We risk creating a society obsessive about remembering, and we may have overlooked the value of forgetting, moving on, or being unknown. Human growth requires private sanctuaries and free spaces where we can experiment, play, dabble, keep secrets, transgress taboos, break our promises, and contemplate our future selves without consequence to our public lives until we decide to change in public. History shows us that personal and social liberation begins in private. We cannot move on from our childhoods, past relationships, mistakes, old perspectives, old bodies, or former prejudices if we are not in control of our privacy and personal development. We cannot be free to choose if our choices are monitored and filtered for us. We cannot grow and change if we are shackled to who we once were or who we thought we were or how we once presented ourselves. If we exist in an environment that always watches, remembers, and labels us, according to conditions or values outside our control or awareness, then our data selves may shackle us to histories that we prefer to move on from. Privacy is the very essence of our power to decide who and how we want to be. Privacy is not about hiding—privacy is about human growth and agency.
But this is not merely about privacy or consent. This is about who gets to influence our truths and the truths of those around us. This is about the architectures of manipulation we are constructing around our society. And herein lies the lesson of Cambridge Analytica. To understand the harms of social media, we have to first understand what it is. Facebook may call itself a “community” to its users, or a “platform” to regulators, but it is not a service, in the same way a building is not a service. Even if you don’t understand exactly how cyberspace works, it is important to understand that it now surrounds you. Every connected device and computer is part of an interconnected information architecture—and shapes your experience of the world. The most common job titles in most Silicon Valley companies are engineer and architect, not service manager or client relations. But unlike engineering in other sectors, tech companies do not have to perform safety tests to conform to any building codes before releasing their products. Instead, platforms are allowed to adopt dark pattern designs that deliberately mislead users into continual use and giving up more data. Tech engineers intentionally design confounding mazes on their platforms that keep people moving deeper and deeper into these architectures, without any clear exit. And when people keep clicking their way through their maze, these architects delight in the increase in “engagement.”
Social media and Internet platforms are not services; they are architectures and infrastructures. By labeling their architectures as “services,” they are trying to make responsibility lie with the consumer, through their “consent.” But in no other sector do we burden consumers in this way. Airline passengers are not asked to “accept” the engineering of planes, hotel guests are not asked to “accept” the number of exits in the building, and people are not asked to “accept” the purity levels of their drinking water. And as a former club kid, I can tell you that when bars or concerts are over capacity and heaving with ravers, fire inspectors will order those consenting customers to leave a building if the conditions become manifestly unsafe.
Facebook may say: If you don’t like it, don’t use it. But there are no comparable alternatives to the dominant players on the Internet, just as there are no alternatives to electric, telecommunications, or water companies. To reject the use of platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Amazon would be to remove oneself from modern society. How are you going to get a job? How are you going to get information? How are you going to socialize with people? These companies love to talk about consumer choice, when they know that they have done everything in their power to become a necessary part of most people’s lives. Getting users to click “accept” after presenting them with a novella’s worth of dense legalese (almost twelve thousand words in Facebook’s case) is nothing but consent-washing. These platforms are purpose-built to run user consent through a blender. No one opts out of these platforms, because users have no other choice but to accept.
When Facebook banned me, they did not simply deactivate my account; they erased my entire presence on Facebook and Instagram. When my friends tried to look up old messages I had sent, nothing came up: My name, my words—everything—had disappeared. I became a shadow. Banishment is an ancient punishment to rid a society of its criminals, heretics, and political radicals who jeopardized the power of the state or church. In ancient Athens, people could be banished from society for ten years for any reason with no opportunity for appeal. In the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union, enemies of the state would not just disappear; all remnants of their existence—photos, letters, news references—would be erased and cleansed from the annals of official history. Throughout history, the powerful have used social memory and collective forgetting as a powerful weapon to crush dissent and correct their preferred histories to shape the realities of the present. And if we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way, we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and PayPal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expounded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance. We just don’t call them monarchies in public, he said, because “anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”
The philosophical basis of authoritarianism rests in the creation of total certainty within society. The politics of certainty repositions the notion of freedom, where freedoms from replace freedoms to. Strict rules and laws are coercively enforced to govern and shape the behavior, thoughts, and actions of the polity. And the first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.
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THE INTERNET HAS FRUSTRATED these old assumptions about the law and the polity that it governs. The Internet is both everywhere and nowhere—it is physically dependent on servers and cables, but it exists without a single location of primary residence. This means that a single digital act could partially occur in countless physical locations simultaneously, or an action in one place could result in effects in another place. This is because the Internet is a type of hyperobject—like our climate and biosphere, the Internet surrounds us and we live within it. The tech community often call their platforms “digital ecosystems,” with an implicit recognition that their construction is a digital container or realm for at least part of our lives to exist within. We cannot see it or touch it, but we know it exists around us by its effects.
Often I encountered police investigators unfamiliar with data crime using false analogies about finding the “murder weapon,” the “location of the body,” and linear “chains of causation.” But data crimes are crimes that usually don’t happen in one specific place. Data crime can often behave like pollution—it’s everywhere generally, but nowhere specifically. Data is completely fungible and intangible, as it is merely a representation of information. It can be stored simultaneously in distributed servers around the world; where even when it’s in a place, it’s never entirely in that place. Servers based in country A handling data subjects in country B could be accessed by a person in country C and deployed on a platform in country D after receiving instructions from a company in country E with financing from country F. This was the nature of Cambridge Analytica’s complex setup. Even if serious harms were clearly incurred, such as hacking, data theft, menaci
ng threats, or deception, it would be unclear who could be held responsible, and our known systems for assessing culpability were entirely incapable of the job.
We like to imagine our government as the captain of the ship, but when the ocean itself changes, our captains may find themselves unprepared and unable to navigate. In July 2018, Britain’s Electoral Commission found that the Vote Leave campaign had broken the law, illegally coordinating with BeLeave. On March 30, 2019—one year after the Brexit whistleblowing stories broke—the Vote Leave campaign officially dropped its appeal of the EC’s findings and fines, essentially admitting to what it had done. Some have asked: Why should we care so much about a mere £700,000? Let’s be clear on this point: Vote Leave’s scheme was the largest known breach of campaign finance law in British history. But even if it wasn’t, elections, like a 100-meter sprint in the Olympics, are zero-sum games, where the winner takes all. Whoever comes first, even if it’s by just a few votes or milliseconds, wins the whole race: They get to sit in the public office. They get the gold medal. They get to name your Supreme Court justices. They get to take your country out of the European Union.
The only difference, of course, is that if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. But in politics, we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite to our democracy. There are harsher punishments for athletes who cheat in sport than for campaigns that cheat in elections. Though they won by only 3.78 percent, the Brexiteers claimed the entire “will of the people” for themselves––and even when Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percent, he too claimed victory. Despite proven cheating, Vote Leave did not have its Brexit medal taken away. No one was disqualified from running in future campaigns, and Vote Leave’s two leaders, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were both allowed to run for prime minister. Crimes waged against our democracy were not considered by the political class to be “real crime.” Many framed these transgressions as being on par with a parking fine, despite the very real harm we face when our civic institutions can be so easily undermined by criminals and hostile foreign states seeking to wage electoral terrorism on our society. And, of course, the most powerful people in Britain and America took the position that these crimes didn’t even happen—rather, they were a “hoax,” the invention of the bitter opponents they had vanquished. This, in the face of what were once known as “facts” and “reality.”
You’d think that after pulling off a conspiracy to hack a world leader’s private emails and medical records, bribe ministers, blackmail targets, and shower voters with menacing videos of gruesome murders and threats, there would be some kind of legal consequence. But there were no consequences for anyone involved in Cambridge Analytica’s African projects. It was too difficult to establish jurisdictionality—whether or not “enough” of the crime happened in Britain to warrant prosecution in the English courts. Their servers were all over the world, the meetings happened in different countries, the hackers were based in yet another country, and Cambridge Analytica only received the hacked material in London but did not request the hacked material in the U.K. Even though there were several witnesses to what happened, Cambridge Analytica simply got away with it. In fact, one of the managers from the Nigeria project eventually moved on to work in a senior position at the U.K. Cabinet Office on foreign affairs projects, sitting in the highest levels of the British government.
In America there were no consequences for Cambridge Analytica, either. The company knowingly and willfully violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It conducted operations to suppress African American voters. It defrauded Facebook users and menaced them with disgusting content. It exposed hundreds of millions of private records of American citizens to hostile foreign states. And yet nothing happened, because Cambridge Analytica was set up for jurisdictional arbitrage. Tax evasion frequently involves setting up shell companies on tropical islands all around the world in an attempt to launder money through a complex enough chain of countries and companies, each with its own unique rules, that authorities lose track of where the money is. This is possible because money, like data, is a completely fungible asset and can be instantly moved through a global finance system. What Cambridge Analytica did was use complex corporate setups across jurisdictions not only to launder money but to launder something that was becoming just as valuable: your data.
In Britain, there were no consequences for AIQ either. After Sanni and I revealed proof of Vote Leave’s unlawful scheme to overspend through AIQ and use it as a hidden proxy for Cambridge Analytica’s targeting capabilities, it became the elephant in the room for the Brexit debate. Britain had already formally submitted its notice to exit the European Union. The notion that the wafer-thin Brexit result could have been affected by systematic cheating, data breaches, and foreign interference was willfully ignored because the ramifications were unimaginable. If the same events had happened in Kenya or Nigeria, there would have been prompt calls from British observers to hold a new vote.
Other British institutions failed as well. BBC executives, who were briefed by The Guardian on the story and given the entire corpus of evidence weeks in advance of publication, decided to drop the story days before it went public—it would have been too controversial. Instead the BBC interviewed Alexander Nix before the Channel 4 exposé was aired and did not include any comment from the whistleblower. When I later appeared on Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship evening news program, the host was at pains to keep interjecting that Vote Leave’s law-breaking, which involved using unlawful money for billions of targeted Facebook ads, was merely another one of my “allegations.” This was despite the fact that this was already an established finding of the Electoral Commission. Frustrated and confused, I then got into an argument about the meaning of a “fact” and how bizarre it was that even with the published rulings of British legal authorities, the BBC still would not let me say that Vote Leave broke the law or that unlawful activity occurred on Facebook’s watch.
The NCA suddenly dropped its investigation of Russian interference, even after it received evidence of the Russian embassy’s dealings with Leave.EU. Later, the prime minister refused to deny that she had halted the investigation into Brexit. There was no parliamentary inquiry launched into the cheating that occurred during the Brexit referendum, and I ended up spending more time answering questions about Brexit in testimony before the United States Congress than in the British Parliament. Despite the lack of an inquiry in Britain, the Canadian Parliament opened its own inquiry into AIQ’s role in Brexit, to help the U.K. authorities compel answers from AIQ after the firm had successfully avoided its jurisdiction by remaining in Canada.
It turns out cheating is a pretty good strategy to win, as there are very few consequences. The Electoral Commission later conceded that even if the vote was won with the benefit of illegal data or illegal financing, the result still stands. Facebook refused to hand over the full details of what happened on its platform during Brexit or the number or types of voters who were profiled and targeted by illegal campaigns. Mark Zuckerberg defied three requests to testify before the British Parliament, and when fifteen national parliaments, collectively representing almost one billion citizens across six continents, banded together in a joint request to interview Zuckerberg, even over the phone, he still turned them down—twice. It seemed that Zuckerberg’s time was more valuable than that of legislatures representing almost one seventh of the human race. Facebook learned that, despite the wrath of the media storm, there were actually very few consequences for simply ignoring the parliaments of the world—the company learned that it could behave like a sovereign state, immune from their scrutiny. Facebook eventually sent its chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, to the British parliamentary inquiry, but he failed to fully answer forty questions according to a subsequent statement by the commi
ttee. But what was perhaps most revealing about the performance was the lack of contrition on the part of the company. When Schroepfer was asked if Facebook’s first instinct to send journalists legal threats was bullying behavior, the Facebook CTO replied that “my understanding is that this is common practice in the U.K.” After being pressed by the incredulous MPs, Schroepfer acquiesced and finally apologized, saying that he was “sorry that journalists feel we are attempting to prevent the truth coming out.”
Of all the individuals who could have been formally punished in this saga, it was sad for me to see that one of the only people to face a sanction was Darren Grimes, the twenty-two-year old Vote Leave intern. As frustrating as his situation was, the archaic legislation meant that he was personally liable for electoral offenses. The commission levied a £20,000 fine against him personally and referred his case to the police. He subsequently succeeded in an appeal against that finding, although further appeals may yet be brought by the Electoral Commission. The campaign, Vote Leave, was fined £61,000, part of which reflected their refusal to cooperate with the regulator. Vote Leave dropped their appeal and that sanction, at least, remains.
It was incredibly hard to watch what happened to Grimes, who had his life torn up over a scheme that others had orchestrated. We had hoped that he would come forward with Sanni, Gettleson, and me, but Grimes defended the scheme until the very end. He panicked and broke down every time Sanni broached the topic, and did not want to accept that he had been used by the people he trusted. Grimes was set up to become their fall guy, and Vote Leave could not have asked for a better candidate. As much as he defended his old bosses’ actions, Grimes was their captive victim. They transformed him from a talented, liberal, and artistic student into a public shill for their alt-right causes, in exchange for help with legal fees.
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