The Guardian published an exposé about how Cambridge Analytica allegedly mastered the use of social media data to give the Brexit and Trump campaigns a crucial edge in 2016. The UK news outlet released an extensive story about Christopher Wylie, the Canadian genius behind the Cambridge Analytica data firm that was reportedly the secret weapon…
Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that. Her phone is scanning her…
There’s a new automated propaganda machine driving global politics. How it works and what it will mean for the future of democracy. “This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them…
We’ve been there before, in the crash of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when we believed that downloading pop music and porn would drive the economy of the future. We’ve done it again: We made another tech bubble on the premise that Americans would write the apps and Asians would make the hardware, and the…
Mainstream media have obsessed over Russia’s alleged use of Facebook to swing the 2016 US election. In reality, it was actually a shady British data-mining firm that was running pro-Trump Facebook propaganda campaigns. Irony doesn’t feel like strong enough a word. Which is worse: Russia allegedly buying a few hundred Facebook ads, with the goal…
Remember the Marlboro Man? He was a sexy vision of the American west, created by a cigarette corporation to sell a fatal product. People knew this and used that product anyway, at great detriment to themselves and those around them who quietly inhaled toxic secondhand smoke, day into long night. An agreement between states and…
