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On 3/24/18 7:11 PM, Steve Heeren via Marxism wrote:
this interesting-sounding article is behind a paywall. Is there any way
your readers can get access to it?
Sorry. I assumed it wasn't.
Why the Outrage?
William Davies on Cambridge Analytica
There is at least one certainty where Cambridge Analytica is concerned.
If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8
November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this
small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of
breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica
could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their
evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.
The villains of the piece would no doubt agree with this assessment, but
not for very plausible reasons. The exposé conducted by Channel 4 News,
with the support of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the
now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to
someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many
times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies
that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary
and delivered to Trump thanks to micro-targeted advertising and some
especially persuasive messaging. ‘Our data informed all the strategy,’
Nix says, with the swagger of an estate agent reporting that demand for
period features is red-hot right now.
It’s true that Cambridge Analytica was recruited to work on the Trump
campaign, though not necessarily because of its Machiavellian
brilliance. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, was on the board of
the company at the time, and probably tossed it a contract for some data
analysis so as to keep things between friends. When the company first
attracted attention in the British media in early 2017, it was reported
as also having had close ties to the Leave campaign. In one of several
investigative reports on the topic, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr
wrote in May 2017 that ‘what is happening in America and what is
happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The
Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And
Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all
these relationships in play.’
Against that heady backdrop, the more recent revelations must register
as something of an anticlimax, not least for Cambridge Analytica’s more
gullible clients. First, there is no firm evidence that Cambridge
Analytica provided consultancy services to any of the major players in
the EU referendum of 2016. Nix initially bragged in an article that it
had, but confessed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select
Committee in February this year that the article had been drafted by a
‘slightly overzealous PR consultant’. Certainly we should try to
understand how ‘Brexit and Trump are entwined,’ but that requires
sociological and economic analysis: the process won’t be as simple (or
as exciting) as identifying a secret control room.
Second, there is not – and cannot be – any evidence that it swung the
election for Trump (by the same token, it isn’t strictly provable that
it didn’t), though unsurprisingly the company claims otherwise. This
still appears painful for Clinton herself to accept. Interviewed for one
of the Channel 4 reports, she speaks of Cambridge Analytica’s ‘massive
propaganda effort [which] affected the thought processes of voters’. And
yet data analysis is at the heart of modern political campaigning.
Clinton, after all, preferred to study data on Michigan from the comfort
of her Brooklyn campaign office than actually to visit the state, even
as panicking Michigan Democrats pleaded with her to spend time there in
the final weeks. If things had turned out differently, there would no
doubt have been star-struck puff pieces on the bleeding edge data
analytics that were behind the election of America’s first female president.
The scandal is twofold, but neither part really concerns elections. The
first is the ‘data breach’, which granted the Trump campaign access to
fifty million Facebook profiles without the users’ permission. This
occurred by means of the abuse of a simple app called
thisisyourdigitallife, the like of which many Facebook users will have
come across. Apps such as this appear in a user’s newsfeed as a
personality questionnaire, producing relatively banal results which can
then be shared with friends. Thisisyourdigitallife was built by
Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University, to test
theories of personality-modelling on the basis of Facebook ‘likes’. Only
270,000 people ever used the app, but it also collected data on their
friends – a feature of how Facebook works, rather than of Kogan’s wizardry.
Facebook knew of thisisyourdigitallife, but was under the impression it
was geared purely towards academic research. Any user who checked the
terms and conditions (and who among us ever does that?) would have
thought the same. What nobody knew until earlier this month was that
Kogan was passing the data straight to Cambridge Analytica, which was
then putting it to work for Bannon. All of this was told to the Observer
by a whistle-blower at Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie: the story
appeared under the headline, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological
warfare tool.’
Various rules were broken. Privacy law assumes that individuals have the
right to know what their data is being used for before they agree that
someone may collect and keep it. Kogan and Cambridge Analytica were
being dishonest and secretive. But while they may not have been true to
every letter of their Ts and Cs, and may be in breach of the Data
Protection Act, no one, surely, will be surprised to discover that data
collected in one arena is put to work in another. Using data in novel
(and secretive) ways is virtually the governing principle of the digital
economy – what Shoshana Zuboff has termed ‘surveillance capitalism’, and
Nick Srnicek calls ‘platform capitalism’.
It’s worth remembering that throughout the 1990s, the internet was
viewed as a threat to capitalism as much as an opportunity. Napster was
the iconic example. It wasn’t clear where the profits lay, once
information was abundant and individual anonymity was the norm. What
changed, as Zuboff and Srnicek both explore in different ways, was that
the internet began to be treated as a surveillance device of potentially
global proportions: cheaper, better or free services were provided on
condition that the ‘user’ would be tracked in everything they did and
anchored in their offline identity. The fact that most tech giants made
– and in Uber’s case still make – vast losses for the first few years of
their existence is integral to this strategy. People must be lured into
using a service and then kept using it by whatever means necessary; only
later is this power converted into revenue.
To suggest that a Facebook user consents to all the ways Facebook uses
or might use their data is completely to misrepresent the logic at work
here. For that matter, to say that a Guardian reader consents to all the
ways the Guardian uses their data (which they deposit every time they
visit the website) is to misunderstand the essentially malleable nature
of data itself. Its potential value and use emerges after one has
collected it, not before.
In the panic surrounding Trump and Cambridge Analytica, this brute
capitalist reality has been mysteriously referred to as ‘harvesting’.
But if creating an app to collect data without people’s conscious
knowledge is ‘harvesting’, then so is a great deal else. By creating
free wifi on the London Underground, Transport for London is harvesting
data (the wifi network was installed to provide TfL with real-time data
on passenger movements). The UK Government Digital Service has harvested
data on citizens by manipulating the design of government websites (the
common practice of ‘A/B’ testing means different users see different
website designs, with data collected on how this affects click-throughs
and time spent on each page). Uber harvests data well beyond car
journeys (the app continues to collect data on passenger behaviour after
a ride has finished, although users can now opt out of this). New
digital advertising billboards at Piccadilly Circus are harvesting data
(they contain cameras to analyse the facial expressions of people in the
crowds passing by).
The second aspect of the recent scandal is grubbier but ultimately less
significant. If its own sales pitch is to be believed (an ‘if’ that
grows larger by the day), Cambridge Analytica likes to play dirty. Nix
and his colleague Mark Turnbull were caught by Channel 4 discussing
techniques of honey-trapping, blackmail and counter-intelligence in a
manner that owed more to James Bond plots than to psychometrics.
Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign
team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when
caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically different from
the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair
Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to
assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus
group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated
psychometrics. As for Nix’s boast that they ‘operate in the shadows’,
and his parting shot to the ‘client’ (‘I look forward to building a very
long-term and secretive relationship with you’), it’s a wonder the
Channel 4 investigator managed to keep a straight face.
So we have a misuse of data, which has rightly attracted the attention
of the Information Commissioner’s Office, and some excitable marketing
patter, which slips into Mafia fantasy before being swiftly retracted at
the first sign of actual danger. The former issue isn’t exactly news: in
2010 the Wall Street Journal found that Facebook apps (such as the one
built by Kogan) were routinely collecting information for the benefit of
advertisers and internet tracking companies, without users’ consent.
Given Facebook’s command of the world’s attention (more than two billion
monthly active users, who spend an average of fifty minutes on the site
every day), it is inevitable that attention merchants flock to the site
in search of the scraps, just as major sporting events attract ticket touts.
Why so much outrage? The Observer should be congratulated for its
tenacity on the topic, and this story may, with luck, push us towards a
tipping point on the issue of data privacy. But the fascination and
shock that Cambridge Analytica is attracting suggests a displacement of
horror that really stems from something deeper. Part of that must lie
with Trump and Trumpism. A terrible event must surely have been
delivered by equally terrible means. Passionate Remainers no doubt feel
similarly about Brexit. It is clear that various secretive and underhand
forces did intervene in the US election campaign. Thanks to Robert
Mueller’s investigation, we know that Facebook sold $100,000-worth of
advertising space to Russian ‘troll farms’, and that 126 million
Americans may have been exposed to Russian ‘fake news’ over the course
of 2015 and 2016. Then there is the FBI’s resurrection of the matter of
Clinton’s emails at a critical moment in the election campaign. Whether
any of this gets us closer to explaining or understanding Trump’s
victory is moot.
Cambridge Analytica looks conveniently like a smoking gun, primarily
because it has repeatedly bragged that it is one. Nix and Turnbull do
for the events of 2016 what ‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre, former Goldman Sachs
banker, and Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, former boss of RBS, did for the
banking crisis of 2008, providing grotesque personalities on which to
focus anger and alarm. To hear such men proudly declaring their lack of
moral conscience is paradoxically reassuring to the degree that it helps
explain the world’s loss of moral direction. But as with the financial
crisis, the circus risks distracting from the real institutional and
political questions, in this case concerning companies such as Facebook
and the model of capitalism that tolerates, facilitates and even
celebrates their extensive and sophisticated forms of data harvesting
and analysis.
It is telling that two of the greatest ethical scandals to have hit
Facebook in recent years both involved academics, the previous one being
the ‘emotional contagion’ experiment, in which it transpired that
Facebook had altered newsfeeds without consent, as part of a scientific
study. Engaging with external researchers means surrendering a tiny
modicum of control. Facebook’s willingness to co-operate with academics
is already slight, and these scandals will make Mark Zuckerberg wonder
if it could ever be worth the bother. Keep all the data in-house and the
question of ethics doesn’t arise. The increasing size and scope of these
giant platforms gradually eliminates the need ever to share valuable
data with anyone else.
It’s sometimes said that data is the ‘oil’ of the digital economy, the
resource that fuels everything else. A more helpful analogy is between
oil and privacy, a concealed natural resource that is progressively
plundered for private profit, with increasingly harmful consequences for
society at large. If this analogy is correct, privacy and data
protection laws won’t be enough to fight the tech giants with.
Destroying privacy in ever more adventurous ways is what Facebook does.
Just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it
in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to be levelled at Silicon Valley
should be ‘leave it in our heads.’ The real villain here is an
expansionary economic logic that insists on inspecting ever more of our
thoughts, feelings and relationships. The best way to thwart this is the
one Silicon Valley fears the most: anti-trust laws. Broken into smaller
pieces, these companies would still be able to monitor us, but from
disparate perspectives that couldn’t easily (or secretly) be joined up.
Better a world full of snake-oil merchants like Cambridge Analytica, who
eventually get caught out by their own bullshit, than a world of vast
corporate monopolies such as Amazon and Facebook, gradually taking on
the functions of government, while remaining eerily quiet about what
they’re doing.
23 March
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