By now I'm sure everyone has seen The Guardian's new RUSSIA-RUSSIA-RUSSIA piece entitled "The Cambridge Analytica Files." In it are the sordid details of how one then-24 year old computer programmer helped Steve Bannon - the most evil man in the world besides Putin and Trump - create a process to harvest Facebook data in order to build complex psychological profiles of the voting public and thus using that information to skew the vote, not only in the US but in the UK as well.
Informational Warfare, they called it, and while Information Warring is not new, the oldest reference being propaganda, today the methods have evolved. Carole Cadwalladr does an especially good job of spinning the yarn, she even credits Wiley as 'a master storyteller' which indeed they both do throughout the article. Whether or not the story they tell is true, however, is certainly a question.
When I saw the article the first thing that popped into my head was the 1995 classic "Hackers" starring Jimmy Lee Miller as Dade and Anglie Jolie in her debut film. She was so CUTE! The baby fat was still on her cheeks and I don't think she wore heels in the entire film. She also shoots a flare gun at a security guard in an act of utter female-badassery, but I digress.
"Hackers" tells the story of bad-kid-gone-gone using his hacking powers in an attempt to stop a bigger, more evil foe. Ok, similar plot, but life sometimes imitates art, so maybe that's a fluke. Let's talk about the styling of these two individuals. First off, the hair is practically the same cut. Dade has a little more and Chris less, and it's pink, but heck, very similar. Outfits? Similar. Well, I'm stretching that, Chris is a bit more of an edge-lord with his pink hair, nose ring, and vegan diet, but the affinity for camo is there. I also can't help but think the whole production of his coming out has been scripted to the letter, look at all the production value in this article. Listen to the 13 minute interview, this is a very well-crafted story.
What did Chris actually do? "Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup."
ERMAGHAD! Targetted ads! My only weakness...
Seriously, that's the psychological warfare mind-fuck tool The Guardian is claiming we were all victim of. You, dear reader, are easily manipulated by a targeted ad. That's pretty true, depending on your levels of agreeableness and neuroticism. The more agreeable you are, the more neurotic, the more likely you'll agree with a suggestion that will supposedly alleviate that negative emotion you're feeling. I'm rather not-agreeable, and my neuroticism is very low, I also didn't vote in 2016 - which fits. There are grains of truth in this story, that's why I'm analyzing it.
The article continues - it's too long - about where this could begin: "One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible."
When something is implausible, that's usually because it happens rarely without some sort of outside input. Prepare for the donning of my tinfoil hat - but perhaps Wiley's trajectory was unlikely because he had help.
"Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics."
From high school dropout to working with the leader of the Canadian opposition party without even a preposition to explain the shift. That's a red flag. From there, he somehow got access to Obama's team. Wylie himself comments, "'Politics is like the mob, though,' he says. 'You never really leave.'" Which suggests his current move, his coming out party if you will, is a political move designed to have impact, similar to his previous work.
Granted, I don't like folks being manipulative. If Wiley's story is 100% true - and I'm gathering a lot of the facts are - then huzzah for exposing the truth. My problem is that this story, and even this character, are a little too much. We'll have to see wait and see if this data makes a splash in the Brittish or American legal system, whether this was illegal is certainly questionable. The psychological impact it has on the culture, however, that's it's true value.
The tie-in to Russia comes later, so once you've bought the story about Chris Wiley and what he does, the shift to Russia-hate comes fast:
"There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer... Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology."
There's the evil Ruskies! Continuing:
"Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company."
Russian influence! ERMAGHAD!
Now that they've gotten Russia and Putin into the narrative, they have to cover their asses with: "There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption." In other words, the entire Russia digression was completely based on a few executives exchanging emails and a power point presentation some of them may have seen.
This is the same old story that we've been fed for months-going-on years repackaged. The theme of impressionable poor voting public being manipulated by some evil patriarchal conspiracy readily apparent. Blame, scapegoating, and red herrings populate the terrain, making it nearly impossible to determine 'the truth' when it comes to current events and politics. Even recent history is difficult to get a handle on, everything from JFK's assassination to 9-11, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Yemen... everything is shrouded in a thick coating of propaganda.
Whenever folks in the military or political apparatus want to cloak something from public scrutiny, they use the infamous term 'National Security' which is really just code for "if you knew what we were doing, you'd demand our heads." Similarly, if we want to discredit, we can throw the old slur of conspiracy theorist. There's actually a lot of evidence to suggest that the CIA actually coined the term and the idea to use it as a weapon.
In much the same way, the mainstream media has been going on and on about election tampering, Russian interference, Trump's dalliance with Ms Daniels - any story they can grab that is both entertaining and utterly inconsequential. In that mileu, we have young Mr. Wiley making his debut album "I helped create Steve Bannon's mindfuck tool." While entertaining, it's nothing new, so pardon me if I'm a little skeptical.