“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,”


The Guardian.

Carole Cadwalladr has an extensive and in-depth piece on the shadowy world of the Mercers and others, and their aims, none of which will make you rest easy. The age of reasoned paranoia is upon us. Recommended reading.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

Full story at The Guardian.

Comments

  1. says

    This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us.

    Well, when you put it like that… Yikes.

  2. rq says

    I’ve been reading through the article in bits and pieces during the day, and it just gets scarier and scarier.

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