it was hard to ignore: a hawkish lightning rod who, along with a host of other neocons, had recently been revealed to be the brains and cash behind a shadowy organization called Groundswell, the intention of which, among other things, was to undermine the Obama presidency and hype the Hillary Clinton Benghazi controversy,2 the latter issue with which I was personally familiar. I had worked in Libya and had known Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who died there due in part to the poor decision making of the U.S. State Department, I thought.
I sat sipping my tea and took careful note of Nix’s list of clients. At a glance, they may have sounded like many other Republicans, but the politics of each was so profoundly the opposite of my own beliefs that they formed a veritable rogues’ gallery of nemeses to most of my heroes, such as Obama and Hillary. The people Nix named were, to my mind, political pariahs—or even better, piranhas, fish in whose pond I could never have imagined myself taking a safe swim.
Never mind that the special interest groups Nix was working for, with causes ranging from gun rights to pro-life advocacy, were anathema to me. For all my life, I had supported causes that leaned distinctly to the left.
Nix was thrilled with himself, with his company, and with the people and groups he’d managed to lasso. You could see it in his eyes. He was terribly busy, he said, so busy and so hopeful for the future that the SCL Group had had to spin off an entirely new company just to manage the work in the United States alone.
That new company was called Cambridge Analytica.
It had been in business for just under a year, but the world had best pay attention to it, Nix said. Cambridge Analytica was about to cause a revolution.
The revolution Nix had in mind had to do with Big Data and analytics.
In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said. Cambridge Analytica had amassed an arsenal of data on the American public of unprecedented size and scope, the largest, as far as he knew, anyone had ever assembled. The company’s monster databases held between two thousand and five thousand individual data points (pieces of personal information) on every individual in the United States over the age of eighteen. That amounted to some 240 million people.
Nix paused and looked at Chester’s friends and at me, as if to let the number sink in.
But merely having Big Data wasn’t the solution, he said. Knowing what to do with it was the key. That involved more scientific and precise ways of putting people into categories: “Democrat,” “environmentalist,” “optimist,” “activist,” and the like. And for years, the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, had been identifying and sorting people using the most sophisticated method in behavioral psychology, which gave it the capability of turning what was otherwise just a mountain of information about the American populace into a gold mine.
Nix told us about his in-house army of data scientists and psychologists who had learned precisely how to know whom they wanted to message, what messaging to send them, and exactly where to reach them. He had hired the most brilliant data scientists in the world, people who could laser in on individuals wherever they were to be found (on their cell phones, computers, tablets, on television) and through any kind of medium you could imagine (from audio to social media), using “microtargeting.” Cambridge Analytica could isolate individuals and literally cause them to think, vote, and act differently from how they had before. It spent its clients’ money on communications that really worked, with measurable results, Nix said.
That, he said, is how Cambridge Analytica was going to win elections in America.
While Nix spoke, I glanced over at Chester, hoping to make eye contact in order to figure out what opinion he might have formed of Nix, but I wasn’t able to catch his attention. As for Chester’s friends, I could see from the looks on their faces that they were duly wowed as Nix went on about his American company.
Cambridge Analytica was filling an important niche in the market. It had been formed to meet pent-up, unmet demand. The Obama Democrats had dominated the digital communications space since 2007. The Republicans lagged sorely behind in technology innovation. After their crushing defeat in 2012, Cambridge Analytica had come along to level the playing field in a representative democracy by giving the Republicans the technology they lacked.
As for what Nix could do for Chester’s friends, whose country didn’t have Big Data, due to lack of internet penetration, SCL could get that started for them, and it could use social media to get their message out. Meanwhile, it could also do more traditional campaigning, everything from writing policy platforms and political manifestos to canvassing door-to-door to analyzing target audiences.
The men complimented Nix. I was well enough acquainted with the two by now, though, to see how his pitch had overwhelmed them. I knew their country hadn’t the infrastructure to carry out what Nix was planning to do in America, and his strategy didn’t sound particularly affordable, even to two men with reasonably deep pockets.
For my part, I was shocked at what Nix had shared—stunned, in fact. I’d never heard anything like it before. He’d described nothing less than using people’s personal information to influence them and, hence, to change economies and political systems around the world. He’d made it sound easy to sway voters to make irreversible decisions not against their will but, at the very least, against their usual judgment, and to change their habitual behavior.
At the same time, I admitted, if only to myself, that I was gobsmacked by his company’s capabilities. Since my first days in political campaigning, I had developed a special interest in the subject of Big Data analytics. I wasn’t a developer or a data scientist, but like other Millennials, I had been an early adopter of all sorts of technology and had lived a digital life from my earliest years. I was predisposed to see data as an integral part of my world, a given, at its worst benign and utilitarian, and at its best possibly transformative.
I myself had used data, even rudimentarily in elections. Aside from being an unpaid intern on Obama’s New Media team, I had volunteered for Howard Dean’s primary race four years earlier, and then both John Kerry’s presidential campaign, as well for both the DNC itself and Obama’s senatorial run. Even basic use of data to write emails to undecided voters on what they cared about was “revolutionary” at the time. Howard Dean’s campaign broke all existing fund-raising records by reaching people online for the first time.
My interest in data was coupled with my firsthand knowledge of revolutions. A lifelong bookworm, I’d been a student forever but had always engaged in the wider world. In fact, I had always felt that it was imperative for academics to find ways to spin the threads of the high-minded ideas they came up with in the ivory tower into cloth that was of real use to others.
Even though it involved a peaceful transfer of power, you could say that the Obama election was my first experience of a revolution. I had been a part of the spirited celebration in Chicago on the night Obama won his first presidential election, and that street party of millions felt like a political coup.
I’d also had the privilege, and had sometimes experienced the danger, of being on the ground in countries where revolutions were happening silently, had just broken out, or were about to. As an undergraduate, I studied for a year in Hong Kong, where I volunteered with activists shuttling refugees from North Korea via an underground railroad through China and out to safety. Immediately upon graduating from college, I spent time in parts of South Africa, where I worked on projects with former guerrilla strategists who’d helped overthrow apartheid. And in the aftermath of the Arab spring, I worked in post-Gaddafi Libya, and have continued to be interested and involved in independent diplomacy for that country for many years. I guess you could say I had the uncanny habit of putting myself in the middle of places during their most
