Wednesday, April 4, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
BookFace and
belt knives
Revelations
that
Cambridge Analytical, a
political consulting firm,
secured the personal infor-
mation of 50 million
Facebook users have rocked
the stock market, embar-
rassed Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg, and seen the
indefinite suspension of
Cambridge CEO Alexander
Nix (see related story, page
22).
Most importantly, this
episode reveals the extent
to which social network-
ing sites and software apps
are using personal informa-
tion to penetrate the minds
of their users in pursuit of
agendas the user may not
even be aware of.
Facebook claims it was
“deceived,” which may
even be partially true,
after Aleksandr Kogan, a
Russian-American scien-
tist working at Cambridge
University used an app
— thisismydigitallife —
wherein Facebook users con-
sented to give not only their
own information, but that of
their friends, while playing
one of Facebook’s familiar
click-bait psychological pro-
file games.
These apps offer users
the thrilling prospect of find-
ing out useful things, such
as what kind of toaster they
would be if they were an
appliance, or which character
in “Game of Thrones” most
matches their personality.
Which is how 270,000
unsuspecting users ended up
becoming 50 million unsus-
pecting users.
That information was
then given, or sold, or
loaned, to Cambridge
Analytical, a company which
first came to life as Strategic
Communications Laboratory
Group, or SCL, fronted by
British ad-man Nigel Oakes,
who first offered politi-
cal consulting during elec-
tions in Indonesia, Thailand,
Kenya, and the UK during
the early 1990s.
Cambridge Analytical,
armed with “psychologi-
cal profiles” compiled of
Facebook users who played
their game, then designed
memes and other politi-
cal ads targeted at Trump
supporters.
Zeynep Tufecki, an
associate professor at
the University of North
C a r o l i n a ’s S c h o o l o f
Information and Library
Science, writes that this
harvesting and storage of
personal data is an “all-
too-natural consequence
of Facebook’s business
model…profiling us and
then selling our attention to
advertisers, political actors,
and others.”
It’s possible you are read-
ing this and feeling quite
comfortable, maybe even
smug, because you are one
of the very few people NOT
on Facebook.
Think again. “Facebook
even creates ‘shadow pro-
files of non-users,’” Tufecki
writes. “That is, even if you
are not on Facebook, the
company may well have
compiled a profile of you,
informed from data provided
by your friends or from other
data. This is an involuntary
dossier from which you can-
not opt out in the United
States.”
Facebook’s purpose isn’t
to create convenient social
connections. Facebook’s
purpose is to make money.
And the way they make
money is by “package(ing)
its members as neat and
coherent sets of data for
advertisers.”
In other words, while you
are giggling at the latest stu-
pid meme, probably put in
front of you by an advertiser,
or a political shill, an unwit-
ting Facebook friend, or a
foreign intelligence agent,
and then share it for a laugh,
what’s really happening is
that someone has turned
your attention into a com-
modity, selling your mind
and personal proclivities on
the open market like digital
cattle in a gigantic feedlot.
Only, in this scenario, the
feeder steer being grain-fed
for slaughter is actually you.
Isn’t that hilarious?
W h a t ’s p a r t i c u l a r l y
unnerving about Cambridge
Analytica, and their prede-
cessors, is that they have
openly claimed they are the
“first ever private-sector
provider of psychological
operations,” specializing in
“psychological warfare, pub-
lic diplomacy, and influence
operations.”
Importantly, their aim
isn’t just to influence your
opinion, but to use the data
they have acquired — by
deception or otherwise — to
about what we are, and what
we are becoming. But as
our technologies creep ever
deeper into the most intimate
parts of our thinking, often
guided by unseen hands,
don’t we owe our descen-
dants the gift of resistance?
Not rejection, mind you
— we are not Luddites sabo-
taging weaving frames —
but well-considered resis-
tance, so that we might bet-
ter manage the unknowable
consequences?
“Automation severs ends
from means,” Carr writes.
“It makes getting what we
want easier, but it distances
us from the work of know-
ing. As we transform our-
selves into creatures of the
screen, we face the…exis-
tential question: Does our
essence still lie in what we
know, or are we now content
to be defined by what we
want?”
In “The Course of
Empire” the historian
Bernard DeVoto wrote:
“The first belt-knife given
by a European to an Indian
was a portent as great as
the cloud that mushroomed
over Hiroshima…Instantly
the man of 6,000 B.C. was
bound fast to a way of life
that had developed seven
and a half millennia beyond
his own. He began to live
better and he began to die.”
Which is a valuable
thought about how we view
technology, where it might
be taking us, and just how
eager we should be to blindly
embrace it.
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