{"id":42733,"date":"2018-03-19T03:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T07:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42733"},"modified":"2018-03-18T10:00:51","modified_gmt":"2018-03-18T14:00:51","slug":"meet-the-gay-canadian-vegan-who-created-steve-bannons-psychological-warfare-mindfck-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/19\/meet-the-gay-canadian-vegan-who-created-steve-bannons-psychological-warfare-mindfck-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet “the gay Canadian vegan who [created] ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool'”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Guardian<\/em>, Carole Cadwalladr<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn\u2019t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.<\/p>\n

By the time I met him in person, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump\u2019s election campaign.<\/p>\n

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating \u201cSteve Bannon\u2019s psychological warfare mindfuck tool\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 2014, Steve Bannon \u2013 then executive chairman of the \u201calt-right\u201d news network Breitbart \u2013 was Wylie\u2019s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica\u2019s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology \u2013 \u201cinformation operations\u201d \u2013 then turn it on the US electorate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,15,13],"tags":[1037,391,593],"class_list":["post-42733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","category-usa","tag-donaldtrump","tag-facebook","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b7f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42733"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42736,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42733\/revisions\/42736"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}