Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020. 352 pages.

In 1992, at a theatre party, a young woman holding a pretend microphone announced, “Hello, everyone. Our question tonight is ‘What is poststructuralism?’ Mr. Milner, can you tell our listening audience, in under 60 seconds: What is poststructuralism?”

There were a dozen confused people in the room. I spoke quickly:

“It’s complicated. Poststructuralists believe that we can’t actually communicate through language. The effect is, since writers can’t communicate, they go for style – pretty writing that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Can you give an example?”

“The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.”

The English Patient had just won the Governor General’s Award. There were audible gasps.

I was talking about postmodern fiction. Making fun of postmodern academic writing was, 25 years ago, a small industry. There was the notorious “Sokal affair” of 1996: New York University physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a deliberate parody, complete with impenetrable writing, myriad references and footnotes, arguing that the laws of physics have political implications and do not apply equally to all people. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was published in the prestigious academic journal Social Text. Sokal admitted to the hoax and generously offered, “Anyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my (21st-floor) apartment.”¹

The Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s annual Bad Writing Contest stipulated that entries must be “non-ironic. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.”² Judith Butler (first place, Bad Writing Contest, 1998) complained in the New York Times that the contest “targeted left-wing scholars.” Editor Denis Dutton defended his journal: “At this time bad writing is the stronghold of the post-structuralist left.”

Poststructuralism can be attributed, at least in part, to the disappointments of Marxism. The economic contradictions of capitalism were supposed to radicalize the working class and lead us to socialist utopia, but instead we got two world wars, the Nazis and Stalinist Russia. Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and members of the Frankfurt School concluded (in their different ways) that the capitalist state – through its control of the “superstructure” (education, media, religion) – was undermining the revolutionary potential of the working class.

Enter Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and a host of others. The ruling elites always manage what we believe. Knowledge is always ideological and has always been “socially constructed.” In Catholic theocracy, “knowledge” was revealed in the “Bible” as interpreted by priests. In modern bourgeois societies, “knowledge” was to be “discovered” via “science” and “reason,” but these too were made-up stories. Which meant, if I understood correctly, that physics is no truer than astrology and Darwin is no better a guide to nature than Genesis.

I wasn’t buying it.

After a thirty-year gap, I returned to university to study avant-garde theatre. All the younger professors – younger than me – were Theory aficionados. In researching my thesis, I learned about the symbiotic relationship between indecipherable avant-garde artists and incomprehensible poststructuralist theorists. Soon, I was sure, avant-garde art and Critical Theory would die their self-inflicted and irrelevant deaths.

Now, two decades after that, it’s clear that poststructuralism’s children are still kicking. Recently, a close friend shouted at me when I said “Aboriginal” instead of “Indigenous.” Another friend informed me, as if I were ignorant beyond belief, “Black people can’t be racist.” I blame poststructuralism. But how did we get from Foucault to my friends’ odd behaviour? That’s what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay try to explain in Cynical Theories.

Early in the book, Pluckrose and Lindsay assure us of their commitment to gender, racial and LGBT equality and make clear their preference for liberalism, which they describe as “political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion.” Liberalism is best thought of as a “framework for conflict resolution.”

But, they say, liberalism and modernity are at great risk from both “far-right populist movements claiming to be making a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy” and “far-left progressive social crusaders (who) portray themselves as the sole and righteous champions of social and moral progress.” The threat from the far right is pretty clear. But are the “far-left progressive social crusaders” a genuine threat to liberalism?

Pluckrose and Lindsay take us from poststructuralism (philosophy), to applied poststructuralism (political theory) to reified poststructuralism (political action guided by Social Justice scholarship). “It” goes by many names: poststructuralism, postmodernism, Critical Theory, Theory. When writing about poststructuralism and its descendants, Pluckrose and Lindsay always write Theory with an uppercase T.

Since its beginning, Critical Theory has been guided by two “inextricably linked core principles” and “four major themes.” The core principles are:

1. The postmodern knowledge principle: radical scepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to “cultural constructivism” – that “knowledge” is always socially constructed.
2. The postmodern political principle: “a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.”

And the major themes:

1. The blurring of boundaries: Blurring boundaries is the postmodernist’s favourite sport. Different poststructuralists staked out their areas of specialty, exploring and calling into question boundaries between science and art, natural and artificial, low art and high, health and sickness, sane and insane, male and female.
2. The power of language: For poststructuralists, language is inherently unreliable and “cannot represent reality or communicate it to others.” There is no real meaning: a writer’s intended meaning carries no more weight than a reader’s interpretation. Language has inordinate power to create (false) categories such as race and gender. “Deconstruction” means looking for contradictions, inconsistencies and hidden meanings.
3. Cultural relativism: We can’t judge another culture because we are doomed to judge it by our standards.
4. The loss of the individual and the universal: The individual, too, is a product of language. The universal is an effort to force dominant discourses – about nature or morality – on everyone.

Poststructuralism was immediately embraced by literary studies and the arts. Even though “postmodern Theory’s high deconstructive phase burnt itself out by the mid-1980s,” it didn’t die; it “matured, mutated, and evolved” and the two principles and four themes have remained pervasive and culturally influential as Theory diversified into distinct strands.

Critical Theory became explicitly political in the late 1980s, just when liberal movements had seen 20 years of remarkable legal and political progress toward racial, gender and LGBT equality. Still, racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes survived, and postmodern political Theory developed to confront not legal discrimination but attitudes.

Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth “set the stage for postcolonialism and postcolonial Theory.” To Fanon, “colonialism represented, above all else, a systematic denial of the humanity of colonized people … Edward Said, the father of postcolonial Theory, took inspiration from Fanon’s depiction of the psychological impacts of having one’s culture, language, and religion subordinated to another.” The downside is that postcolonial Theory, “with its disparagement of science and reason as provincial Western ways of knowing … impedes the progress of developing (countries. The) claim is not only factually wrong, morally vacant, and patronizing; it is also negligent and dangerous.”

The “blurring of boundaries” is central to Queer Theory, and the more radical the Theorist, the blurrier the boundaries. Pre-Theory gay activism appealed to universal liberal principles of shared humanity, but “Queer Theory regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality to be oppressive … and is radically sceptical that these categories are based in any biological reality.” Queer Theory is “arguably the purest form of applied postmodernism. It underlies much trans activism and makes an appearance in multiple forms of Social Justice scholarship.”

Pluckrose and Lindsay accept Critical Race Theory’s contention that race is a social construct. For example, tribes abound and are important social divisions in the Bible, but skin colour is barely mentioned: “In order to justify the abuses of colonialism and the kidnapping, exploitation, and abuse of slaves, their victims had to be regarded as inferior or subhuman … Perhaps most importantly, this was done by emerging forms of scholarship in what we would now call the social sciences and natural sciences.” With most of the glaring, legal inequalities between Whites and Blacks removed, postmodern Theorists focused on “microagressions, hate speech, safe spaces, cultural appropriation,” etc.

Prominent Black feminists brought attention to the Whiteness of feminism. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the initially modest concept of intersectionality in a 1989 scholarly law paper, but it was soon expanded to include more than race and gender:

Trans men, while still oppressed by attitudes towards their trans status, need to recognize that they have ascended to male privilege and amplify the voices of trans women, who are seen as doubly oppressed, by being both trans and women. Gay men and lesbians might well find themselves not considered oppressed at all, particularly if they are not attracted to trans men or trans women, respectively, which is considered a form of transphobia and misgendering.

Critical Race Theory and intersectionality are centrally concerned with ending racism by making everyone more aware of race at all times. Racism is always taking place and the activist’s job is to find it: “The member of the marginalized racial group is said to have a unique voice and a counternarrative that, under Theory, must be regarded as authoritative.” Everything the marginalized individual interprets as racism must be accepted as racism.

Liberal feminists demanded that men and women be treated equally in such things as the right to vote, own property and access to employment. In the 1970s, university-based Marxist feminists connected patriarchy and capitalism and argued that capitalism must be overthrown to end patriarchy. Then came postmodern feminists who argued that it was the existence of categories – feminine and masculine, then female and male – that oppressed women. “As Theorists incorporated aspects of Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and, particularly, Critical Race Theory through the concept of intersectionality, the resulting feminism tended to “focus on identity in the form of race, gender, and sexuality.” By 2006, feminist scholars no longer understood “patriarchy” as the literal “rule of the fathers,” but instead as, “in Foucauldian terms, vague notions of male dominance permeating every discourse.”

Intersectional Theory resulted in the virtual disappearance of economic class, replaced by the concept of social privilege – initially White privilege, but soon extended to other identity categories, such as male, straight, cisgender, thin, able-bodied, etc. White feminists are expected to include, but not appropriate, “the experiences of women of color, providing space for them to be heard, and amplifying their voices – without exploiting them or becoming voyeuristic consumers of their oppression. These kinds of impossible, contradictory, double-binding demands are a persistent feature of applied postmodern Theory.”

Disability activism began in the 1960s with the liberal aim of increasing disabled people’s access to the opportunities available to the nondisabled. Disabled people were considered people with some form of disability, but according to “dis/abled” scholarship, disability is imposed upon people by society. Dan Goodley, author of Disability Studies: Theorizing Disableism and Ableism, “considers diagnosing, treating and curing disability as cynical practices, dependent on corrupt ableist assumptions and upheld by a ‘neoliberal system.’”

Although feminist scholars have long written about pressure on women to be thin, fat studies became a scholarly field quite recently: “Within fat studies, it is common to address negative attitudes towards obesity alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disableism, and imperialism.” Poststructuralism and “feminist science” are used to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that nutrition plays a significant role in health and that obesity “is strongly correlated with early death.” Fat activism could play a valuable role by fighting discrimination and prejudice against obese people but, by “descending into radical social constructivism, paranoia, and science denial … fat studies is currently among the most irrational and ideological forms of scholarship-activism in identity studies.”

In the final three chapters, Pluckrose and Lindsay summarize Social Justice scholarship, look at what happens when Social Justice scholarship leaves the university to become “Social Justice in action” and suggest alternatives to Social Justice ideology. I would suggest several recurring themes of Social Justice scholarship:

1. Radical scepticism coexists with radical overconfidence: “We now have Social justice texts … that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person (who is) racist or sexist.”
2. All ways of knowing are equal. In the view of “research justice,” there is “a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with ‘other forms of research,’ including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions … and emotional responses.”
3. Some people know better than others. “Standpoint Theory” tells us that one’s position within a social power dynamic “dictates what one can and cannot know: thus the privileged are blinded by their privilege (while the oppressed) understand both the dominant position and the experience of being oppressed.”
4. Power is systemic: “In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society … Power is a system we’re all constantly participating in.”
5. Race and gender don’t exist but Social Justice activists must look for them everywhere.
6. “Thou Shalt Shut Up.” Social Justice educator Barbara Applebaum writes, “The mere fact that they can question the existence of systemic oppression is a function of their privilege.” According to Social Justice scholar Alison Bailey, disagreement is “willful ignorance.” According to Robin DiAngelo, Whites can’t tolerate even a minimum amount of racial stress and defend themselves through “the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving.” If you express anything other than “This is great – I’m learning so much!” you’re guilty of White Fragility. You can’t disagree, you can’t be silent, and you can’t leave.
7. I’m okay, you’re privileged: “It is profoundly ironic that a movement claiming to problematize all sources of privilege is led by highly educated, upper-middle-class scholars and activists who are so oblivious to their status as privileged members of society.”

Pluckrose and Lindsay point to several ways in which Social Justice scholarship is harmful:

Academics have been fired or denied tenure for crossing intellectual lines visible only to Social Justice scholars (for example, Rebecca Tuvel and Bruce Gilley).

“Universities are among the best, and ideally the least biased, centres of knowledge production,” but “Social Justice scholarship and ethics completely displace reliable and rigorous scholarship into issues of social justice.”

Social Justice scholars “teach students to be skeptical of science, reason, and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identity; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicize every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity.”

Social Justice’s focus on race, gender, etc., crowds out practical and measurable approaches to health, education, crime, the environment, poverty and equality.

Social Justice scholars train students to work in a Social Justice industry worth billions of dollars: “According to a major job search website in the United Kingdom, equality and diversity jobs are especially common in the Equality and Human Rights Commission, professional associations, the Law Society, schools and universities, the police, large private sector companies, local authorities, trade unions, and the Civil Service.”

Inside and outside the university, focus on race can be beneficial. In my field, Canadian theatre, it’s led to the hiring of more Indigenous, Black and Asian actors and managers, and will lead to the production of more plays by Indigenous, Black and Asian writers. But would this have happened in the absence of Social Justice scholarship? Perhaps more slowly, but yes: Canadian theatre and the world have been moving toward greater inclusivity for decades.

Outside the university, where few people have heard of Foucault or Butler, what remains of Social Justice scholarship? Language is considered extremely dangerous. The first language rule is: if you’re not Black, never say the “n-word.” There used to be no embarrassment attached to saying the word when reading aloud from a classic novel (or when writing an article like this), but suddenly people started losing their jobs for exactly that. When did that happen? There are many derogatory words for ethnic, religious or national groups – kike and spic, for example – but Inroads and I needn’t fear retribution for writing them out.

Social media have made people far more vulnerable to condemnation for minor offences. It doesn’t help that some of the enforcers are complete idiots. A Black security guard in the United States broke his school board’s zero-tolerance policy on racial slurs when he told a student not to call him the n-word. The security guard was fired – and rehired only after an enormous outcry that included an offer from Cher to cover his legal expenses. Consider, too, the treatment of Lindsay Shepherd by professors and staff at Wilfrid Laurier University.³

How serious is all this? Compared to what, nuclear war? Are these anecdotes unfortunate, rare incidents, or are they the tip of the iceberg? How many people have to lose their jobs to make it a serious problem?

Right-wing populism is a bigger problem than Social Justice activism, but Social Justice activism can help conservative extremists get elected. What do you expect to happen when you tell millions of well-meaning, fair-minded people that they’re racist? What happens when you tell high school dropouts stocking shelves at Walmart that they benefit from White privilege? Judging by the amount of time right-wing populists like Tucker Carlson spend warning Fox News viewers that Social Justice warriors and cancel culture are taking over America, they must think there’s an audience receptive to that message.⁴

Pluckrose and Lindsay oppose banning or removing public funding from courses rooted in postmodern Theory. “We cannot fight illiberalism with illiberalism,” they say, but we must speak out; if those on the right are the only ones challenging Social Justice excesses, then right-wing extremists will gain support:

You don’t need to become well versed in Theory and Social Justice scholarship … but you do need to have a little bit of courage to stand up to something with a lot of power. You need to recognize Theory when you see it, and side with the liberal responses to it – which might be no more complicated than saying, “No, that’s your ideological belief, and I don’t have to go along with it.”

Don’t leave home without…

A few things with which to arm yourself in preparation for a scrap with Social Justice activists:

• Areo, an online journal, edited until recently by Helen Pluckrose
• Counterweight, a liberal humanist organization, founded by Helen Pluckrose, which provides resources for people in trouble because Critical Social Justice is being imposed on them in the workplace.
• Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker: An excellent compilation and investigation of liberalism’s many successes.
• Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes: Three articulate, brilliant and moderate Black scholars. Hundreds of hours of stimulating entertainment on YouTube.

Continue reading “You’re Privileged, so Shut Up” →

“The world’s most valuable resource,” noted The Economist in 2017, “is no longer oil, but data.” According to the same publication, in 2019 “big firms spent $32bn … on cloud services” – “cloud services” being where our data are stored.¹

Three books, all published in 2019, tell you more about data than you ever thought you wanted to know.

Edward Snowden, Permanent Record.

New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019. 352 pages.

Permanent Record is about Edward Snowden’s short but memorable career in American intelligence. He was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in 1983. He was a member, he says, of the “last undigitized generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably.”

His was also the first generation to be raised with, if not by, computers. His parents seem serious and devoted, descended on both sides from a long line of Navy personnel. Oliver Stone’s 2016 film Snowden makes its subject appear right-wing, at least in contrast with his girlfriend (now wife) who drags him to an Iraq war protest. In the book, Snowden and his parents seem patriotic in a “good citizenship” way. They don’t have strongly partisan views. Snowden joins the Marines, and later the CIA, to contribute to his country.

He tells an interesting anecdote that conveys, I think, the family’s politics. His mother loved giving him math challenges. She’d buy him books and toys if he could mentally total their prices. He had to add in the 3 per cent sales tax.

“Why?”

“Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”

“What do they do with it?”

“You like roads, buddy? You like bridges? … The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”

Some time later, she told him,

“They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.”

“So now the library will get even more books?”

“Let’s hope.”

One day, his father brought home a computer. Soon afterward, he could “dial up and connect to something new called the Internet”:

Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation’s big bang or Precambrian explosion. It irrevocably altered the course of my life … From the age of twelve or so, I tried to spend my every waking moment online … Gradually, I stopped sleeping at night and instead slept by day in school. My grades went back into free fall.

Snowden and education never got along, and eventually he found work using his computer talents. Then there was a news report “about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center,” and then “a second plane just hit the other tower.” Snowden writes that he “accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts … I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed.” He thought he could best serve his country “behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe.” He wanted to work with the CIA or the National Security Agency (NSA), but he didn’t have the educational qualifications:

The more I read around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirements for military veterans.

He joined the Army. That ended poorly, with multiple fractures in his legs and “administrative separation … only available to enlistees who’d been in the services fewer than six months.” He decided to follow the inevitable, by putting his computer skills to use for the government. After 9/11, they were desperate for people with computer skills. But by this time, the structure of government service had changed:

I was amazed to find that there were very few opportunities to serve my country directly, at least in a meaningful technical role. I had a better chance of working as a contractor for a private company that served my country for profit; and I had the best chance, it turned out, of working as a subcontractor for a private company that contracted with another private company that served my country for profit.

Snowden rose rapidly through the ranks. His job was to “make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for ages, and search through them at will.” But gathering and storing data on U.S. citizens was illegal, and high government officials and top politicians were lying about it. In early June 2013, while hiding out in a Hong Kong hotel, he went public. He was not yet 30 years old.

The U.S. cancelled Snowden’s passport while he was in transit through Russia. I was relieved to read that a year later his wife joined him. They’ve been there ever since.

It’s easy to admire Snowden; he was cautious and disciplined. Without mentioning names, he distinguishes himself from Julian Assange: “I disclosed the government’s documents only to journalists. In fact, the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero. I believe, just as those journalists believe, that a government may keep some information concealed.”

Snowden was heroic, but I have to admit I’m not as outraged by his government’s behaviour as he is. I oppose it in principle, but I don’t feel threatened by it. As the cliché goes, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” On the other hand, Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck (sic) scared the shit out of me.

Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.

New York: Random House, 2019. 288 pages.

From undermining fanatics to organizing fanatics

Christopher Wylie was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1989. His parents were doctors. He spent his high school years in a wheelchair as a result of two relatively rare conditions: “Not long after I discovered the computer lab, it became the one room at school where I didn’t feel alienated. Outside, there were either bullies or patronizing staff.”

He learned about webpages and JavaScript and other things I don’t understand. He “felt like a conjurer.” At 15, he spent a summer at Lester B. Pearson United World College, with students from around the world, and became interested in politics. That school year, he started skipping classes to attend public events with local members of Parliament. He asked questions and offered opinions:

It was liberating to find my voice. Like any teenager, I was exploring who I was, but for someone gay and in a wheelchair, this was an even bigger challenge … I began to realize that many of the things I was living through were not simply personal issues – they were also political issues. My challenges were political. My life was political. My mere existence was political .

He was brought to the attention of a local Liberal MP and offered a job in Ottawa. But first he spent

the summer of 2007 in Montréal, hanging out in hacker spaces frequented by French Canadian techno-anarchists … By then, with treatment, I could shuffle around without a wheelchair … Most hackers couldn’t care less what you look like or if you walk funny. They share your love of the craft and want to help you get better at it … My brief exposure to hacking communities left a permanent impression. You learn that no system is absolute. Nothing is impenetrable, and barriers are a dare.

When he arrived in Ottawa, Facebook was big and Twitter was growing, but no one in the Liberal Party knew what to do with them. The Liberals sent several people, including Wylie, to observe Barack Obama’s campaign. He was expecting to learn new media, like YouTube; instead he learned about data and “the modeling they used to analyze and understand that data.” He learned that “it was those numbers – and the predictive algorithms they created – that separated Obama from anyone who had ever run for president before.” With data on “age, gender, income, race, homeownership – even magazine subscriptions and airline miles” – you could predict whom people would vote for and what issues were most important to them, and craft messages that might sway their opinions:

For me, this was a wholly new way of understanding elections. Data was a force for good, powering this campaign of change. It was being used to produce first-time voters, to reach people who felt left out. The deeper I got into it, the more I thought that data would be the savior of politics.

He was eager to share what he’d learned. He had his supporters but, in the end, the Liberal Party of Canada didn’t want to spend the money on something they didn’t quite understand. Soon afterward, “The LPC was devastated in the federal election by the Conservative Party of Canada, which had invested in sophisticated data systems at the behest of its imported Republican advisers.”

In 2010, at age 21, Wylie left politics for law school at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He “flourished in London and soon gained a wide circle of friends.” He was soon tempted by an offer from the U.K. Liberal Democrats. It was the the only party to oppose the war in Iraq, he notes, but it was a poster on their office wall that finally lured him in: “No one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.” It all makes for a very funny story – unless you’re a Liberal Democrat. Wylie provided an extensive and devastating report, and the party elected to shoot the messenger. In 2015, “the party was eviscerated, losing forty-nine of its fifty-seven seats in Parliament.”

He was ready for something new. A Lib Dem connection had suggested Wylie apply for a job with SCL Group, because SCL was “looking for ‘data people for some behavior research project’ involving the military.” After several interviews, Alexander Nix, an SCL director, “offered me a three-month contract to do, essentially, whatever I wanted … After all the agonies of dealing with the LPC and the Lib Dems, it was incredibly enticing to be given free rein.” In June 2013, he started at SCL.

Meanwhile, Wylie had started a PhD in fashion at University of the Arts London. Nix agreed to cover his tuition. SCL had contracts with the British and U.S. military. Wylie’s days alternated between “fashion models and cyberwarfare,” but it was models of another kind, “neural networks, computer vision, and autoencoders,” that attracted him:

At SCL we would watch countless numbers of radical jihadist propaganda videos, and we noticed that, beyond the violence of the clips that make it onto the news, there was a rich and well-articulated aesthetic to their style of content. Cool cars were showcased. There would be music … They tried to position their backward ideology as somehow modern or futuristic in a way that echoed the old Italian Futurists’ promotion of a fascism for tomorrow … These films were propagating a grotesque cult of violence and hate … Their style was self-indulgent and naively romantic, and it bordered on kitsch. Even terrorists have pop culture.

Around this time, in September 2013, I distinctly remember thinking, How cool is this? I get to work in culture, but not just for someone’s branding campaign. I get to work in culture for the defense of our democracy.

SCL was trying to undermine extremist movements. If you could get enough information on their members, you could sow discord: “The most susceptible targets are typically the ones who exhibit neurotic or narcissistic traits … because they are more prone to feelings of envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behavior.” To find the most susceptible targets, you needed a great deal of data, more than you could sort manually. So you also needed algorithms to analyze the data. That’s what they did at SCL: gather truckloads of data and analyze it. They did it for military security; and then they did it for anyone who had the money to pay for it.

In Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s film The Great Hack, SCL CEO Alexander Nix is shown pitching the company by describing its work in Trinidad and Tobago:

There are two main political parties, one for the Blacks, one for the Indians. And they screw each other. So, we were working for the Indians, and we went to the client and we said we want to target the youth. And we try and increase apathy. The campaign has to be non-political, cause the kids don’t care about politics. It has to be reactive, cause they’re lazy. So we came up with this campaign which was all about “be part of the gang,” “do something cool,” “be part of a movement,” and it was called the “DO SO!” campaign. “Do so! Don’t vote!” … It’s a sign of resistance against, not the government but against politics and voting. We knew that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn’t vote because they “Do so!” but all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which was to go out and vote … Now the difference in 18- to 35-year-old turnout was like 40 per cent. And that swung the election about 6 per cent, which is all that’s needed in an election that’s very close.²

It was a young field and Wylie’s task was to develop it by gaining access to new sources of data and writing new algorithms to analyze them: “One unintended consequence of having large pluralities of citizens connected via mobile phone networks was that everybody could be traced, tracked, profiled, and communicated with.” There were “data brokers such as Experian, Acxiom, and niche firms with specialist lists from evangelical churches, media companies, and so on. Even some state governments will sell you lists of hunting, fishing, or gun licensees.”

A great deal of data came from Facebook, which used the data it gathered to sell targeted advertising but didn’t seem to care much who else used it and what they used it for. And when you joined Facebook, you gave them permission to access all your friends’ data too. Eventually SCL had information on hundreds of millions of people, and once they had 5,000 bits of information on you (everything you clicked or liked, every email you sent or YouTube you watched, every Google search you searched), so the claim went, they knew you better than you knew yourself.

The algorithms were about profiling. They’d categorize personality by:

ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism … This sounds simple, but the Big Five model can be an immensely useful tool in predicting voters’ behavior … Obama ran on change, hope, and progress – in other words, a platform of openness to new ideas. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to focus on stability, independence, and tradition – in effect, a platform of conscientiousness.

Each of the Big Five traits are found in pretty much everyone. There’s also a:

“dark triad” of traits – narcissism (extreme self-centeredness), Machiavellianism (ruthless self-interest), and psychopathy (emotional detachment) – that are less common and maladaptive, meaning that those who exhibit them are generally more prone to anti-social behavior, including criminal acts.

In October 2013, Steve Bannon arrived at SCL, with truckloads of money provided by eccentric right-wing backers. When he first met Bannon, Wylie writes,

We talked for four hours – not only about politics but about fashion and culture, Foucault, the third-wave feminist Judith Butler, and the nature of the fractured self. On the surface, Bannon seemed utterly predictable – another old, straight white guy – but he spoke with a certain wokeness I hadn’t expected at all. In fact, I quickly decided he was kind of cool … He was no political hack, but a fellow nerd given permission to speak freely.

When Wylie joined SCL, he believed that data collection and profiling were being used for positive ends, to search out fanatics and prevent acts of terrorism. That changed soon after Bannon’s arrival and the creation of a new SCL subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica. CA continued to search out fanatics, but for different purposes. Bannon was out to organize fanatics. CA would create new Facebook pages “with vague names like County Patriots or I Love My Country.” As people joined these groups, CA would post videos and articles:

Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. All the while it was testing and refining messages …

Once a group reached a certain number of members, CA would set up a physical event. CA teams would choose small venues – a coffee shop or bar to make the crowd feel larger … People would show up and find a fellowship of anger and paranoia. This naturally led them to feel like they were part of a giant movement, and it allowed them to further feed off one another’s paranoia and fear of conspiracy. … The meetings took place in counties all across the United States, starting with the early Republican primary states, and people would get more and more fired up at what they saw as “us vs. them.” What began as their digital fantasy, sitting alone in their bedrooms late at night clicking on links, was becoming their new reality.

That’s one example of what you could do with a lot of data and the ability to select the people you want. But data and technical ability weren’t enough. Wylie describes CA’s work for the Leave side in the Brexit campaign:

The problem with Remain was that they completely failed to understand what they were up against. As Cambridge Analytica identified, provoking anger and indignation reduced the need for full rational explanations immunize target voters to the notion that the economy would suffer. neglected to stop and ask people what they thought the economy was in the first place. Cambridge Analytica identified that many people in non-urban regions or in lower socioeconomic strata often externalized the notion of “the economy” to something that only the wealthy and metropolitan elite participated in. “The economy” was not their job in a local store; it’s something that bankers did.

Pro-Brexit leaders knew that to win they would need to attract a few progressive voters:

One of the most compelling progressive arguments for Brexit was pretty simple … Under EU rules, migrants to Britain from countries like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria did not need a visa to work and live in Britain. But migrants from, say, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, or Jamaica were required to undergo extensive screening and difficult immigration procedures … As the Remain campaign paraded around its “pro-immigration” messages to defend the EU, what many people of color saw was the tacit whiteness of that very message – that it really meant rights for some immigrants … And it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home” .

One more example:

In August 2016, the football player Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the American national anthem to protest systemic racism and police brutality toward African Americans and other minorities in the United States. The fashion brand Nike, Kaepernick’s sponsor, stood behind the athlete, and a controversy ensued … Cybersecurity firms also identified fake Nike coupons originating from alt-right groups that targeted African American social media users with offers like “75% off all shoes for people of color.” The coupons were intended to create scenarios in which unwitting African American customers would try to use the coupons in a Nike store, where they would be refused. In the age of viral videos, this scenario could in turn create “real” footage showcasing a racist trope of an “angry black man” demanding free stuff in a store. So why would these disinformation operations target a fashion company and attempt to weaponize its brand? Because the objective of this hostile propaganda is not simply to interfere with our politics, or even to damage our companies. The objective is to tear apart our social fabric. They want us to hate one another.

By August 2014, less than a year after Bannon’s arrival, it all became too much for the one-time adviser to the Liberal Party of Canada. Two years after Wylie and CA parted company, Donald Trump became the GOP nominee: “If my hunch was correct, Cambridge Analytica was not only using the data tool I had worked on to manipulate American voters into supporting him, it may have been knowingly or unknowingly working with Russians to sway the election. … I felt sick to my stomach. And I knew I had to tell someone.” A few months after Trump’s election victory, Wylie went public. When he testified before the U.S. Congress, in June 2018, he was 29 years old.

Brittany Kaiser, Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again.

New York: Harper, 2019. 400 pages.

The digital arms race

A second book about Cambridge Analytica has been published: Brittany Kaiser’s Targeted. Kaiser, who also has a background in progressive politics, joined CA around the time Wylie was leaving. Targeted doesn’t add much to Wylie’s story. Kaiser seems mostly concerned with explaining why she stayed at CA for four years. None of the three books has an index, perhaps an unfortunate result of the shift toward electronic books.

The three books together are an introduction to another world. It would be nice to think that companies and governments are tightening up rules and legislation to protect our private data, but my guess is that the increasing sophistication of our cybersecurity experts will be matched by the increasing sophistication of our hackers, in a kind of digital-evolution arms race. Snowden, Wylie, Kaiser and a host of others have myriad suggestions. I don’t mean to denigrate them, but they don’t make me feel safe from predators like the wealthy among us who will stop at absolutely nothing in pursuit of their ends. The outcome, if not their intention, seems to be an increasing number of failed organizations and states.

Back in March, Snopes.com declared as “false” rumours that U.S. representatives had used COVID-19 legislation to give themselves a $25 million pay raise. Who started and promoted the rumour?

Would a Cambridge Analytica clone incite Indigenous people to block railways in support of other Indigenous groups?

Did you know that your computer’s camera can watch you, even when the computer is off?

The irony is that while Bannon and friends are out to create distrust and paranoia in all of us, these three books (and a host of films) do exactly that in me.

Continue reading “The World’s Most Valuable Resource” →