Survival in the Gig Economy
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Get it from: Thriftbooks * Better World Books * Amazon
This is an insider’s story about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal that burst onto the public consciousness in the spring of 2018—about a year before the Mueller Report became public. In many respects, the Cambridge Analytica scandal has been nearly forgotten in the ensuing (and never-ending) scandals associated with the Trump regime and coup attempt of January 6th. But this story gives us valuable insight into the dark forces that made Trump possible, as well as its association with the ongoing delusion and racial violence that may eventually destroy the United States.
Christopher Wylie had previously worked as a data analyst in Canadian politics. He became disenchanted with politics, and found himself with a job offer from Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), a private British behavioral research and strategic communications group. SCL had started sometime in the 1990s. Although the company managed a number of traditional “commercial” accounts, it also had high-level connections in the British government, particularly the intelligence network. Its upper-level employees included Thatcher-era former cabinet ministers and retired military commanders, which allowed the company access to “secret” level government information. Company headquarters was located in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, “a place of exceptional wealth and power, with an unabashed legacy of empire.”
When Wylie came on board, SCL was involved in various electoral “campaigns” in developing countries—a few of them outright dictatorships. The company had also been involved in US-funded psychological warfare associated with the Iran and Afghanistan wars. The company’s modus operandi was to conduct data mining on target audiences and then tailor messages to modify behavior based on objectives dictated by their paying clients. The company’s leaders and owners had close affiliations with the British royal family, the British military, and the Conservative party. These were folks who were, for the most part, filthy rich, privileged and well-connected.
The beginning of Cambridge Analytica starts in 2014. Aleksandr Kogan, a developer at SCL, created an app for collecting and sharing information. SCL entered into a partnership with Facebook, which allowed SCL access to its users. The app not only collected data about the user (all of the posts, likes, sites visited, stuff bought on the web), but also the same information from all of the user’s Facebook friends and everyone else in their Facebook network. Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook deployed the theory of the Panopticon: In order to be able to convert user behavior into profit, platforms need to know everything about their user’s behavior, while their users know nothing of the platform’s behavior. “As Cambridge Analytica discovered, this becomes the perfect environment to incubate propaganda….platforms are allowed to adopt dark pattern designs that deliberately mislead users into continued use and giving up more data.”
In March of 2018, Facebook admitted to transferring 50 million user profiles to Cambridge Analytica, although it also claimed that it was not aware of the app’s additional scope and reach, which was in violation of company rules. Facebook ended up paying $5 billion to the US Federal Trade Commission in exchange for settling the suit against it, as well as $643,300 to the UK Information Commissioner. The basis for the legal action against both companies was that they were deliberately deceptive about what information was to be collected and how it was to be used. Ironically, the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)—which had been adopted in April of 2016—did not go into effect until May 25, 2018—a few months after news about the Facebook scandal broke.
In May 2018, SCL announced it would be closing due to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, there may be various “shell” entities still operating. Most of the people associated with the company are very wealthy. An investigation by the FTC against the company is still ongoing. In October of 2020, Wylie’s former boss, Alexander Nix signed an agreement with British authorities that disqualifies him from serving in the capacity of director, or forming, promoting, or managing a company without permission of the courts until 2027. The British Insolvency Service director said that the company had been offering “shady political services to potential clients for a number of years.”
Cambridge Analytica was formed as a subgroup of SCL when it was purchased by the oligarch heirs Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer for $15 million (SCL retained a 10% interest) shortly before the 2016 election. Characterizing this as an “investment” in a private company avoided having to report it as a political donation. Setting up such subsidiary companies was a fairly standard SCL practice, which allowed them to operate under the radar.
The Mercers appointed Steve Bannon as the Vice President, and it was he who Wylie and others primarily worked with in getting the organization set up. Bannon was hell-bent on creating a movement even before Donald Trump had become a candidate. Wylie reports that Bannon told him that to “fundamentally change society, you have to break everything,” and his ultimate mission was to destroy “the establishment…big government and big capitalism,” i.e., the controlling administrative state that made choices for people and deprived them of purpose.
Wylie describes the subtle subterfuge of wooing Bannon when his boss, Alexander Nix (more on him later) set up a dummy office in Cambridge—because apparently Bannon needed to have the cachet associated with the university. Wylie and a co-worker nicknamed the Cambridge location the Potemkin Site (named after the hastily constructed Russian towns built to impress visitors). Every time Bannon visited, employees scrambled to set up the faux Cambridge “office.” If Bannon ever suspected it was a fake, he never let on. Wylie wryly notes that Bannon unofficially became Cambridge Analytica’s first target of disinformation.
Cambridge Analytica also did work for other (in)famous luminaries. John Bolton set up a super PAC with over $1 million to “increase militarism in American youth” because he thought millennials were “morally weak.” Executives at the Russian firm Lukoil came looking for suspicious projects that had nothing to with promoting the gas and oil industry. Wylie says he can point to no “smoking gun” evidence that Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Russian disinformation campaign in the U.S., even if they seemed to have their hand in a lot of international deception campaigns that may or may not have been coordinated. Wylie says that he started “turning a blind eye” to shady projects he was not directly involved in, because, “I knew it would get me in trouble with Nix if I asked too many questions that he didn’t care for.”
Wylie’s misgivings began to grow, especially when he discovered a campaign (described in company correspondence) as “voter disengagement’ targeting African Americans. Because Wylie was concerned that this activity might be illegal, he put a call into the company’s U.S.-based lawyers in New York. He never received a response. Wylie also recalls receiving a memo from the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Giuliani) with a warning about potential implications of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The memo recommended “filtering” the work of foreign nationals through U.S. citizens, as well as suggesting that Nix recuse himself until “loopholes could be explored.”
When the 2016 election cycle began, the Mercers let everyone at Cambridge Analytica know that their preferred candidate was Ted Cruz. Both the Cruz and Trump campaigns had independently paid more than $5 million to Cambridge Analytica. In the Spring of 2015, Wylie received a phone call from the Trump organization. Wylie says he was actually looking forward to doing some regular commercial (i.e., non-political) stuff, assuming that the work would involve The Apprentice or Trump’s casinos. The conversations were initially “amorphous,” and Wylie thought the Trump executives were looking for free advice. When Wylie found out Trump was running for President he declined: “I was finished doing dirty work for right-wing politicians.”
Ironically, Cambridge Analytica sued Wylie and two of his co-workers, alleging he had violated the “non-solicitation” clause in their NDAs by contacting Trump. Wylie explained to his attorneys that at no time was he working for Trump. But the company was relentless in badgering Wylie, costing him a lot of money. In order to settle the suit, Wylie signed a “super-non-disclosure agreement,” thus setting “the first trap in my future as a whistleblower.” Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica had “spread like a disease through the Republican party,” while at the same time it was “screwing” them.
In an early conversation during the recruitment of Steve Bannon, Wylie recalls telling Bannon, “The message at a Tea Party rally is the same as at a Gay Pride parade: Don’t tread on me! Let me be who I am! “ Wylie’s argument appealed to Bannon, because it resonated with all the “embittered conservatives who couldn’t be real men anymore,” having to deny and suppress some fundamental part of their core identity. “They had to hide their true selves to please society—and they were pissed about it…It was humiliating, and Bannon knew that there was no force more powerful than a humiliated man.”
The data collection projects were much more than a big database of facts about who people were, what they liked, and how they spent their time. The projects were done in conjunction with psychological research (a lot of it Russian) which deliberately targeted impulsive anger, conspiratorial thinking, and dark triad personality traits. These were paired with other behavioral research finding that patterns of irregular rewards that create anticipation are the foundation of addictive behavior. Thus, many algorithms used by social media platforms are deliberately designed to create “ludic loops” and “variable reinforcement schedules” in users’ brains. Anger and hate addiction on steroids.
Bannon became a regular reader of Reddit and 4chan, and—through Cambridge Analytica—developed tools to automate cyberbullying and scaled psychological abuse—which became key tools of the alt-right. A favorite strategy was to show content that was framed as “liberal elites mocking regular Americans” targeted to angry white men. Other strategies were designed to inoculate targets against counter-narratives. That is, any criticism of racism for example, would be interpreted as an attack on one’s own identity, further entrenching racialized views and creating a “wicked reinforcement cycle,”
Research conducted by the company revealed that making people angry interfered with their ability to rationally process information. Angry people were “more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups” and also tended to “underestimate the risk of negative outcomes.” The tools developed at Cambridge Analytic were thus designed to tap into the darkest part of the human limbic brain, circumventing both logic and compassion. Bannon told Wylie he “wanted his targets to discover themselves and become who they really were.” But, according to Wylie, these tools were not about self-actualization, but “used to accentuate people’s innermost demons in order to build what Bannon called his “movement.’”
A central character in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is the man who hired Wylie—one Alexander Nix. Nix was one of the Directors at SCL Group. He had been born into the British upper classes and schooled at Eton, where the British royals send their children. On the day of his interview, Wylie describes walking through the ornate lobby at SCL and then ushered into a small room that was “exceptionally hot.” Wylie at first thought someone had accidentally left the heat on (it was late spring), but later found it was intentional—“a way to mess with people before a meeting.”
Curious, I did a search on Alexander Nix myself. Although one would never confuse him with Mark Zuckerberg, there are some striking similarities. The most striking feature is the pale, paper-white skin, which seems almost spooky on someone who has sufficient resources to travel anywhere in the world and yet somehow never sees the sun. Other common features are the supercilious turn of the mouth in an otherwise expressionless face, and a vacuous stare that suggests one would have to dig far and deep to find a soul.
Nix testifies in UK MP’s “fake news” investigation. We can see obvious entitled asshole behavior from the very beginning.
According to Wylie, Nix was the sort of character who took “Obvious delight in intimidation…[and] possessed an uncanny gift for finding just the spot where his malice would do the most damage.” Nix “made sport of belittling staff, blowing through the office like some irritable tornado, tossing out insults as he passed.” One of his favorite things to do was to blame the victim of his rages, which often included gaslighting. When Nix would throw things and cause chaos, the staff would dutifully clean up the mess. When Nix calmed down, everyone would pretend as if nothing had happened.
Wylie describes his own “blowup” with Nix, which ironically revolved around the Cambridge Analytica contract. Although signing the contract would have granted Wylie shares in the company, he was nervous about a long-term commitment, heeding a “warning voice in the back of my head.” Nix was furious at this refusal to sign, trapping Wylie in a small room where he screamed and flipped a chair. Wylie didn’t go to work for two weeks: “We both knew that he needed me more than I needed him.” Nix sent a co-worker to deliver an apology (being too stubborn and haughty to do so himself). Wylie “reluctantly” returned to work, but did not sign the contract.
One of the most exciting parts of the story is the set-up by the UK Channel 4 news, where they recorded Nix and other Cambridge Analytical employees pitch their services to a Sri Lankan investigator with the alias of “Ranjan.” This involved a huge amount of research into Sri Lankan politics and prominent families, because “Ranjan’s” story would have to get past Cambridge Analytica’s background check. In the setup, Ranjan posed as a Sri Lankan who had left his country, made a fortune elsewhere, and was now interested in returning to his homeland and running for political office. Wylie provided the background on how Cambridge Analytica vetted potential clients as well as Nix’s usual modus operandi. In the UK, journalists are permitted to run this type of “sting” operation so long as the sting will reveal probable crimes and is otherwise in the public interest. Channel 4 recorded a total of four meetings, and Nix came to the final meeting.
In March of 2018, just before Cambridge Analytica would learn of its impending demise, Nix (allegedly) emptied £6 million from company accounts, depriving staff of severance pay. In testimony before Parliament, Nix said the money was payment for “unbooked services,” or, alternatively, return of a portion of his original investment in the company. Since the downfall of Cambridge Analytica, Nix has been able to live quite splendidly in his London Holland Park mansion.
Unlike many whistleblowers, Wylie was not only able to survive his ordeal, he was able to actually do something to bring the crime into the spotlight and (some of) the perps before authorities. Wylie had no illusions about who and what he was up against—the person who had his job previously had been found dead in a hotel room in Kenya. He was also keenly aware that Facebook knew who all of his friends were, as well as where they lived and what they did for a living. Wylie acknowledges all the good people who helped him—an attorney who was willing to work for free and then connected him with Hugh Grant (yes, that Hugh Grant) for help with funding when she couldn’t keep working for free. His friends from his previous “political” life who connected him with Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. The folks who connected him with The Guardian and Channel 4, which resulted in the production of smoking gun evidence and allowed Wylie to tell his story to the world.
Unlike Nix, who continues to live in comfort, cloaked by the privilege of wealth and the avoidance of consequence for his own malfeasance, Wylie today lives in an undisclosed location in working class East London. His neighbors—who were initially concerned about some of the “sketchy” folks coming around looking for Wylie—now warn him when they see someone suspicious. Wylie has installed extra bolts on the door and keeps all his electronic devices in a special drawer lined with metal fabric that blocks electronic signals. His personal computer is encrypted and locked down with a physical U2F key. He also keeps an air gapped laptop that is never connected to the Internet. A pile of hard drives that have been degaussed, smashed, or acid-bleached after handing evidence over to authorities waits to be properly disposed of.
Wylie compares his experience as a whistleblower to that of an LGBTQ person “coming out.” It is an act that involves an “intimate understanding of systems of power” and a “transformative act of truth-telling.” The painfulness of seeing the evil at Cambridge Analytica and doing nothing was comparable to the pain of living “in the closet” so as not to discomfort those who don’t want to hear your truth. He likens his time at Cambridge Analytica (along with the gradual realization of what they—and he—were doing) as living for two years in a “personalized don’t ask, don’t tell policy imposed by powerful companies.”
In my opinion, everyone who is on Facebook—or spends a lot of time on social media generally—needs to read this book! It is also a good book for folks who want an insider’s scoop about what really happened—since coverage in American media has been (in polite terms) substandard. Wylie is also possessed of the kind of wide-ranging intelligence that can logically connect technology, politics, culture, and psychology. His story helps us understand some of the f*cknuttery that we are still dealing with.