Quotulatiousness

March 28, 2018

Ideological Possession

Filed under: Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robin Koerner offers some information on how to diagnose and treat the widespread scourge of ideological possession:

As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it.

Ideological possession is to healthy political discourse as scientism is to science.

The most important thing to know about diagnosing ideological possession is that you can’t do it by looking at the content of the possessing ideology.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s not the content of your belief that makes you dangerous, it’s the way you believe it.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly when advanced by those who are so sure of their own knowledge and moral outlook that they would impose it against the protestations of those affected by it. To the ideologically possessed, the imposition can always be justified because “it’s the right thing to do,” “it will start working if we keep at it,” “the complaints are coming from bad people,” and so on. (Yes. The logic is as circular as it seems.)

[…]

To protect oneself from the terrible epistemic disease of ideological possession, epistemic nutrition and exercise are extremely effective.

With respect to the former, the regular consumption of great thinkers like J.S. Mill (“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), George Orwell (“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”), and Dostoevsky (“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him”) will keep you in good epistemic health. Supplement these basics with a more varied diet of thinkers with whom you disagree on things that matter, and you’ll be in even better shape.

With respect to the latter, a comfortable regime of epistemic exercise — which takes a little time and effort but is immediately rewarding — involves maintaining real friendships with people who have very different assumptions, experiences, and declared moral and political priorities from your own.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.

March 27, 2018

Stereotype duel – Boomers versus Millennials

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the long-term damage the Boomers have done to the Millennials:

I’m highly amused that the boomers, possibly the most media-stereotyped generation in history, where the decent members keep telling us they’re not like the lunatics who protested, shut down universities and joined sex communes to share medieval-like diseases from never bathing, are the ones most stereotyping the millennials, according to how the media portrays the millennials.

As some millennial readers here have said, and as I know from my circle, most millennials aren’t like the lazy, game addicted creatures who preach socialism at everyone that the media shows you. Most millennials I know were raised under the spur of boomer teachers who — sorry guys — really are stereotypical in “challenge all authority except mine!

Yes a lot of millennials got lost along the way, and yes, I know my share of millennials drifting through life with no aim, no job, no training, nothing.

But do consider these kids were assured from their youngest age that they were surplus (there are too many humans. I mean they tried to force both of my kids to sign a no-reproduction agreement); that there is nothing they can do (capitalism is inherently unjust, and we’re all ruled by corporations and big, shadowy forces); that no one cares about them (blood for oil; the only reason guns aren’t banned is because people want you to get shot); that their future is poorer and any children they have will be condemned to hell on Earth (we’re running out of oil, water (according to my kids’ teachers), glass (also according to my kids’ teachers) and anything else you can think of (including some things you can’t), there is no future for humanity (global warming is going to kill us all.)

The amazing thing is not that some millennials drift through life with no aim and no plan. Who cares, if it’s all going to end, anyway.

I’m fairly sure they resemble nothing so much as the generation that grew up in the shadow of the year 1000, except without the religious portion, since the prophecies that depress them pretend not to be religious. And yet, anyone who has seen a millennial white male talk about how he’s guilty of all the evils in the world and how he will never be clean of white privilege knows EXACTLY what the flagellants looked like.

Put yourself in their place. The kids who swallowed the gospel of human guilt for everything and in particular the gospel that the West is particularly evil and that the end is nigh and inevitable aren’t getting up and building. I’m shocked, aren’t you shocked?

The brighter they are, too, the easier it is for them to swallow that gospel, because it’s easier for smart people to become attracted by internally consistent systems even if (particularly if) they have no contact with the outside world.

Again, these aren’t all the millennials, just like the toking, commune dwelling lot weren’t all of the boomers.

But they are a significant portion, and in some way they might be the portion that would have been most dedicated/creative.

So, what can be done?

QotD: Victimology

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One must have a closed heart not to see that some minorities still are mistreated, that some women are still abused, that some of the overweight are still bullied, that some handicapped continue to be neglected, and that some members of the gay community are harassed. But one must have closed eyes not to see how some have used the victim card for personal gain. In our earnest efforts to redress monstrous problems, we consistently create new monsters. Perpetual victimhood is too great a price for temporary protection. Those victim shackles are nearly unbreakable.

We are, I fear, living in a new age of tyranny, and one as sinister as many that have gone before because these modern tyrants are weak and earnest and have had legitimate complaints. The tyranny is a tyranny mostly of the mind. To use another Blakean metaphor — our own “mind-forged manacles” hold us captive and few find escape from a ruthlessly self-imposed victimhood. And the so-called privileged must cultivate a strong streak of masochism in order to cope with this modern liberal view of political reality. And perhaps we are reaching victim overload. No longer just minorities and women and Muslims and gays and the handicapped, but also the overweight and the underfed, and the homeless, the gluten-adverse, the peanut phobic, the emotionally distraught, and so forth ad infinitum. Who will be left to blame? Who will be left to carry the guilt for all these victims of society and nature?

But it is on a still deeper level that victimhood is truly disturbing for a victim is never an equal. A victim is always defined not by who they are, but by what has been done to them. While treating a group as victims is in many ways preferable to denigrating them, it has this same impact: They are not equal. They are like pets, well treated, even pampered, but not their masters equal. Victimhood is little more than a subtler, but equally pernicious, form of enslavement. The liberal enablers of this pretense should be ashamed. They would do well to remember a much less quoted warning my Dr. King: “A shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” Liberals have made entire segments of society more dependent and eternally adolescent. They are never truly free because they are always defined by their limitations and pain.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

March 26, 2018

QotD: Virtue signalling

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness.

One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!

Comedians make use of virtue signalling of the vituperative kind. With the right audience they can get laughs scorning the usual suspects: Ukip, the Daily Mail, Eton, bankers and the rest. The audience enjoys the caricaturing of all of these, sneering at them and, in the process, joining together as a congregation of the righteously contemptuous. What a delight to display your virtue, feel confirmed in your views, enjoy a sense of community, let off some anger and have a laugh all at the same time! It is so easy, too!

No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things: by helping the blind man across the road; looking after your elderly parents instead of dumping them in a home; staying in a not-wholly-perfect marriage for the sake of the children. These things involve effort and self-sacrifice. That sounds hard! Much more convenient to achieve virtue by expressing hatred of those who think the health service could be improved by introducing competition.

James Bartholemew “The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’: Want to be virtuous? Saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness”, The Spectator, 2015-04-18.

March 25, 2018

QotD: America’s “read-only” activists

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.

Heather Heying, “On the dangers of read-only activism”, Medium.com, 2018-03-02.

March 24, 2018

Today in bad ideas examined – Time to [nationalize | regulate | break-up] Facebook?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:

The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.

There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.

That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?

[…]

Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.

He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?

We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“

There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.

QotD: Joining “The Firm”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Personally I think Meghan Markle would be a catastrophic addition to The Firm if she does not understand why it is a terrible idea for the Royals to get political. Do that and they stop being symbols (essentially endearing living flags whose job is to wave strangely and act as a navigational datum for flypasts) and become legitimate political targets. There is no surer route to a republic and I would regret that (as I do not share Spiked’s democracy fetish) but not necessarily oppose it if the House of Windsor does indeed go full retard.

Perry de Havilland, “Samizdata quote of the day”, Samizdata, 2018-03-01.

March 23, 2018

Who’s gaslighting who?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Nick Gillespie on the gaslighting of America:

The election of Donald Trump hasn’t just brought a poorly mannered reality TV star into the Oval Office and our newsfeeds. It has also popularized the concept of gaslighting, or tricking rational people into thinking they’re insane. The phrase is a reference to a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer tries to convince his young bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she’s nuts so he can cover up a murder and search for jewels hidden in the house they share (the house’s gas lamps flicker due to Boyer’s late-night searches, hence the title).

Go Google “Donald Trump is gaslighting America” and you’ll find a constantly growing list of stories from outlets ranging from CNN to Teen Vogue to Vanity Fair to Refinery 29. The common thread is some variation on the theme that Trump’s brazen lies, misstatements, and rhetorical sleights of hand are designed to drive us all batshit crazy by contradicting what we plainly see happening to the United States of America. At rock bottom, Trump’s detractors believe there is simply no way that he could have legitimately won the 2016 election, especially against Hillary Clinton, of whom President Obama said, “I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

Yet it’s not Donald Trump who is gaslighting us, but Hillary Clinton, whose complete and utter refusal to take responsibility for her loss is at the heart of what’s so weird about contemporary America. You read it here first: Trump is the effect and not the cause of the ongoing mudslide that is the daily news. Ever since about 11 p.m. ET on November 8, 2016, Clinton and her allies in the media have worked overtime to provide increasingly fanciful explanations for her failure to beat the least-credible candidate ever in American history. Sometimes the apologias are conscious, sometimes not, but nobody really wants to accept what happened (in fact, even Trump himself couldn’t believe it for a while, which helps explain why his transition was so incompetent). The result is a non-stop barrage of stories, some more credible than others, that Trump’s win was the result of some sort of sinister machination that has undermined our democracy. Following from this interpretation every aspect of his behavior, from his bro-ing out with Vladimir Putin to his indifferent spelling and capitalization while tweeting, is just one more sign that we are living in a world gone stark, raving mad.

To be fair, Trump trades in delusion, such as his insistence that violent crime is at or near all-time highs, that massive voter fraud was the only reason he lost the popular vote, and that his inauguration was the most-viewed ever. These sorts of patently false statements do indeed constitute attempts at gaslighting. So, too, do his unconvincing denials about a sexual relationship with the porn star known as Stormy Daniels, his doctor’s statement that he only weighs 239 lbs. (giving rise to the “Girther” movement), and his fanciful stories about how Japanese car makers use bowling balls in quality-assurance tests. Against such a backdrop, even the president’s so-far-not-contradicted denial that his campaign colluded with Russia seems like a form of gaslighting. In fact, everything he says seems like it’s intended to drive us insane or at least seriously question basic reality.

March 22, 2018

Unaccountable federal agency refuses to answer to the senator who wanted it to be unaccountable in the first place

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Perhaps this is a teaching moment for Senator Elizabeth Warren, says A. Barton Hinkle:

If Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had taken a page out of Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas’ book, she might not be in the pickle she is today.

Warren is spitting mad at Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who does double duty heading up an agency whose creation Warren championed: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB’s previous director was an ideological ally of Warren. Since Mulvaney took over, Warren has ripped the agency’s decisions. Warren said Mulvaney is giving “the middle finger” to consumers, and she railed at Mulvaney’s indifferent response to the 10 (!) letters she has sent him demanding answers to more than 100 questions.

The other day she tweeted that she is giving Mulvaney “one last chance.” Yet as The Wall Street Journal points out, she has only herself to blame for her apparent impotence.

Time and again during debate over the CFPB, conservatives and libertarians warned that its powers were too great and that its accountability to the other branches of government was too limited. But that was just the way Warren and other supporters wanted things. Neither Congress nor other political forces could influence an unaccountable regulatory agency. Now Warren finds herself thwarted by the very lack of oversight she championed.

Be careful what you wish for.

[…]

Philosopher John Rawls famously invented a mechanism for doing just that: the “veil of ignorance”: If you are designing the rules for a society, you should assume that you know nothing about your place in that society. If your race, age, physical abilities, mental prowess, and so forth are all a complete mystery, then you are likely to design a political-economic system that is fair to all. Just in case you wind up at the bottom of the social pile.

Having a president who makes policy through signing statements, his “pen and phone,” and other forms of executive action, for example, seems brilliant when the opposing party controls Congress. It seems less so when the opposing party controls the White House.

Should intelligence agencies keep tabs on Islamists who might pose a threat of domestic terrorism? Then don’t be surprised if a different administration turns the focus to right-wing militias.

Libertarian Dad Jokes

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 21 Mar 2018

In homage to Dad Joke videos everywhere, Reason‘s Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg try their hand at one-liners, cornball punchlines, and “comedy.”

Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Shot and edited by Bragg and Bragg. Starring Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.

Music: “Quirky Dog” by Kevin MacLeod

The social media mistake

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

H/T to American Digest for the link.

March 21, 2018

Free speech at risk on campus

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt on the claims and counter-claims about the threat to freedom of speech in today’s universities:

Over the past two weeks, Jeffrey Sachs (a political scientist at Acadia U; not the economist at Columbia) has made the argument that There Is No Campus Free Speech Crisis, as he put it in a long twitter thread on March 9. Matt Yglesias then expanded on Sachs’ argument in a post titled Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong, and Sachs expanded his case in a Washington Post Monkey Cage essay with a similar title: The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts. Sachs and Yglesias both draw heavily on analyses of the speech questions in the General Social Survey, which were plotted and analyzed well by Justin Murphy on Feb. 16. In this blog post we will show a reliance on older datasets and the failure to formulate the question properly have led Sachs and Yglesias to a premature conclusion. Something is changing on campus, but only in the last few years.

Sachs and Yglesias claim that the current wave of concern about speech on campus that began around 2014 (with media reports about safe spaces and trigger warnings), and that intensified in 2015 (after the Yale Halloween controversy, and the earlier publication of The Coddling of the American Mind, by Lukianoff & Haidt) is a classic moral panic. They believe it is merely a media frenzy in response to a few high profile incidents. In a typical moral panic, people on one side of the political spectrum get riled up because stories about outrageous incidents appeal to their desire to believe the worst about a group on the other side. Sachs and Yglesias claim that conservatives and conservative media have gleefully exploited a handful of campus stories to fuel hatred of left-leaning students, or “social justice warriors,” when in in fact nothing has changed on campus.

Given how frequent moral panics are, especially as political polarization and cross-party hatred increases, and as social media makes it easy to whip up a panic, it is vital to have skeptics. It is important for people with different biases and prior beliefs to dig into survey data that bears on the question. It is also crucial to formulate the question properly. What exactly is it that has changed, or not changed, on campus in recent years?

Here are the three major positions in the current debate, along with our proposal for how each should be operationalized.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

QotD: “Woke”

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In case you were unaware, “woke” is a term used by urban teens to describe a mental state in which one believes they are cognizant of how the world really works but instead wouldn’t have a clue if it slapped them in the face. Saying that someone is “woke” is a hip way of saying that they suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect.

Jim Goad, “The Problem With White Guys These Days”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-26.

March 20, 2018

Free speech on the ropes

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille says the right to freedom of speech isn’t dead, but it might not qualify for a new life insurance policy:

We have an environment in which the president of the United States is dismissive of the free speech rights of his opponents, prominent constitutional scholars sniff at free speech unless it’s used by the “right” people for their favored goals, and the country’s leading civil liberties organization is suffering an internal revolt by staffers who oppose “rigid” support for free speech protections.

Last October, President Trump said “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.” That came just hours after he tweeted, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” And even before Trump took the oath of office, he’d huffed that protesters who burn American flags should face loss of citizenship or jail.

So if you’re an academic with expertise in constitutional law, and you have months to watch a populist politician who commands the power of the presidency fulminate about punishing those who criticize him, what do you do? If you’re Georgetown Law’s Louis Michael Seidman, you suggest that the president might be on to something.

In a forthcoming paper, Seidman’s main complaint is that free speech doesn’t inherently favor progressivism — it allows too much voice to people who disagree. “At its core, free speech law entrenches a social view at war with key progressive objectives,” writes Seidman.

Sure, “the speech right has instrumental utility in isolated cases,” he adds. But “significant upside potential”? Nah.

[…]

In its early days, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) viewed free speech as a tool of social justice, suited to particular purposes under particular conditions,” wrote Weinrib, calling on the modern organization to rededicate itself to progressive political goals over civil libertarian advocacy.

The ACLU may be close to taking her advice. Last fall, about 200 of the organization’s staff members signed a letter objecting to the groups’ “rigid stance” on the First Amendment. The letter was characterized by former ACLU board member Michael Meyers as “a repudiation of free-speech principles.”

Huh. With a president who openly chafes at criticism and suggests media naysayers should be punished with the force of law, now seems like a perfect time for opponents to rally around unfettered debate and the First Amendment. Instead, lefty academics and activists are lining up to agree with Trump that a free press and individual rights to freedom of speech, belief, and association are indeed overrated overall.

March 19, 2018

Meet “the gay Canadian vegan who [created] ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool'”

Filed under: Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr talks to the young developer at Cambridge Analytica who says he’s the one who created the tools that the Trump campaign used to sway opinions their way:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

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