought? |
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< | In 2016, I was not a persuadable, but that misses the point. I am already a bona fide member of the hallucinating mob. I have owned a smartphone since 2008 and have operated a Facebook account for at least as long as that. What anxiety-induced compulsive Facebook checking of my echo chamber formed my current outlook? It is harrowing. |
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> | Facebook at Odds with Democracy |
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< | A Small Act of Resistance |
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> | As against this backdrop, what Cambridge Analytica did “was much less important than how the media has portrayed it because… it was nothing shocking or radically unexpected;. The data collection model of the internet (Facebook) is fundamentally inconsistent with the values of the commons we want. |
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< | In the face of this, there is but one personal act of defiance left. I may never be one of those who knows how to change the behaviour of computers, but the decision to seek to learn, grapple and engage with the design of my global commons is a start. We have had Cambridge Analytica, we have had Snowden, we know the power of information and we therefore no longer have the luxury of ignorance. So, why have I not deleted Facebook? |
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> | The scandal lays bare the realities of what Shoshana Zobhoff describes as surveillance capitalism, and that, notwithstanding public comments to the contrary, Facebook has little incentive to change, its fundamental purpose is to track, collect and to target. It is an advertising agency and in this way, is antithetical to the democratizing commons described above.
Whilst society may be blind to this reality, those politicians who wish to displacine important social priorities in favour of personal political gains, are clearly not. In his book about Cambridge Analytica's work, whistle-blower Christopher describes an unnamed African country moved similar money out of its health ministry in order to pay for the firm's services. |
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I don't think I
understand the arc of the essay, which probably means that the best
way to make it better is to make clearer the contour of the
argument. |
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> | The Need for Adjustments |
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< | The first point, which also seems to be the title point, is that the
activities of Cambridge Analytica did not by themselves change the
result of a referendum that was decided by a relatively significant
margin of 4%. That does not seem to me to be a very strong thesis,
however. The significance of the matter, as you indicate yourself,
has nothing to do with whether it was outcome-determinative in one
electoral incident. |
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> | I am both in awe of the potential of the internet as well as terrified of the current social cost to access. |
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< | I think in deciding what Cambridge Analytica itself accomplished,
the matter would better be addressed by asking what it actually did,
in this and in prior electoral episodes elsewhere, than by relying
upon one (or even more than one) general political science studies
of the effect of advertising on candidate choice. We can all agree,
I think, that the question about psychographically-tagerted "push
communications," which are not necessarily advertisements, is how
they effect behavior, rather than idea formation. |
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> | In the face of such compelling societal concerns as identified by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the resistance to change seems to be cries of ‘convenience’. Putting to one side the legitimacy of such assertions as well as the need for government intervention, solutions exist at least on the individual level. Cryptography and the changing of individual privacy settings and the adoption of more protective habits (Firefox, proton mail and signal) are a start. Education both of one’s self as well as of the next generation of the lived reality that privacy is understood as fundamental to freedom and democracy and not merely a preference. |
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< | But that's the less evident aspect of the process that you discuss
in the remainder of the draft, which is far removed from the
question of single electoral choices, and more generally directed at
the issue of the effect of these push communications on
self-fashioning tout court. Once we are at the question of how the
self is shaped, any one Alexander Nix is indeed insignificant. But
the matter cannot be analyzed simply as one troll and one anxiety
sufferer in his echo chamber. Now the question is about the
"climate of opinion," the influence of the great plurality of minds
and bots affecting minds, that studies of "computational propaganda"
are in this sense about. |
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> | The benefits to the above are two-fold, such actions both ensure greater individual protection but also impact upon the market and force companies to listen and practices to change. If the resistance to change is ‘convenience’ then the small changes referred to above can be marketed as ‘adjustments’ nevertheless, they are ones that are fundamental to reclaiming privacy, democracy and freedom. |
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< | So I think the way forward is to clarify what the central idea is,
and to reflect that ida both in brisk introduction and in a more
closely-sustained effort to produce the analysis that causes you to
believe in the value of whatever idea it is. So far as why you
haven't removed yourself from Facebook (or is that FACEBOOK?) yet, I
should think the answer is that you're still not taking the question
very seriously. |
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