<nettime> Troll factories in some shitty St Petersburg office?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Kremlebots roll over:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-we-spent-1m-harvesting-millions-of-facebook-profiles-video

Voice of Christopher Wylie, the 28 year-old hipster data scientist:

"We spent a million dollars harvesting tens of millions of Facebook 
profiles, and those profiles were used as the basis of the algorithms 
that became the foundation of Cambridge Analytica itself...
"We would know what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, 
including the framing of it, the topics, the content, the tone, whether 
it's scary, that kind of thing.... what you would be susceptible to and 
where you're going to consume that, and how many times do we need to 
touch you in order to make you change how you think about something.
"In addition to having data scientists, and psychologists, and 
strategists, they also have an entire team of creatives, designers, 
videographers, photographers.
"They then create that content, that gets then sent to a targeting team, 
which then injects it into the internet. Websites will be created, blogs 
will be created. Whatever it is that we think this target profile will 
be receptive to, we will create content on the internet for them to 
find. And then they see that, they click, and they go down the rabbit 
hole - until they start to think something differently.
"Instead of standing in the public square and saying what you think, and 
letting people come and listen to you, and then having that shared 
experience as to what your narrative is,  you are whispering into the 
ear of each and every voter, and you may be whispering one thing to this 
voter and another thing to another voter. We risk fragmenting society in 
a way where we don't have any more shared experiences, and we don't have 
any more shared understanding. If we don't have any more shared 
understanding, how can we be a functioning society?
"If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break 
it. And it's only when you break it that you can remold the pieces into 
your vision of a new society. This was the weapon that Steve Bannon 
wanted to build to fight his culture war."
***

All this was done by a London firm, with money supplied by 
arch-conservative algotrading meister Robert Mercer. What's more it was 
done with data harvested from Facebook by a Cambridge-based Russian 
academic who actually does have an office at some shitty St Petersburg 
university, and it's not yet known whether the data or even the 
algorithms ended up there.
I am aware the above has been partially known for months, yes, I read 
all that. It is still not completely known but the above declarations by 
a core developer link the major dots and mark a turning point in global 
history. Either social media is regulated (see Allan Siegal's post) or 
we knowingly concede entry into a post-democracy of continuous psy-ops 
and civil information warfare. Where the biggest guns reap all the rewards.
The additional question of whether Trump, Nigel Farage and others can be 
directly linked to Russian psy-ops programs and/or prosecuted for the 
use of these techniques raises the specter of intense inter-elite 
conflicts spilling over into civil unrest, with the further possibility 
of the US president launching global-scale shooting wars as a 
diversionary excuse for state-of-emergency tactics.
This is the endgame of the neoliberal program for the total makeover of 
society, which began in the early Seventies with the Powell memo and the 
Trilateral Commission declaration on "too much democracy." I think it 
will be defeated and at least partially purged from both the state and 
civil society. But obviously nothing assures that outcome.

Also see: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036 ("Computer-based 
personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans")
And the articles:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm?CMP=share_btn_tw

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

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