Mindfuck Read online

  I clicked again and more dots appeared. “And now we are adding in online footprinting—like Internet browsing.”

  I clicked again. “And here are records with census information…and now social media profiles.” I continued to add layers and he leaned in. The map lit up more and more, with little clusters of dots growing outward until, after the final click, the map was dazzling, in a multitude of colors. He asked who had paid for it, but I told him I couldn’t say. As I started to outline the types of research into social media networks that DARPA was funding, he asked if something similar could be carried out in America.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said.

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  STEVE BANNON WAS BORN in Virginia in the early 1950s to a working-class Irish Catholic family. He went to a Catholic military high school and graduated with a degree in urban affairs from Virginia Tech, then served in the Navy as a surface warfare officer before a post at the Pentagon writing reports on the status of the U.S. Navy fleet worldwide. In the 1980s, his life took an academic turn—a 1983 master’s in national security studies from Georgetown University, a 1985 M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. After a tour in investment banking, Bannon moved on to making films in Hollywood as an executive producer, director, and writer. He worked on more than thirty films, including a documentary about Ronald Reagan. In 2005, Bannon joined the Hong Kong–based Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), and a year later he brought in a $60 million investment, half of which came from his former employer Goldman Sachs. The company eventually rebranded as Affinity Media Holdings, and Bannon continued to help run it until 2012, when he joined Breitbart. Next, Bannon co-founded the Government Accountability Institute, which eventually published the book Clinton Cash, by Breitbart News editor at large Peter Schweizer.

  In 2005, the right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart began Breitbart.com, an online news aggregator, and by 2007 it had grown to publish original content as Breitbart News. The site ran on the undercurrent of Breitbart’s personal philosophy, which has been referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture.

  When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy. At our first meeting, he was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau. The logic, as we later learned with Brexit, was that Britain served as an important cultural signifier for Americans. Win the Brits, and so falls America, Bannon later told me, as the mythologies and tropes of Hollywood had crafted an image of Britain as a country of educated, rational, and classy people. He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid. Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives” imposing their “feminist ideology” onto gaming culture.

  Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry, lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins. Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings” simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels” (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach.

  This is one of the odder moments in the Cambridge Analytica saga—the random airplane conversation that changed history. Several months before I met Bannon, two Republican consultants, Mark Block and Linda Hansen, happened to be sitting next to an ex–military officer who had worked as a subcontractor for a company that utilized “cyberwarfare” in elections. Block fell asleep on the flight, but Hansen and her seatmate started chatting, and the man told her about SCL’s projects in information warfare. When the flight landed, Hansen told Block they needed to contact Nix. Block, who had been the campaign manager for Herman Cain, was well connected to the fringe elements of Republican circles. He knew Bannon and understood immediately that SCL would be of interest to him. So Block connected Bannon with Nix, and I wound up in this hotel suite meeting the man who would later stage a mass manipulation of the American psyche.

  By the time I walked through the doors of the Varsity Hotel, Nix had already met with Bannon several times in New York. But when Nix tried to explain our projects, he ran into a problem—he didn’t actually understand what we were working on. He was in deeply unfamiliar territory with Bannon, who cared more about the details of the research than the pedigree of the researchers. Inside SCL, Nix was typically relegated by the other directors to deal with their “less serious” clients. Nix became more active in the company after his father, who was a large shareholder, died in 2007. He had graduated with average marks in art history from the University of Manchester but preferred the various enterprises of wealthy friends and family to galleries or libraries.

  Bannon was not a typical client for Nix, who was far more used to dealing with ministers or businessmen from the developing nations of Britain’s old empire. Bannon did not need a second passport from a tropical nation. He was not looking for colonial cosplay in London, and he did not care how Nix pronounced his words or about the tailoring of his bespoke suit. Bannon wanted real things. It was deeply disorienting for a man accustomed to seducing ministers with scantily clad Ukrainian women and inebriated Etonian banter.

  Originally, Nix suggested to Bannon that we meet somewhere on London’s Pall Mall, a street lined with grand stone buildings. A couple of blocks north of Buckingham Palace, Pall Mall begins at Trafalgar Square and ends at St. James’s Palace, the sixteenth-century residence of several members of the royal family. The area is home to some of Britain’s most exclusive private gentlemen’s clubs, where black tie is common and Nix socialized with his peers, sucking down drinks in opulent surroundings. Nix had imagined an elaborate dinner in a private dining room at the Carlton Club, meticulously planning the menu and serving staff, only to be rebuffed at the last minute.

  Still, Nix knew that everyone, including Bannon, suffers the yearning of an unfulfilled secret self. He realized that the American was lounging in the ancient universities of England to play out a role—when Bannon looked in the mirror, he saw a philosopher. To win him over, Nix would need to help him achieve his fantasy of becoming a thinker of big thoughts. And so my “academic” vibe became just what he needed to lure Bannon into role-play.

  Today Bannon is famous, but as we sat in that hotel room in the autumn of 2013, I knew virtually nothing about Steve from America. Even so, I quickly realized we were kindred spirits. We had ended up in politics, but our shared passion was culture, with his ambitions in film and mine in fashion. He indulged my interest in deconstructing trends and agreed that many of our social norms could be boiled down to aesthetics. And we both saw what was bubbling in tech and online spaces. He talked about gamers, memes, and MMORPGs—online games like World of Warcraft with huge numbers of players. He used the word “pwned” in a sentence, which is a gamer expression that implies domination or humiliation of a rival. We connected on all the things that made us weird. As we sat talking together, I found myself growing unexpectedly comfortable with him. He was no political hack, but a fellow nerd given permission to speak freely.

  When Bannon said he was interested in changing culture, I asked him how he defined culture. There was a long pause. I told him that if you can’t define something, you can’t measure it,
and if you can’t measure it, you can’t know if you are changing it.

  Rather than dive deep into theory, I gave Bannon a grossly simplified example of what culture is by using cultural stereotypes. Italians have a reputation for being more passionate and extroverted than other people. (Having dated one, I can testify to the grain of truth behind this reputation.) And while it’s obvious that not all Italians are loud and brimming with passion, if you visit Italy, you’ll probably find more people who are extroverted in their presentation than if you visit, say, Germany or Singapore. This can be thought of as a norm—the peak on a bell-shaped distribution curve of extroversion or loudness. And perhaps Italy peaks a bit further up the scale than other countries.

  When we describe cultures, we use the language and vocabulary of personality. We use the same words to describe both people and peoples. On the one hand, we can’t stereotype at the individual level, because every person is different. But on the other hand, we can say that, in a broader sense, Italian culture can be characterized as probably a bit more outgoing than many other cultures.

  If we can measure or infer certain traits in individuals using personal data, and then use those same traits to describe a culture, we can chart a distribution, creating an approximate metric for that culture. This framework made it possible for us to propose how we could use personal data found on social media, in clickstreams, or from data vendors to identify, for example, who the most extroverted Italian people are through their patterns of behavior as individual consumers and users. Then, if one wants to shift the culture to make it slightly less extroverted, this data gives us a list of actual named Italians, ordered by their degree of extroversion, whom we could track and target over time, trying to chip away at their extroversion. In other words, culture change can be thought of as nudging the distribution curve of culture up or down. What the data allowed us to do was to disaggregate that culture into individuals, who became movable units of that society.

  Bannon was someone who liked to talk, but when I got into a subject that interested him, he was quiet and even deferential. But he was also eager to get back to applications. To understand how this might become a practical campaign, think of public health. When a communicable disease threatens a population, you immunize certain vectors first—usually babies and old people, as they are most susceptible to infection. Then nurses and doctors, teachers and bus drivers, as they are most likely to spread a contagion through wide social interaction, even if they do not succumb to the disease themselves. The same type of strategy could help you change culture. To make a population more resilient to extremism, for example, you would first identify which people are susceptible to weaponized messaging, determine the traits that make them vulnerable to the contagion narrative, and then target them with an inoculating counter-narrative in an effort to change their behavior. In theory, of course, the same strategy could be used in reverse—to foster extremism—but that was not something I had even considered.

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  THE GOAL IN HACKING is to find a weak point in a system and then exploit that vulnerability. In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them. If you walk up to a random person on the street and ask, “Are you happy?” the chances are high that she will say yes. If, however, you walk up to that same person and first ask, “Have you gained weight in the last few years?” or “Are any people from your high school more successful than you?” and then you ask “Are you happy?”—that same person will be less inclined to answer yes. Nothing about her personal situation or history has actually changed. But her perception of her life has. Why? Because one piece of information in her mind was weighted more than the others.

  What we played with as the questioner was how she was weighting that information, which in turn affected her judgment of that information. We biased her mental model of her life. So which is true? Is she happy or not happy? The answer depends on which information is being pulled to the front of her mind. In psychology, this is called priming. And this is, in essence, how you weaponize data: You figure out which bits of salient information to pull to the fore to affect how a person feels, what she believes, and how she behaves.

  Unless someone’s parents are secretly Vulcan, no one on earth is a purely rational thinker. We are all affected with cognitive biases, which are the commonly occurring errors in our thinking that generate flawed subjective interpretations of information. It is completely normal for people to process information with bias—in fact, everyone does—and oftentimes these biases are harmless in day-to-day life. These biases are not random in each person. Rather, they are systematic errors, meaning they create patterns in common forms of irrational thinking. In fact, thousands of cognitive biases have been identified in the field of psychology. Some biases are so common and seemingly intuitive that it can be hard for people to even recognize that they are actually irrational.

  For example, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a study that asked participants a very simple question: “Suppose you sample a word at random from an English text. Is it more likely that the word starts with a k, or that k is the third letter?” Most people responded with the former, that words that start with k (e.g., kitchen, kite, or kilometer) are more likely. However, the opposite is true, and one is actually twice as likely in a typical English text to encounter words where the third letter is a k, such as ask, like, make, joke, or take. They tested for five letters (k, l, n, r, and v) like this. It is easier for people to think of words by first letter because we are taught to organize (or alphabetize) words by their first letter. However, people conflate this ease of recall with frequency or probability, even when this is far from the truth. This cognitive bias is called the availability heuristic, and is just one of many biases that affect our thinking. The bias is why, for example, people who see more news reports of violent murders on the news tend to think that society is becoming more violent when in fact global murder rates have been declining overall during the last quarter century.

  I had been pondering these ideas based on my experiences in politics, then fashion, and then information warfare. Political extremism, for example, is a cultural activity with parallels in fashion: They’re both based on how cultural information proliferates through the nodes of a network. The rise of jihadism and the popularity of Crocs can both be thought of as the products of information flows. When I started my research into cultural information for SCL’s counter-extremism work, I drew upon similar concepts, approaches, and tools to those I was exploring in fashion forecasting—adoption cycles, diffusion rates, network homophily, etc. The work was all about trying to anticipate how people would internalize and then spread cultural information—whether that meant in joining a death cult or in choosing a wardrobe.

  Bannon immediately grasped all of this, even telling me that he believed, as I do, that politics and fashion are essentially products of the same phenomenon. It was obvious that he treated intelligence gathering in a broad and deep way, which is not something I’ve seen many people in politics do. And that’s what makes him so powerful. He reads about intersectional feminism or the fluidity of identity not, as I later learned, because he’s open to those ideas but because he wants to invert them—to identify what people attach themselves to and then to weaponize it. What I didn’t know that day was that Bannon wanted to fight a cultural war, and so he had come to the people who specialized in informational weapons to help him build his arsenal.

  Bannon and I were clearly on the same wavelength, and the conversation that day flowed so naturally, it felt as if we were flirting—but not, because that would be gross. But intellectually, we were a match. I left that meeting feeling uplifted and validated by someone who had taken the time to listen. Bannon came across as a reasonable guy when I first met him—nice, even. I could tell he appreciated learning
new ideas and got excited by their possibilities. But what struck me was how this guy was a cultural maven and a tech nerd. I realized he had a bit of a libertarian streak, but we hadn’t talked that much about politics.

  Then I remembered I had lost my wallet. I called Nix to tell him how everything had gone—and that I needed a new ticket. “Chris, I’m busy, sort it out yourself.”

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  BANNON’S INTEREST IN OUR work wasn’t merely academic; he had big ideas for SCL. He told Nix of a major right-wing donor who might be persuaded to make an investment in the firm. Robert Mercer was unusual for a billionaire. He’d gotten a Ph.D. in computer science in the early 1970s, then went on to become a cog in the wheel at IBM for twenty-some years. In 1993, he joined a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies, where he used data science and algorithms to inform his investments—and made a stupid amount of money doing it. Mercer wasn’t one of these wheeler-dealer types who frenetically bought and sold businesses. He was an extremely introverted engineer who applied his technical skills very specifically to the art and science of making money.

  Over the years, Mercer had donated millions of dollars to conservative campaigns. He also started the Mercer Family Foundation, run by his then-thirty-nine-year-old daughter, Rebekah, which originally supported research and other charities, but had begun to also donate to politically involved nonprofit groups. His wealth and influence placed him alongside the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson in the pantheon of Republican donors. The news that Mercer might be willing to invest in SCL made Nix salivate. Mercer’s profile was one of disrupting the financial sector. Renaissance was one of the highest-performing hedge funds in the industry—and Mercer built the firm by eschewing traditional finance backgrounds and instead hiring physicists, mathematicians, and scientists to build his firm’s algorithms. But Mercer, it seemed, wanted us to attempt an even more ambitious version of profitable disruption. By profiling every citizen in a country, imputing their personalities and unique behaviors, and placing those profiles in an in silico simulation of that society (one created inside a computer), we would be building the first prototype of the artificial society. If we could play with an economy or culture in a simulation of artificial agents with the same traits as the actual people they represented, we could just possibly create the most powerful market intelligence tool yet imagined. And by adding quantified cultural signals, we were verging on a new area of something akin to “cultural finance.” We thought that if we got it right, we could run simulations of different futures of whole societies. Forget shorting companies; think about entire economies.