Naturally, there are also rumors of a nefarious Russian connection. Scary, right? Makes me wonder if I’m still not under Cambridge Analytica’s influence right now. In the words of a pink-haired Cambridge Analytica data-warrior-turned-whistleblower, the company served as a digital armory that turned “Likes” into weapons and produced “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”
This newfangled construct was then used to brainwash-carpet-bomb the American electorate, shredding our democracy and turning people into pliable zombie supporters of Donald Trump. The charge, as reported by twin exposés in the New York Times and the Guardian, is that the firm inappropriately accessed Facebook profile information belonging to 50 million people and then used that data to construct a powerful internet-based psychological influence weapon. This week, Cambridge Analytica, the British election data outfit funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and linked to Steven Bannon and President Donald Trump, blew up the news cycle. Walter Dill Scott, Influencing Men in Business: Psychology of Argument and Suggestion (1911)
“The man with the proper imagination is able to conceive of any commodity in such a way that it becomes an object of emotion to him and to those to whom he imparts his picture, and hence creates desire rather than a mere feeling of ought.”
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