DISTURBING TRENDS
Meet the fashion trend forecaster turned psychological warfare expert who blew the whistle on the misuse of Facebook data to spread disinformation in democracies. By Xerxes Cook.
Christopher Wylie is the “gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool’”, as he put it to the Guardian earlier this year when he blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica’s disinformation operations during the Brexit and Trump votes. And we can add fashion student to the unlikely mix of identity labels, as Wylie, who had previously worked on campaigns for Barack Obama and Britain’s Liberal Democrats party, was studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting while working for Cambridge Analytica. It was during this time Wylie began developing an algorithm to quantify culture, which was later used to influence the political opinions of millions of people whose data he harvested from Facebook. In the aftermath of Wylie’s revelations, Cambridge Analytica announced in May that it was shutting down and declaring bankruptcy.
I met Wylie in London in the week in which Mark Zuckerberg testified to US Congress about the data breach and its influence on American democracy, and ahead of Wylie’s own testimony to a select committee of British Parliament in late March, to hear his thoughts on the similarities between politics and fashion, fake news, and whether the era of moving fast and breaking things is over.
Xerxes Cook: “What are some of the similarities between politics and fashion?”
Christopher Wylie:
“Politics is just as cyclical as fashion, and so much of politics is about the aesthetic you’re presenting, and the narrative you’re presenting. You’ll have these major events in fashion – fashion week, shows, different seasons – and you’ll have the same thing in politics. Trends are just as important in politics as they are in fashion, just that rather than an aesthetic trend, it might be an ideological, behavioural or cultural trend. In politics, you need to keep track of all kinds of trends, because you need to know what the adoption of that will be six months down the road. Knowing that is going to help you win an election.”
XC: “And in your eyes, how do they differ?” CW:
“Amazingly, with fashion, not only is it visually and aesthetically really enriching, computationally and mathematically it’s really hard. How do you define bold? You could come up with theories that certain colours are bold, but are they really? If I go to a black-tie dinner but I’m decked out in camo, I’m actually wearing quite muted colours. Something that is intuitive for a human is usually the hardest thing to teach a computer.”
XC: “How did you get from teaching computers to how to understand fashion to inventing the ‘psychological warfare mindfuck tool’ that played such a decisive role in swinging the Brexit and Trump votes?”
CW:
“It’s about profiling. Profiling is important from a military perspective, because it’s a way to create early warning flags about somebody who is more susceptible to radicalisation. The premise of this research was about understanding how our psychology influences our behaviour or our adoption of things, and combining it into this idea of using data to capture a person’s identity. Because if we know who this person is, we can design personalised interventions that will change their behaviour in a way that is bespoke to that person.”
XC: “What was Steve Bannon’s role in this?” CW:
“Steve Bannon is a really militant guy; he uses the term ‘culture war’ quite pointedly. He literally means: ‘I want to fight a war, in our culture.’ For him it just clicked: if he’s going to fight a war, he needs an arsenal of weapons. What are the weapons for culture? It’s information. It just so happened that Steve Bannon was setting up Breitbart UK, so he was going back and forth to London, and Alexander Nix [the founder of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group] then introduces me to Steve Bannon. He tells me about this idea of if you want to change politics, you have to change culture. I then said that if you want to change something you first have to know what it is. What I told Steve Bannon was that the units of culture are people: this is why we use a lot of the same words to describe cultures as we do people, as ultimately culture is made up of people.”
XC: “From a data point of view, the units are people, and people are comprised of their data trail and online likes?”
CW:
“Exactly. If the units of culture are people, and people can be quantified by their social data, then we can quantify culture using the internet, right? If we’ve then quantified culture, then we can change it. What he was talking about was very similar to what I was researching, when I would take off my information-warfare hat and put on my fashion hat. He wanted to create a trend. And a trend is a movement in a culture; what we call an information cascade – and you can measure that. Once you measure it, you can then identify the exact people who if they move slightly this way, you’ve then changed the culture.”
XC: “Some of these ‘personalised interventions’ included fake news. Do you think stories such as Hillary Clinton running a paedophile ring and so on were spread by Cambridge Analytica using the algorithm you had made?”
CW:
“SCL Group specialises in rumour campaigns, and, ultimately, disinformation. Cambridge Analytica will set up all kinds of entities and companies which then disappear, so no-one can trace what they actually do. The way it works is that you set up blogs and news sites – things that don’t look like campaign material – and you find people who would be most amenable to this particular conspiracy theory, unfact or ‘alternative fact’. You let them start going down the rabbithole of clicking things. The idea is that you start showing them the same material from all these different kinds of sources, so they feel like they see it everywhere, but they don’t see it on the news. They then question why the ‘establishment’ doesn’t want them to know something.”
XC: “how long did you spend at cambridge analytica?”
CW:
“A year-and-a-half. I left at the end of 2014. Some of the clients and candidates we started meeting were batshit insane. The research we were doing still maintained this ethos of us working in an informational war context, but actually now this was going to be applied in a democracy – targeting and exploiting essentially mental vulnerabilities in certain types of people, in the context of making them vote in a particular way. We’re all sitting there thinking: ‘What the fuck are we doing?’”
“YOU FIND PEOPLE WHO WOULD BE MOST AMENABLE TO THIS PARTICULAR CONSPIRACY THEORY AND LET THEM START GOING DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE OF CLICKING THINGS”
XC: “What did you do after you jumped ship?”
CW:
“It’s funny, because first Alexander [Nix] tried to offer me more money, and I said: ‘It’s literally not about money.’ He came back and said: ‘You like fashion, what if we find you something in fashion and you can keep doing it, and we can switch back and forth.’ I was like no, your offer is fashion and fascism. The last project they were planning out was in Nigeria. They were working with hackers, hacking the now President of Nigeria’s medical records for kompromat [compromising material]. They created these videos of people being burned alive in order to intimidate voters. I’m like, this is not conducive to a healthy democracy. Why the fuck would I do that? Why would I create content so that people are too scared to vote? So some billionaire can get his candidate in and make money from exploiting this country? That’s fucked-up. So I leave. I then start doing some work with the Centre for Fashion Enterprise, which helps promising young designers such as Craig Green, who I’m wearing now. I just needed a break. This was heavy, heavy, heavy, and I needed something light.”
XC: “In your testimony to MPs at the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture Media and Sport
Committee hearings, you said you disclosed Cambridge Analytica’s activities during the Brexit and Trump campaigns because you fundamentally disagree with the use of military psychological operations on civilians. Do you believe these disinformation techniques swung both the Brexit and Trump votes?”
CW:
“Yes. It was very uncomfortable sitting there thinking I have possibly played a role in this. There’s a difference between a really sketchy company and a really sketchy company that fundamentally changes geopolitics. It was the election of Donald Trump and listening to narratives that I remember from Cambridge Analytica: the wall, ‘drain the swamp’, all the NSA [National Security Agency] and Deep State paranoia … these were all research dreams that Steve Bannon set up. I don’t have the words to describe it. I clearly fucked up big time, left this company, which I helped set up, to its own devices, and you’ve now got this
– Donald Trump as President.”
XC: “Whistleblowers are the counter- cultural heroes of today. Yet there seems some ambivalence in your case, with the feeling we can’t consider you a true hero because you chose to work with these people in the first place, and because the consequences of you doing so are unbelievably catastrophic.”
CW:
“That’s fair. I would agree with that. I don’t shy away from the fact that I did some fucked-up shit. The thing I would say, though, is that if you look at Edward Snowden, he worked for the NSA. Chelsea Manning worked for the US military. When you actually look at most whistleblowers who release information to the public about what they’re working on, it requires them to be complicit in the first place: that’s how they know about it. There’s no such thing as a perfect whistleblower. So, absolutely, they are fair criticisms. I accept those criticisms. That’s in part why I’ve come forward. But you see the impact: Facebook has known about this since 2016, yet it was only until a massive amount of media pressure that you then get Mark Zuckerberg testifying at Congress for two days straight.”
XC: “It seems as if your legacy as a whistleblower, not your legacy as the research director of Cambridge Analytica, is to bring about the first era of real regulation to the internet.”
CW:
“I think the biggest impact of blowing the whistle is the mindset. Legislators are now starting to realise the digital space is integral to the physical space. Data is like electricity now. It’s unreasonable to say if you don’t want to be electrocuted, don’t use electricity. But it’s not unreasonable to demand safe building codes so your wiring is appropriate. You can work in this space, but don’t create an open platform that foreign actors can use to exploit and interfere with our democracy.”
XC: “How about data in fashion? How should companies go about using their market research and inventory data?”
CW:
“I think there’s a way of applying data science and marketing tech to actually catalyse creativity. If you have data on customers and you do a proper job at segmenting the market, you can find a market for anything. You might have a very particular aesthetic, and there might only be a market of 10,000 people out of the whole world, but that’s where an algorithm will actually help you: it’ll help you find the people who want to buy your thing. One of the things that I do find interesting right now is what people might call irony, like in Vetements, Balenciaga … ”
XC: “… this very knowing, self-referential meta-trend.” CW:
“Like with Virgil Abloh, where it’s literally, this is a ‘black dress’, or Vetements with their logos. Taking the piss. It’s where I’ll look to fashion to better understand how people feel more generally. If you have a lot of designers who are starting to make stuff that is ironic – or stupid, like [Vetements’s] €200 DHL T-shirt – and people are buying it, it’s because you have a total collapse of trust in institutions, including fashion institutions. That says a lot about how we see the world right now. This is where fashion, and culture in general, is so important. Right now, there are no progressive Steve Bannons out there. There’s a reason why he’s obsessed with culture and fighting a culture war: there’s nobody fighting back. The fashion industry could do more to make people care about stuff. It has a lot more power than I think it realises. You never see the fashion industry going around playing hard politics, but it could, just like every other industry does.”
“THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REALLY SKETCHY COMPANY AND A REALLY SKETCHY COMPANY THAT FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGES GEOPOLITICS”