Mindfuck

by Christopher Wylie

  Doing this research, I also began to see socially and economically deprived white people in a different way. It was clear that part of what underpins racist and xenophobic sentiment is a feeling of being threatened, reinforced through constant and salient “warnings” from sources like Fox News. One of the problems I noticed with the topical political debates on American cable news channels is the lack of nuance in labeling voter constituencies. White voters, Latino voters, women voters, suburban voters, etc., are all frequently discussed as unidimensional and monolithic groups, when in fact the salient aspects of many voters’ identities do not actually reflect the labels that pollsters, analysts, or consultants use to describe them. And this in turn alienates certain people. If you’re a white man living in a trailer, for example, you’re probably going to get angry when you are shown people on TV who are insisting that white people are super-privileged in this country. If you grew up using an outhouse, you probably don’t have much tolerance for a big discussion about whether trans people should be able to use the toilets of their choice. If you’re lower middle class and you see a black person on welfare, it’s not surprising that your attitude would be “Well, what about my welfare?” if you live in a state that has continually cut your support. This is not to defend these views, but if we want to understand them, we have to remain open to other perspectives, even ugly ones.

  As part of our early exploration of American culture, we looked at two areas we thought might be at play in this social discord. First we looked at whether a sense of social identity threat was fueling some of these views. The second area was related but slightly different. A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. This flawed logic extends into a perception that attention paid to other groups will ultimately mean less attention for people like them. Either way, minorities seemed to be “threats”—identity threats or threats to resources. Following this hypothesis of an underlying sense of threat, we wanted to see if we could mitigate some of these feelings, and we did so by trying to reduce the sense of threat. We would ask people in one study to imagine they were invincible superheroes who couldn’t be harmed or killed. We then asked them about types of people they ordinarily considered threatening—gays, immigrants, people of other races—and found that they had a more muted response to those “threatening” stimuli. If you are invincible, nothing can threaten you, not even the gays. This was fascinating for me and the team, as we were unpacking possible ways to mitigate underlying factors for racial tension. With each experiment, we learned more about how to manipulate outcomes according to people’s innermost traits.

  Our work in Virginia yielded promising results. We showed that there were relationships between personality traits and political outcomes, and that we could not only predict certain behaviors but also shift attitudes by framing the language of messages to correspond to psychometric profiles. We knew that even though the data sets we used were pretty decent in this little sandbox of pilots, they were still woefully inadequate for discerning all the nuances of personality and identity. In order to truly re-create society in silico, we would need to find even more complete data—way more data. But that was a problem to be solved in the future.

  Nix gave us a week to write a report that would normally have taken two months to do. He was anxious to get the ball rolling, because he knew what was at stake. Bannon had told him that Mercer might invest up to $20 million. For a niche firm like SCL, which had an annual budget in the range of $7 million to $10 million, this would be a game-changing amount of money.

  After pulling late nights and working through the weekend, we sent the report to Bannon the following Monday, and he immediately understood the possibilities of what we could accomplish. He was fully on board. In fact, he called the SCL office after reading the report and was almost giddy. “This is so great, guys,” he kept saying.

  Now we just had to persuade Robert Mercer.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS after this, one evening in late November 2013, Nix called me at home. “Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re flying to New York tomorrow.” He, Tadas Jucikas, and I were going to present our findings to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.

  Nix flew out first thing in the morning, but for some reason he’d booked Jucikas and me on a later flight. We landed at JFK around four in the afternoon, with our meeting scheduled to start at five. As we stood in line at U.S. customs, my phone rang. It was Nix. “Where the fuck are you?” he demanded.

  “We just got off the plane,” I told him.

  “Well, you’re late,” he snapped. “You’d better hurry up and get here.”

  “I can’t just wave myself through passport control!” I said, exasperated. As we squabbled on the phone, others in the queue turned their heads. We continued arguing until a customs official barked at me to get off the phone. And that wasn’t the end of it. Nix called me repeatedly—as we got in the car, when we arrived at the hotel, and as I changed clothes to come to the meeting. This was typical Nix, planning poorly and expecting me to fix everything. Irritated, I decided to put my phone on silent and take my time getting ready, mostly just to vex him. Jucikas and I took a cab to the meeting, which was at Rebekah Mercer’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Rebekah and her husband, a French financier named Sylvain Mirochnikoff, had bought six apartments at the Heritage at Trump Place, on Riverside Boulevard, combining them into one gigantic seventeen-bedroom home. The place took up most of the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth floors, with spectacular views up and down the Hudson, dotted with all the lights of New York.

  But it was also tacky, as Rebekah had decorated it with random artsy-craftsy touches: ceramic figurines, throw pillows, holiday decorations. In the living room, she had a magnificent grand piano, and on top of it was a clusterfuck of knickknacks and framed family photos.

  Rebekah was an interesting case. She had studied biology and mathematics at Stanford and earned a master’s in operations research and engineering economic systems. She had then followed her father into trading at Renaissance Technologies but left when she began homeschooling her children. In 2006, she and her sisters bought a bakery in Manhattan, so her life became primarily about kids and chocolate chunk cookies. She had a super-perky air about her, like some kind of right-wing cheerleader. And because she had so much money to give, she was an influential person in GOP circles. Unlike more cynical Republican Party operatives, she had what Mark Block called “TB”—she was a true believer in these conservative crusades.

  I walked into the living room and saw Rebekah sitting on a loveseat with Nix. The two of them were chatting and laughing, Nix turning on the charm. The room was packed with people—Bob Mercer, Bannon, Block, a couple of old men from the pro-Brexit right-wing U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), and a collection of guys in suits who I assumed were lawyers or corporate advisers. Several other Mercers were also there, including Bob’s wife, Diana, their daughter Jennifer, and a few grandchildren. This was a family affair.

  Mercer was the antithesis of his daughters, who were gaudy and garrulous. He rarely looked at anyone and mostly just listened. He wore a plain gray suit, even though we were at his daughter’s house for dinner. Most of the talking was done by his daughters or his entourage. He was intimidating, deeply serious, and almost entirely nonverbal. When he did speak, his tone was flat. He asked only questions related to very technical aspects of our work and always wanted me to give specific statistics.

  When the time came, Nix stood up and gave a short speech about SCL’s pedigree, our work for the military, and how the firm didn’t normally indulge private clients as we were now (a lie) but how Mercer’s persistence at chasing him had worn him down. I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Nix then introduced me and started describing the project wholly incorrectly. He clearly had not read the long report and so just started making up findings. I knew
Mercer would see right through his bullshit, so I interrupted to describe what we’d done in Virginia. Nix glared at me as he sat down beside Rebekah. In discussing the project, I added some of the more colorful details to draw the Mercers in. When I mentioned Kombucha Lady, describing her as an evangelical Christian who loved yoga and organic foods, Rebekah blurted, “That’s so me! Finally, someone understands us!”

  I also talked about SCL’s projects in other regions—the Middle East, North Africa, the Caribbean. When I got to the Trinidad project, I could see Bannon nodding his head as I described the idea of replicating society in silico. It also got Bob Mercer’s attention, because as an engineer he was especially interested in this part. After I started at SCL, I had realized that the information propagation R&D projects that DARPA was funding were just cultural trend forecasting by another name. Harvesting social media data to profile users with an algorithm was just the beginning. Once their behavioral attributes were inferred, simulations could be run to map out how they would communicate and interact with one another at scale. This brought to mind experiments from the 1990s in a niche field of sociology called “artificial societies,” which involved attempts by crude multi-agent systems to “grow” societies in silico. I could remember as a teenager reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where scientists used large data sets about societies to create the field of “psychohistory,” which allowed them to not only predict the future but also control it.

  Mercer had involved people from his company Renaissance Technologies in the original scoping of SCL, and, given that Nix was so focused on money and a hedge fund was part of the early stages of this project, everyone was under the impression that this was going to become a commercial venture. To put it crudely, if we could copy everyone’s data profiles and replicate society in a computer—like the game The Sims but with real people’s data—we could simulate and forecast what would happen in society and the market. This seemed to be Mercer’s goal. If we created this artificial society, we thought we would be on the threshold of creating one of the most powerful market intelligence tools in the world. We would be venturing into a new field—cultural finance and trend forecasting for hedge funds.

  Mercer, the computer engineer turned social engineer, wanted to re-factor society and optimize its people. One of his hobbies is building model train sets, and I got the feeling that he thought he could, in effect, get us to build him a model society for him to tinker with until it was perfect. By taking a leap at quantifying many of the intrinsic aspects of human behavior and cultural interaction, Mercer eventually realized that he could have at his disposal the Uber of information warfare. And, like Uber, which decimated the hundred-year-old taxi industry with a single app, his venture was about to do the same with democracy.

  Bannon’s goal was fundamentally different. He was no traditional Republican. In fact, he hated Mitt Romney–style Republicans for what he saw as their vapid capitalism. He loathed Ayn Rand, because she objectified people into commodities. He would talk about how an economy needed a higher purpose and sometimes referred to himself as a Marxist, less out of ideology than to make a point—that Marx talked about humans fulfilling a purpose. He claimed to believe in dharma, a tenet of Hinduism and Buddhism that has to do with order in the universe and proper, harmonious ways of living. He felt his mission was to find America’s purpose. In his mind, the time was right for a revolution: He saw several signals from the financial crisis and a decaying trust in institutions that foretold of a great reckoning looming on the horizon. Bannon’s quest was quasi-religious, with him assuming the role of messiah.

  So, like Mercer, Bannon hated “big government,” but for his own reason—because he saw the administrative state replacing the roles played by tradition and culture. For him, the EU was a chief offender, a sterile bureaucracy replacing tradition in the extreme—leaving Europe to become an economic marketplace devoid of meaning. The Western world seemed to Bannon as if it were losing its way by abandoning its cultural traditions for meaningless consumerism and a faceless state. For Bannon, this was a full-on culture war. As a self-anointed prophet, Bannon wanted a tool to peer into the future of our societies. And with what Bannon called Facebook’s God’s-eye view of each and every citizen, he could work to find the dharma for every American. In this way our research became almost spiritual for him.

  Nix, Bannon, and Mercer were all fascinated with Palantir, Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm, whose name comes from the crystal ball, or all-seeing eye, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. At the time, it seemed to me that these men wanted to create their own private Palantir by investing in SCL. Imagine the possibilities for an investor like Mercer: Predict the future of what people will buy and not buy, in order to make more money. If you can see a crash coming, you have the all-seeing orb for society: You might make billions overnight.

  When I finished, Rebekah invited everyone into the dining room. The kitchen staff brought out plates of filet mignon with a delicate garnish, but, knowing that I didn’t eat meat, Rebekah had asked the chef to prepare a special dish for me. It turned out to be grilled cheese sandwiches—I suppose at least she’d tried. She reached over to my plate to grab one and, after taking a bite, sighed with contentment. “I actually just asked for these because I wanted one,” she confided.

  “You know,” she said, “I’m so glad that someone like you is giving us a chance. We need more of your kind of people.”

  “Oh, what do you mean?” I asked innocently. Of course, I knew exactly what she meant, but I wanted her to say it out loud.

  “The gays—who I love, by the way!”

  I pondered how she squared the mental gymnastics of both loving the gays and also supporting causes to oppress them. But then again, I’ve been to many dinners where people talk about how much they love animals as they tear into a steak.

  Rebekah wanted to entice more LGBT people into the Republican ranks, believing it would strengthen the party. She then said she loved my jacket and suggested we go shopping together sometime. Rebekah was so awkward, and so expertly manipulated by Nix, I almost felt sorry for her. But not quite.

  At the end of the meal, Bob asked everyone to leave except for Nix, Rebekah, and the lawyers. He had made the decision to invest—somewhere between $15 million and $20 million of his own money. “We’ll create an actual palantír,” Nix said. “We’ll literally be able to see what’s going to happen.”

  * * *

  —

  WITH UP TO $20 million in the bag, Nix was in a giddy mood. The night after our meeting, he took Jucikas and me to a lavish dinner at Eleven Madison Park, a Michelin-star venue with vaulted ceilings. He ostentatiously flipped through the wine list, then directed the waiter to bring us the Château Lafite Rothschild—a $2,000 bottle of wine.

  “Get whatever you like,” he said, waving his arm grandly. This was a pleasant surprise, because, despite his wealth, Nix was cheap and complained about even the smallest expenses, such as office supplies. He once rejected an expense claim because someone bought “too many” highlighters, saying, “You don’t need more than one.” But on this evening he ordered what seemed like dozens of dishes, an Arthurian feast. He was flush with his own magnificence.

  The waiter brought the wine, and no sooner had he filled our glasses than Nix flailed his arm in conversation and knocked the bottle off the table. Hundred-dollar droplets spewed everywhere, and before the waiter even had a chance to whip off his arm towel and clean it up, Nix exclaimed, “Bring us another!” I must have looked at him agape, because he winked and said, “When you have $20 million, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  The night turned into a full-on bacchanalia. Somehow a couple of women in tight skirts materialized, to the evident shock of other diners. “Chris, do you want one?” he asked me, until I reminded him that I was not into women, as if anyone needed reminding, and he blurted, “Oh, do you want me to find you a bum boy?” I didn
’t know how to respond, but Nix just kept talking. He then told me a story about his time at Eton and what posh boys apparently do for fun. The whole scene was beyond mortifying, and it just kept getting worse.

  At some point, the restaurant’s management had to figure out what to do with us. Our bill by now was in the tens of thousands of dollars, so they couldn’t just throw us out before we’d paid. Jucikas and Nix were too far gone to care, but I was sitting there watching everyone watch us. Then, in what was obviously a coordinated move, a dozen waiters suddenly fanned out in the room, whispering to the guests at the other tables. All the guests rose from their tables as one and walked into an adjoining dining room while the waiters picked up half-eaten entrees and bottles of wine and deftly resettled everyone away from the ruckus we were causing.

  I’ve come to think that there was something darkly prescient about that night. Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon’s animating ideology. Before catalyzing America’s dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos throughout society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on “truth” influenced Bannon and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes. “It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”