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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America Paperback – October 8, 2019

by Christopher Wylie (Author)

4.7 1,020 ratings

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For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers.

Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals in--excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other through psychological manipulation. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.

Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born.

Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (October 8, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593229142
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593229149
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.18 x 0.87 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,887,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Ham Ward

This book is SO important on SO many levels!

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2019

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Timely and important book. Cogent, informative, and impactful. Read it in two days. Fun, well written and with just the right amount of snark in it. This book must have hit home as you can see the bad guys already trying to smear author Wylie in the media and other venues.

Highly recommended if you want to understand where we were two years ago and where we are now headed in terms of cyberwarfare, computational psych, the future of democracy and privacy (or lack thereof), AI and many more topics.

Good discussion about the dark side of social media. Companies that act like a nation-state with no competition with no oversight.

Wylie comes across as interesting and likeable. An intelligent character who is candid about his shortcomings and the monster he helped create with a real grasp of the wider issues.

liked that Wylie devotes the last section of the MF book to intelligent and well thought out regulatory approaches to counter the negatives infecting the Internet.

20 people found this helpful

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Pliny

Devastating news for democracy

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2019

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This is a real life tale with devastating relevance to our country and the world's future. With the energy of youth, an intense interest in human politics and psychology, and being of the generation knowing how to use computers and the internet to accomplish real-world change, Christopher Wylie slipped down a very dark path. How many of us can honestly say that while finding our way early in our careers, we wound up making decisions which directly altered the course of history -- giving the "edge" to Brexit and the US 2016 election outcome. Wylie, this young Canadian did. Ultimately, testifying before Congress and in writing this book, he became a whistleblower on himself and Cambridge Analytica.

Consider the potential impact of this discovery: In Wylie's psychological research, he found that a relatively small number of social media "likes" were enough to very clearly categorize the political and social characteristics of a person. He points out that discovering just 10 "likes" identified the person better than his/her co-workers, 150 "likes' better than a family member, and 300 "likes" better than one's spouse.

As retired software engineers (and not social media users), my wife and I, having just completed reading the book over a couple weeks, found this to be compelling, but not easy reading. It is eye-opening to discover how "every click we make" while browsing the internet isn't just innocently stored so people can sell us more stuff. With little work, these "clicks" are associated with a privately owned computer record on each of us. Enterprises like CA connect all the details they can to each personal record -- names, aliases, emails, contacts, property ownership, voting records, race, income, credit stats, memberships, social & blog posts, purchases, product reviews, video watchlists, tweets, "likes", smart phone GPS locations, computer & smart TV IP addresses, and so on. Much of this data is public and free and much can be bought. Some can be hacked. So each of us is very well "known" and categorizable, by a growing industry of amoral, for-profit, non-governmental private enterprises. And we don't get paid for our data or even have the right to know what they have on us.

So what? Well, with a small expenditure of money to buy data, let's say your organization has gathered more than enough of this data on individual people stored in their database for all practical purposes, representing the US population "virtually" on a computer. Each individual record is filled out with detailed personality characteristics and psychological tendencies. In the database, you could search online social commentary looking for key words revealing what gets users angry or insecure. [As Wylie points out, anger pretty much destroys the human animal's ability to think while in that state.] Next study these people in your database, see where they live, work, what they eat, what they believe in. Now you can test what psychological and political messages you might need to feed them to reinforce their behavior, keeping them angry or worried. If the test works, scale it up. Then work on another group, and so on.

Even this example is simple and unsophisticated, considering all the data you have. Maybe, childless, pet-less, married people who live in cities and watch violent movies are a special group who would respond to the appropriate micro-targeted message from your corporate or political client. You don't even have to plan what you're looking for -- it's easy to let a computer program work on all your data, make the associations, and find all the possibilities.

The beauty and danger to democracy in micro-targeting is that when you deliver your messaging, the bulk of the population is unaware of the targeted messages you create, because you can target down to one person, ten, or a thousand at your whim. In the meantime, "likers" and "re-tweeters" happily amplify your message to like-minded targets. As a result, a politician or corporate leader could go up or down in popularity with neither the press nor the general public having any underlying clue of your targeting campaign.

It seems almost unbelievable that casual "liking" across the internet and social media would so dramatically threaten modern society, but here we are. For shortsighted convenience and instant ego reinforcement, we have freely provided our private preferences and life minutia for corporate and political databases whose owners now have the easy task of just refining and updating it periodically for their own ends. So it was inevitable, that with no meaningful governmental regulations to speak of, and with humanity's insatiable demand for power and money, our widely available personal data would cleverly become used against us.

These are critical times for those who understood what Benjamin Franklin meant when he said we Americans have "a republic, if you can keep it." But that was long ago and largely forgotten. Now with business and political leaders re-discovering how useful public ignorance and distraction can be to retain power, they use their consultants to proactively divide us into angry, non-thinking, but convenient tribes. Yet somehow we still are told and collectively believe that America is just too “exceptional” to ever fail.

28 people found this helpful

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Heidi G

Thanks, I hate it.

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2020

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This is one of the most horrifying books I've read in recent years, but it's certainly fascinating and informative.

Don't expect to be happier for having learned in more detail about Cambridge Analytica's data-driven psychological warfare and the ways in which Facebook was weaponized to skew recent elections. The whole operation makes the skin crawl, and yet it is important to have this glimpse of what social media can be and do.

Christopher Wylie is a complex person who seems to be trying to atone for his misdeeds through publicly exposing the dirty work he engaged in. Whether or not he completely succeeds in that atonement is rather left to the reader. He's not infallible (who among us is completely pure in motive and deed?) but I'm still thankful he saw the light and decided to come clean.

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theCustomerWhoReviews

Eye opening

Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2021

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Extremely informative on the underlying mechanisms of the business models of ‘free services’ provided by the big tech companies on the internet.

One person found this helpful

Jorge Pablo

Interesante

Reviewed in Mexico on February 5, 2021

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Comprad este libro si queréis conocer el poder de las ciencias de datos.

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WALSH MARTIN

Your views on social engineering will never be the same again

Reviewed in France on October 25, 2020

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This book reads like a good thriller, difficult to put down, a great plot and leaves you flabbergasted. Except it's not fiction. This is a whistleblower account of what really happened - and what is probably still happening. You want to cancel all your social media accounts - except you realise that you can't anymore - not without some serious rehab anyhow! A true minf*ck....

Papamad

No esta mal

Reviewed in Spain on March 25, 2020

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No dejara una huella indeleble en mi, pero el libro no esta mal. A quien no conozca el tema de los big data le encantará, a quien sepa del caso, le iluminará algunos rincones, pero no le hará ver la luz. Distraido y revelador de como algo que puede usarse para ampliar el conocimiento, también puede usarse para manipularlo.

Despues de leerlo, uno queda aun mas escamado del uso que se puede hacer de los datos privados. Y ya es dificil que no los demos, si queremos estar conectados.

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Erin Brooks

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2019

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Excellent well written book. Makes mad that more isn’t being done to address all the issues raised in this book.

One person found this helpful

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