SW That Elected Trump Based On SW That Elected Obama
But when Trump was elected, the man who designed the software and the following excerpt was working for a military contractor to do so, rather than a political party. I'm having trouble continuing to read his book ;p
Insurgencies, by nature, are asymmetric, in that a few people can cause large effects. So catalyzing an insurgency within the belligerent’s organization requires first concentrating resources on a few key target groups. This is optimized by good profiling and identifying the types of people who are both susceptible to new ways of thinking and connected enough to inject our counternarrative into their social network.
The most effective form of perspecticide is one that first mutates the concept of self. In this light, the manipulator attempts to “steal” the concept of self from his target, replacing it with his own. This usually starts with attempting to smother the opponent’s narratives and then dominating the informational environment around the target. Often this involves gradually breaking down what are called psychological resilience factors over several months. Programs are designed to create unrealistic perceptions in the targets that result in confusion and damage self-efficacy. Targets are encouraged to begin catastrophizing about minor or imagined events, and counternarratives attempt to remove meaning, creating an impression of confusing or senseless events. Counternarratives also attempt to foster distrust in order to mitigate an existing hierarchy or group when you begin to think that you are being used in some unfair way, or when events seem senseless or purposeless. You become less willing to accept setbacks, take risks, or comply with commands.
But simply degrading morale is often not enough. The ultimate aim is to trigger negative emotions and thought processes associated with impulsive, erratic, or compulsive behavior. This moves a target from mild or passive resistance (e.g., less productivity, taking fewer risks, rumors, etc.) into a realm of more disruptive behaviors (e.g., arguing, insubordination, mutiny, etc.). This approach has been taken in South America, for example, to provoke disunity among members of narcotics operations, increasing the likelihood of information leaks, defections, or internal conflicts that erode a supply chain. The most susceptible targets are typically the ones who exhibit neurotic or narcissistic traits, as they tend to be less psychologically resilient to stressing narratives. This is because neuroticism can make a person more prone to paranoid ideation, as they tend to experience more anxiety and impulsiveness and place more reliance on intuitive rather than deliberative thinking. People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to
This is another excerpt from Christopher Wylie's autobiographical account of developing political control systems during the 2010s. He was a hacker and politician who worked in machine learning, and moved from politics, into private military contracts, and then back into politics.
The light went on: This was the first time Nix truly understood what we were doing. He could not have been less interested in things like “data” and “algorithms,” but seeing actual people onscreen, knowing everything about them, had seized his imagination.
“Do we have their phone numbers?” Nix asked. I told him we did. And then, in one of those moments of weird brilliance he occasionally had, he reached for the speakerphone and asked for the number. As Jucikas relayed it to him, he punched in the number.
After a couple of rings, someone picked up. We heard a woman say “Hello?” and Nix, in his most posh accent, said, “Hello, ma’am. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I’m calling from the University of Cambridge. We are conducting a survey. Might I speak with Ms. Jenny Smith, please?” The woman confirmed that she was Jenny, and Nix started asking her questions based on what we knew from her data.
“Ms. Smith, I’d like to know, what is your opinion of the television show Game of Thrones ?” Jenny raved about it—just as she had on Facebook. “Did you vote for Mitt Romney in the last election?” Jenny confirmed that she had. Nix asked whether her kids went to such-and-such elementary school, and Jenny confirmed that, too. When I looked over at Bannon, he had a huge grin on his face.
After Nix hung up with Jenny, Bannon said, “Let me do one!” We went around the room, all of us taking a turn. It was surreal to think that these people were
The book is called "Mindf*ck, Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America" and it's the first book I've read this much of in a very long time! It explains what happened in the USA with clarity and detail. The data described above was purportedly harvested using public API's only, although the chapter is titled with regard to trojan horses ... On 4/13/21, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
But when Trump was elected, the man who designed the software and the following excerpt was working for a military contractor to do so, rather than a political party. I'm having trouble continuing to read his book ;p
Insurgencies, by nature, are asymmetric, in that a few people can cause large effects. So catalyzing an insurgency within the belligerent’s organization requires first concentrating resources on a few key target groups. This is optimized by good profiling and identifying the types of people who are both susceptible to new ways of thinking and connected enough to inject our counternarrative into their social network.
The most effective form of perspecticide is one that first mutates the concept of self. In this light, the manipulator attempts to “steal” the concept of self from his target, replacing it with his own. This usually starts with attempting to smother the opponent’s narratives and then dominating the informational environment around the target. Often this involves gradually breaking down what are called psychological resilience factors over several months. Programs are designed to create unrealistic perceptions in the targets that result in confusion and damage self-efficacy. Targets are encouraged to begin catastrophizing about minor or imagined events, and counternarratives attempt to remove meaning, creating an impression of confusing or senseless events. Counternarratives also attempt to foster distrust in order to mitigate an existing hierarchy or group when you begin to think that you are being used in some unfair way, or when events seem senseless or purposeless. You become less willing to accept setbacks, take risks, or comply with commands.
But simply degrading morale is often not enough. The ultimate aim is to trigger negative emotions and thought processes associated with impulsive, erratic, or compulsive behavior. This moves a target from mild or passive resistance (e.g., less productivity, taking fewer risks, rumors, etc.) into a realm of more disruptive behaviors (e.g., arguing, insubordination, mutiny, etc.). This approach has been taken in South America, for example, to provoke disunity among members of narcotics operations, increasing the likelihood of information leaks, defections, or internal conflicts that erode a supply chain. The most susceptible targets are typically the ones who exhibit neurotic or narcissistic traits, as they tend to be less psychologically resilient to stressing narratives. This is because neuroticism can make a person more prone to paranoid ideation, as they tend to experience more anxiety and impulsiveness and place more reliance on intuitive rather than deliberative thinking. People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to
narratives were his weapons. First we used focus groups and qualitative observation to unpack the perceptions of a given population and learn what people cared about—term limits, the deep state, draining the swamp, guns, and the concept of walls to keep out immigrants were all explored in 2014, several years before the Trump campaign. We then came up with hypotheses for how to sway opinions. CA tested these hypotheses with target segments in online panels or experiments to see whether they performed as the team expected, based on the data. We also pulled Facebook profiles, looking for patterns in order to build a neural network algorithm that would help us make predictions.
A select minority of people exhibit traits of narcissism (extreme self-centeredness), Machiavellianism (ruthless self-interest), and psychopathy (emotional detachment). In contrast to the Big Five traits found in everyone to some degree as part of normal psychology—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—these “dark triad” traits are maladaptive, meaning that those who exhibit them are generally more prone to antisocial behavior, including criminal acts. From the data CA collected, the team was able to
“political correctness” that was preventing them from speaking these “truths” in public. It was through the process of reading these forums that Bannon realized he could harness them and their anonymous swarms of resentment and harassment.
This was especially true after Gamergate, in the late summer of 2014, right before Bannon was introduced to SCL. In many ways, Gamergate created a conceptual framework for Bannon’s alt-right movement, as he knew there was an undercurrent populated by millions of intense and angry young men. Trolling and cyberbullying became key tools of the alt-right. But Bannon went deeper and had Cambridge Analytica scale and deploy many of the same tactics that domestic abusers and bullies use to erode stress resilience in their victims. Bannon transformed CA into a tool for automated bullying and scaled psychological abuse. The firm started this journey by identifying a series of cognitive biases that it hypothesized would interact with latent racial bias. Over the course of many experiments, we concocted an arsenal of psychological tools that could be deployed systematically via social media, blogs, groups, and forums.
Bannon’s first request of our team was to study who felt oppressed by political correctness. Cambridge Analytica found that, because people often overestimate how much others notice them, spotlighting socially uncomfortable situations was an effective prime for eliciting bias in target cohorts, such as when you get in trouble for mispronouncing a foreign-sounding name. One of the most effective messages the firm tested was getting subjects to “imagine an America where you can’t pronounce anyone’s name.” Subjects would be shown a series of uncommon names and then asked, “How hard is it to pronounce this name? Can you recall a time where people were laughing at someone who messed up an ethnic name? Do some people use political correctness to make others feel dumb or to get ahead? ”
People reacted strongly to the notion that “liberals” were seeking new ways to mock and shame them, along with the idea that political correctness was a method of persecution. An effective Cambridge Analytica technique was to show subjects blogs that made fun of white people like them, such as People of Walmart . Bannon had been observing online communities on places like 4chan and Reddit for years, and he knew how often subgroups of angry young white men would share content of “liberal elites” mocking “regular” Americans. There had always been publications that parodied the “hicks” of flyover country, but social media represented an extraordinary opportunity to rub “regular” Americans’ noses in the snobbery of coastal elites.
...
attitudinal research on American citizens.
Soon enough, weird questions began popping up in our research. One day I was in my London office, checking reports from the field, when I noticed a project involving Russia-oriented message testing in America. The U.S. operation was growing rapidly, and several new people had been brought in to manage the surge in assignments, so it was hard to keep track of every research stream. I thought that maybe someone had started exploring Americans’ views on international topics. But when I searched our repository of questions and data, I could only find data being collected on Russia. Our team in Oregon had started asking people, “Is Russia entitled to Crimea?” and “What do you think about Vladimir Putin as a leader?” Focus group leaders were circulating various photos of Putin and asking people to indicate where he looked strongest. I started watching video recordings of some of the focus groups—and they were strange. Photos of Vladimir Putin and Russian narratives were projected on the wall, and the interviewer was asking groups of American voters how it made them feel to see a strong leader.
What was interesting was that even though Russia had been a U.S. adversary for decades, Putin was admired for his strength as a leader.
“He has a right to protect his country and do what he thinks is best for his country,” said one participant as others nodded in agreement. Another told us that Crimea was Russia’s Mexico, but that, unlike Obama, Putin was taking action. As I sat alone in the now dark office, watching bizarre clips of Americans discussing Putin’s claim to Crimea, I wanted answers. Gettleson was in America at the time. When he answered the phone, I asked if he could enlighten me about who had authorized a research stream on Putin. He had no idea. “It just showed up,” he said, “so I assumed it was approved by someone.”
Patten’s interest in Eastern European politics crossed my mind, but I didn’t give it a lot of thought. In August 2014, a Palantir staff member sent an email to the data science team with a link to an article about Russians stealing millions of Internet browsing records. “Talk about acquiring data!” they joked. Two minutes later, one of our engineers responded, “We can exploit similar methods.” Maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t, but the firm had already contracted former Russian
...
Analytica set up camp, Israeli, Russian, British, and French “civic engagement” projects operated behind fig-leaf cover stories. The unspoken belief shared by all: Foreign interference in elections does not matter if those elections are African.
The company was working nominally in support of Goodluck Jonathan, who was running for reelection as the president of Nigeria. Jonathan, a Christian, was running against Muhammadu Buhari, who was a moderate Muslim. Cambridge Analytica had been hired by a group of Nigerian billionaires who were worried that if Buhari won the election, he would revoke their oil and mineral exploration rights, decimating a major source of their income.
True to form, Cambridge Analytica focused not on how to promote Goodluck Jonathan’s candidacy but on how to destroy Buhari’s. The billionaires did not really care who won, so long as the victor understood loud and clear what they were capable of, and what they were willing to do. In December, Cambridge Analytica had hired a woman named Brittany Kaiser to become “director of business development.” Kaiser had the kind of pedigree that Nix drooled over. In their first meeting,
...
U.K. authorities seized Cambridge Analytica’s servers, the Information Commissioner’s Office subsequently stated that “some of the systems linked to the investigation were accessed from IP addresses that resolve to Russia and other areas of the CIS.”
It’s eye-opening to summarize what was going on over those final months of my tenure. Our research was being seeded with questions about Putin and Russia. The head psychologist who had access to Facebook data was also working for a Russian-funded project in St. Petersburg, giving presentations in Russian and describing Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to build a psychological profiling database of American voters. We had Palantir executives coming in and out of the office. We had a major Russian company with ties to the FSB probing for information about our American data assets. We had Nix giving the Russians a presentation about how good we were at spreading fake news and rumors. And then there were the internal memos outlining how Cambridge Analytica was developing new hacking capacity in concert with former Russian intelligence officers.
In the year after Steve Bannon became vice president,
...
By this time, the political climate in Britain had become extremely toxic. Threats were being sent to both Remain- and Leave-supporting MPs (mostly to the Remain side), there was a disproportionate increase in race-based violence, and social media was blowing up every day. No one was passive or nonchalant about what was going on in British politics anymore. People were awake and people were angry. Very angry.
A lot of the messaging from the Leave side during this time was targeted toward "metropolitan elites," as the politicians called them, as well as people of color and European migrants. Vote Leave eschewed responsibility, but it was apparent that they had left the race-baiting to Leave.EU, which gladly (and proudly) took up the cause. A few days before Jo Cox was murdered, Leave.EU's Farage unveiled a campaign poster showing a caravan of brown-skinned migrants beneath the words "BREAKING POINT". The move drew comparisons to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s showing lines of Jewish people flooding into Europe.
As I sat in Canada watching the drama unfold, I told myself that Vote Leave was not the same as Leave.EU, as many of my friends were working for Vote Leave. Farage's campaign is the racist one using Cambridge Analytica, I thought. Vote Leave couldn't possibly be pandering to that kind of rhetoric. I was wrong.
...
campaign advisers not wanting to take on the personal risk of breaking election laws would find someone inexperienced, often an eager young volunteer, and nominate them as the campaign's "agent," which would make that person legally liable for the campaign. That way, if and when wrongdoing was uncovered, a fall guy was in place and the true perptrators could walk off scot-free, continuing to enjoy their proximity to power while leaving behind the betrayed volunteers and broken lives.
we were based primarily out of Cambridge because of our close partnership with the university. This was a total falsehood, made up on the fly. But for Nix, truth was whatever he deemed true in the moment. As soon as he'd said we had a Cambridge office, he started referring to it all the time, urging Bannon to stop by.
"Alexander, we don't have a Cambridge office," I said, exasperated with his insanity. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Oh, yes we do, it's just not open at the moment," he said.
A couple of days before Bannon's next visit to the U.K., Nix had the London office staff set up a fake office in Cambridge, complete with rented furniture and computers. On the day Bannon was scheduled to arrive, he said, "Okay, everyone, we're working out of our Cambridge office today!" And we all packed up to go out there and work. Nix also hired a handful of temps and several scantily clad young women to staff the would-be office for Bannon's visit.
The whole thing felt ludicrous. Gettleson and I messaged each other, sharing links about Potemkin villages, the fake Russian towns set up in old tsarist Russia to woo Catherine the Great when she visited in 1783. We christened the office the Potemkin Site and made relentless fun of Nix for coming up with such a stupid idea. But when I walked around the fake office with Bannon, two months after I first met him in a Cambridge hotel, I could see the light in his eyes. He was buying it and loving every moment of it. Fortunately, he never noticed that some of the computers weren't actually plugged in or that some of the hired girls didn't speak English.
Nix set up the Potemkin Site every time Bannon came to town. Bannon never caught on that it was fake. Or if he did, he didn't mind. It fit the vision. And when it came time to name the new entity the Mercers were funding, Bannon chose Cambridge Analytica--because that was where we were based, he said. So Cambridge Analytica's first target was Bannon himself. The Potemkin Site perfectly encapsulated the heart and soul of Cambridge Analytica, which perfected the art of showing people what they want to see, whether real or not, to mold their behavior--a strategy that was so effective, even a man like Steve Bannon could be fooled by someone like Alexander Nix.
On Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:13 AM grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
The book is called "Mindf*ck, Cambridge Analytica
CA appeared 2nd generation limited scope results, nothing compared to well documented
Well documented _where_ please? https://twitter.com/HindsightFiles
The book is called "Mindf*ck, Cambridge Analytica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica CA appeared some limited scope rather party internal seeking out its own supporters, analytical, a 2nd gen tactical run use of data excercise as done earlier in prior elections. Among other tactics, mostly using platforms, not being the platforms themselves. So was not in comparison to the mass brainwashing programming censorship and steering campaign blanket conducted by seemingly wholly Leftist owned Fake News, Big Tech, and Social Media corrupt platforms themselves, across 200+ Millions an entire nations of peoples indiscriminantly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE Fake News Example for Basic Bitch Analysts It was and is unprecedented, beyond Orwellian, and far from basic. Those that can't see it, are blind. Blinded by their TV which they need to unplug from and wake up. "they are simply unaware of the invasive sophistication of these technologies..." So now both Mass Data Tech and Mass Programming Channels are running rampant unrestricted influence ops in election wilds, global contexts, etc. And States worldwide are still refusing to allow open public all access inspections of election meta, HW/SW, and results... "trust us", refusing to hear court cases, etc... corruption and gratuitous power loves to sustain and hide itself over and from you in those ways. Quite hilarious that even binary OS kernels are more open to debugging inspection than your political systems (which shouldn't even exist, evolve past those legacy models). 2023 will be even more insane... expect that. The only way out is to stop forcing other people to be your slaves, and route around and put off the slavers. NAP, Cryptocurrency, and The Tiny Dot, among other things.
participants (3)
-
grarpamp -
Karl -
Karl Semich