Modern Wisdom - #089 - Professor David Carroll - Netflix's The Great Hack: Behind The Screens

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

David Carroll is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design. The Great Hack is one of my favourite documentaries of 2019 and today we get a fascinating and unique insight into the story behind Cambridge Analytica from one of the key figures in this controversy. Extra Stuff: Follow Professor Carroll on Twitter - https://twitter.com/profcarroll   Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom podcast. My guest today is Professor David Carroll He is an associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design, but he is slightly better known right now for being the man who took on Cambridge Analytica. If you've seen the great hack on Netflix You will know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, I highly recommend that you go and watch it. It's definitely one of my favourite documentaries of 2019. Today, we are going behind the screens. We're going to find out a lot of information that was cut from the original documentary. We're going to hear what David's life is like now that this is totally blown up. His predictions for Facebook moving forward, what's happening

with Cambridge Analytica, if he's actually got his data yet and an awful lot more. Consider this the director's cut extra DVD, super special edition. Don't know of a Skype. Please welcome, Professor David Carroll. At PS, share this episode with some friends. A lot of people don't actually know the dangers to do with data privacy right now. And as David says, data rights are akin to human rights. Also, feel free to share it on Facebook as a big middle finger to Mark Zuckerberg. I'm joined by Professor David Carroll. Professor, welcome to the show. It's great to be on here, thanks for having me. What is your life like at the moment? It's pretty overwhelming.

The response to the film is mind-blowing. Mostly because I get so many messages per minute from people around the world saying that their mind is blown. So this sort of mutual mind-blowing is happening right now and it's overwhelming. I never expected it to go this big. So, I mean, you were in the press during the first iteration, like the real time unveiling of this particular storyline. And now there's this sort of recap of all of that that's got Netflix's power behind it. So,, it's, it doesn't surprise

me that you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by that. The last couple of days, it's only been out for upon when we're recording now, like two days, I think 24th it came out on Netflix. And usually when people suggest something to me and different spheres of awareness, say the same thing, I'm not right, I need to, I need to take notice of this. And in the space of two days, I'd like five people, like, man, man, if you watch that, the great hack on Netflix, it's sick. You gotta go watch it. I'm like, okay, cool, fair enough.

So yes, for the people who do not know why your life is chaos at the moment and what's being going on, could you give us a rundown of what we're talking about? Sure. So a weird company has been working in elections around the world for a long time and allegedly worked on the Brexit campaign and the Trump presidential campaigns as well as others. And the movie looks at the stories of three people who were involved in learning more and unraveling the scandal behind that. So it follows Carol Cadwaladur, who was the primary journalist for the observer in the Guardian, who really uncovered the story for the press and the world. It covers Brittany Kaiser, who was really high up in the company and was with the company up until the very end.

And she tries to come out and spill the information that everybody is seeking. And then myself who learned that I could try to get my data from the company using British law and it follows my legal struggle Still to this day trying to get my data back Which under British law is required and so it's been fascinating to see how the British government being Parliament and the Information Commissioner, have been the strongest force in the world to hold the company accountable, even more accountable

than the United States government and the United States regulators. So the movie is a story about how journalism and citizens and the law can hack back against these technological forces. For people who are hoping for a movie that explains and gives you the proof of whether or not the stuff worked, those people will be disappointed. This is not a movie about whether it worked. This is a movie about whether we can live in a democracy where this stuff is going on. Yeah, the big question that hangs over the top of all of it is did they do it, right? Like if you watch the movie at the end of it, there's still the natural slipperiness of large corporations like this and the specific evasive tactics that get used in hearings

and stuff like that. There's no straight answer. There isn't a, yes, we did it, no, we didn't. And for every accusation, so there's an accusation they worked with leave.eu. This is Cambridge analytic, it's a company that we're talking about. There's an accusation they worked with leave.eu. And there's some pretty damning evidence like emails going back and forwards, Brittany, who was one of the head execs there, sitting on the announcement for the leave.eu thing, etc, etc. And yet, when asked Andrew Nix, who is the head guy at Cambridge Analytica, says, no, we didn't do it. Was it Andrew Nix? Alexander. Alexander Nix, sorry. Yes. And he says, no, we didn't. So even that that is like no straight answers does it feel a little bit like trying to play whack him all with this. Well it's really interesting it's been a story about finding the truth and realizing the fragility of truth in this age.

and the reality that this story has intrinsic ambiguity because we really can't know whether any of this was the defining factor in any of these elections. There's no control group in elections. You cannot determine whether or not this affected that. It's all of the above. When people think about why did people vote for Brexit and why did people vote for Trump? There's no single reason.

There is a perfect storm of reasons. And so, this is one of the reasons. But what it really shows us is who is determining truth now. And I really saw truth out of the only place I knew that it could be reliable in this age. And that is in the courts. Legal truth is now the only pure truth because the machine, the media machine is a truth distortion device and then social media is a truth distortion device. So when we had people lying to reporters and we have people even lying to

lawmakers, the best way then to find the truth would be in the courts and in forensic documents. And basically what is on the servers? And so luckily the UK Information Commissioner sees the servers under criminal warrant an important fact that the film depicts an important fact that many people do not realize and has been conducting an incredible forensic investigation on the servers. And so they say in the autumn, there will be a public report on what is on those servers. And to me, that will be the most reliable, most definitive set of evidence to answer the question. Who was Cambridge Analytica?

What did they have? How did they use it? And could it have had an effect? We shouldn't even try to make those assessments until we have hard forensic evidence of what they had. If it turns out that their data was nothing special, let's look at the data and decide that. If it turns out that they really did have this extraordinary database, let's see what was

in there and see what could happen. At the minimum, we know what's out there so that we can think about the future. The next elections that are coming up right away. This technology is only going to expand in its capabilities. And to be honest, the popularity of this movie will inspire more bad guys to do more bad things. So it shows us that we need to inoculate ourselves against this, and we need to make sure that our governments are ready to try and withstand these kinds of attempts to subvert and industrialize democracy itself. Is that the scene where the police or the law enforcement go into the office building and then pull the blinds down and you can kind of see through.

Yeah, so that's for anyone who's watching that was I wondered what the come up and so that was right because Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy when into administration. Quite early in the proceedings of when they realized that there was some shit incoming for one of a better term and I wondered how much of that stuff were they able to get rid of sure everyone would be thinking well What did they wipe like if the if law enforcement find X then what didn't they find what had already perhaps managed to be Binned etc etc So could you just give the listeners a background to Cambridge Analytica, sort of where they'd been before the two main situations that we come up against, which is Brexit and Trump's campaign in 2016?

Sure. So the parent company or the main company, which is called SCL, it stands for, used to stand for strategic communications laboratories. It's actually a company that's, I think about 20 years old, it's been around for a while actually. And when you dig into the history of the company, they've been working in what they call election management and also defense contracting for quite some time now. And ultimately, when I first got into this story, it actually was the military work that disturbed me and troubled me the most.

This idea that a defense contractor was now getting into the business of elections and the boundary between the military industrial complex and free and fair elections had been breached by the fact that the company started a elections division called Cambridge Analytica, especially to get involved in elections in the United States and to provide services to the Republican Party. And in many ways, in response to the success of the Barack Obama campaign, the sort of arms race that political parties are engaged in, and in one up in each other, to win elections using the latest technologies.

So I think the film does a good job of acknowledging that reality and that with each successive election, we get more and more insane. So what are we going to do to slow down the pace of escalation? There's sort of a mutually assured destruction undertone to this, that if we continue to allow military contractors to internationalize

and industrialize and commercialize it to the highest bidder and that there really are British aristocrats thinking they can like reconstruct the British Empire through companies like this. It's a kind of new colonialism. As an American, one of the first sort of alarming things that I felt when I discovered what this really was and found some forensic proof that confirmed my worst fears is I really didn't have the feeling of like why is a British

company interfering in my election? It wasn't about the Russians, it was about the British. Any 250 years later, it's still the British. So it's like there shouldn't be any election of interference. Elections should be domestic affairs. And I think one of the most alarming things about this company and this movie is that fundamental idea that Americans are working on British politics and Brits are working on American politics. We should just be working on our own politics. And that's it. Yeah. There was some pretty harrowing examples of the stuff that SCL in their military form had managed to achieve prior to this, right?

So they'd done some stuff in Trinidad and Tobago where they'd come up with a campaign which essentially was targeted at young voters, but they knew that encouraging young voters not to vote was going to asymmetrically affect a particular demographic. That demographic was the one that they didn't want to vote and it was the Indian and is it African on the other side? Yes, it's in the film points out that every country and every electorate has a unique kind of cultural political condition. And in Trinidad and Tobago, you have this sort of racial and ethnic divide between the people

who migrated from India and the people who were brought there by the slave trade, so the Afro-Caribians. And then those divisions that are built into society can be exploited and fermented to manipulate democracies. And the film does a chilling job of showing how the sort of military mindset of going into population and analyzing it for its weaknesses can be used against it.

It doesn't necessarily even need big data to do so. And I think the film does a good job of showing how, yeah, this is a company that's been around for a while and has been developing these tactics. And then what has sort of escalated it is that they have adopted big data analytics to further weaponize these tactics above what they already were. So I think that is what is alarming.

Now, it's not in the movie, but there are research and reports that somehow SCL got its hands on the data from the Trinidadian ISP. And so did you some data harvesting to try to develop models of the electorate? And so what's interesting too is this movie just sort of gives you enough to understand and become alarmed. But there's so many threads that the viewer could take from the movie and then do their own investigations and dive deeper and find that the movie is just scratching the surface in a lot of ways.

Yeah, it is the hub in the center of a spoke of rabbit holes that you can tumble down on the internet, which is the reason why I only got about five hours of sleep last night after I finished watching it, so thanks for that, David. So yeah, coming back to the SCL thing, which I think is important for people that are listening, even the ones that have watched the documentary to kind of frame what we're talking about here, the fact that they were able to enact social change without big data. So big data was allowing them to target more effectively, but their understanding of behavioral economics and behavior change generally allowed them to distribute a message

a social campaign across all of Trinidad and Tobago, and downstream from that, not even like the first or second order effect, like the fifth six-thorder effect was the one that they wanted, and it was going to discriminate. And it caused enough of a swing in voter turnout to affect the election in the direction that allegedly their particular employer or the person at commission that work wanted. And then they've pushed this forward and then created the

not, well, I don't want to say non-militarized version, but like the commercial aspect of that, which is what became Cambridge Analytica. And you've got this really sort of shady bond type villain guy, Alexander Nick, who's the guy that's behind it all, it would appear. And the whole company, when you start to learn about Cambridge analytic or in particularly about Alexander himself, just immediately makes me think about a Dan Brown novel. You know, one of the evil geniuses from a Dan Brown novel

that's in that sort of place. And it's really, it's very harrowing, like as you're watching it, incredibly harrowing. Yeah, and there are characters in the company which are who are not in the film or are sort of secondary characters. So, you know, Alexander Nick's seems to be the real salesman behind the operation, but there are other figures

in the company that are not in the movie. A key character who's not mentioned once is a person named Nigel Oaks. And he is reported to be more of the brains behind the operation, the expert in behavioral dynamics. He calls it, which is what you were describing, like economic psychology, behavior like economics. And it really comes from the advertising world.

He used to be at Sachi and Sachi and really did pursue a path of taking the principles of how advertising and marketing works and applying those to political warfare and has done work for governments in sort of winning hearts and minds, especially after 9-11. So after September 11, the focus of, especially the US military, but all many allies sort of started to work on how you could counter violent extremism

without escalating more violence and so using these kinds of techniques were deployed and Nigel Oaks is really the hidden figure behind that work and he's still in operation the hidden figure behind that work. And he's still in operation. There is one company that did not go but bankrupt or insolvent. It's called SCL Insights Limited and it's the last surviving SCL company.

And according to my lawsuit, I've discovered that he acquired the assets of SCL group and moved them into SCL insights. And so that is a continuing concern. And I also was able to determine that just days before the scandal exploded last spring, so sort of the weekend of March 16, 17, 18, when the whole thing exploded, that week,

SCL group, led by Nigel Oaks, had given a presentation to the State Department in the United States about countering violent extremism with their techniques. And that was from a contract that SCL group earned during the Trump transition. And there's a public documents that show that Mike Flynn who it was a character in the Mueller investigation and who was caught and aligned to the FBI and was fired from the Obama campaign

and fired from the truck drum campaign. And he had a pretty previously undisclosed consulting gig with SCL group. And the timeline overlaps in a stunning way where he had a consulting gig with SCL in November and December of 2016 during the transition. And then there are also public documents revealed where the company was given its contract to the State Department.

And then right before the whole thing explodes, we see that they were actually delivering their work on countering violent extremism. And one of the interesting things when you sort of become well-known for this stuff is anonymous people start sending you things. So I was sent the presentation deck that Nigel Oaks presented to the State Department that day. And it was a fascinating look into what SCL's work for governments looks like,

and how the same techniques, as they would claim, be used for good. And arguably, yes, like if you can convince young Muslims to not join ISIS, that is a good thing. No one can dispute that is what we want. So an interesting, like sort of the data point that I found interesting from that presentation was SCL's methodology had shown that the primary motivator

for young men in the Islamic world is actually not religious ideology. It is economics that most young, disaffected men join these kinds of terror groups because of the lack of economic opportunity. There's more opportunity to get paid if you become a terrorist, unfortunately, in many of these failed societies. And then the tactics that they're recommending are related to this observation. Where did they get that observation from? Do you know how they got that? That's really there on the ground survey research. They're old-fashioned kind of market re-researchs. So not really the big data analytics. What I were talking about before, the sort of good old-fashioned on-the-ground panel research

interviews, they send out like crews to do interviews, they do surveys, they do individual interviews, sort of good old-fashioned qualitative research. And that actually initially informs some of their tactics and methods, and then that tends to be sort of further augmented by big data analytics to sort of further validate the initial assumptions that might be developed in a qualitative sense. But just to me, it was so disturbing and so fascinating that essentially the same company

that was telling the State Department that the reason there is ISIS is because of the failures of capitalism. And that same company was telling the president that the way that he could win the election was by fomenting the divisions in American society and fomenting Islamophobia and fomenting a fear of the other in order to win. It was so chilling to realize that the same company was advising both things.

Yeah. And it's astonishing to comprehend that. Yeah, it really is. I think one thing that comes to mind is, as technology progresses, the same way as a wheel could have been made to make a cart which allows someone a farmer in a field to pull their hay around more easily. That same wheel can also be fitted to the bottom of a tank to make a war machine. As technology begins to develop and improve and is easier for people to get hold of, these situations, the line between good and evil actually becomes more magnified and the implications

become greater. And that's why stuff like this I think is so chilling that people can see. Also another thing is that it's at the mercy of whims of humans, right? Like these Cambridge Analytica or SEL or whatever could in some different iteration of the universe have been totally righteous and super virtuous and been like, right, we're going to help humanitarian causes and we're going to have an act change so that people donate the right amount or so that people improve their recycling so that people, you know, companies understand that climate changes if they et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have this power and the direction in which they choose to swing it is totally

down to them until they're litigated into a box. And once it's out of a different box, once it's been opened, that door's been opened and this technology exists, it's not going back in. Like it's not going anywhere. So one of the first things I think that a lot of people will be thinking, one of the biggest questions I've had so far, which I want to ask yourself, is what do we do about companies that hold this sort of power? You have them across nation states, you have them outside of the jurisdiction of one particular government. What have you got any idea about how we begin to tackle this problem?

Yes, I definitely would agree that you know that's people say the genie's out of the bottle. We can't go back to the innocent world that we thought we had It's true and like I said before Some critics of this movie could say that you've done a terrific advertising campaign for these kinds of bad actors. You've glorified them in their mahagic abilities. But I have felt that it was worth creating the awareness of what is underneath these structures. And it was worth being able to tell the story of how individual action can interface with government accountability.

And so it's a real stress test for our institutions, which are being tested to the limit in terms of can they, as it said in the movie, as the final report from parliament suggests that the RR, our institutions and regulations fit for purpose. They were designed to do something, and this whole scandal is the ultimate stress test of all these institutions across different countries. We have had a transnational investigation that is involved at times the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The film to keep it simple has actually not included some very important strands of the scandal. So there's a whole able to tell us about some of those? Sure, sure. So there's a whole part of the scandal that involves a Canadian

company called Aggregate IQ, which the film does not mention when you get deep into the rabbit hole, you realize it's a huge part of the story. It's where Chris Wiley came from. And aggregate IQ is central to a lot of the scandal related to Brexit and the illegal coordination and illegal spending part of the Brexit scandal. And that side of the story is much, interestingly, much more connected to Boris J. Johnson's sort of wing of the conservative side, whereas the great hack focus is more on the Aaron Banks

Nigel Farage side of the British political establishment. And so that whole part of the scandal got cut off and chunked off because it would get a complicated story even more unwieldy. But interestingly, I think the BBC HBO fictionalization of Brexit that started Benedict Cumberbatch, that actually is dramatizing that side of the scandal. So I actually think the filmmakers felt justified in like leaving that whole thing aside because it has been dramatized already. There's no need to read to do that. But for viewers trying to put the pieces together, if you've seen the Brexit movie, that's the side of the story that the Great Hack didn't bother touching.

Instead it focused on the more ferozge and trump and banan side of the scandal. So that back to the question of like, what can we do about it or what's possible? Clearly, the need for international cooperation has been demonstrated that lawmakers have to collaborate as allies to hold bad actors and rogue operations accountable, as well as legitimate, massive multinational corporations like Facebook and Google, that it's both a responsibility of sort of international cooperation, because no one government or state

can handle it by themselves. That indeed, it took the UK Digital Media Culture and Sport Committee to take a really aggressive stance on getting to the answers. And those lawmakers did not take a deferential stance to anyone, not SCL Cambridge Analytica, not Facebook. They were aggressive because they knew they had to be. Whereas by comparison, U.S. lawmakers in Congress and Senate exhibited tremendous deference to Facebook

because it is a domestic company. There was a fear of hurting an American business. When you go back and listen to those testimonies, a lot of times the lawmakers would, especially on the Republican side, but even on the Democratic side, would just start out with, Facebook is the, an American is an amazing business. It's the greatest part of an American- It's a pump-combin- They do the same thing, isn't it? Yeah. America is an amazing business. It's the greatest part of it. It's a compliment, a big issue. Yes, yes. They start out flattering him and then maybe sort of sneak a good question

or a critique in. Whereas the UK lawmakers just were aggressive. So say now and say that they don't give a fuck. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that firm stand. And so to me, it shows that, and then, of course, there was also this grand committee that was formed, which include 11 parliaments from around the world. And Zuckerberg refused to appear before any of them. So there was defiance by characters like Alexander Nicks, who were willing to lie to these guys.

The heads of aggregate IQ were completely defiant to their government, so the guys who got caught in Canada, when you can go back and watch those hearings, and just like it's insane to see these guys just stonewall, their own government. And then the way that Mark Zuckerberg didn't even have the balls to appear before parliaments in the UK, in Canada, and even this grand assembly. So

because Facebook is a super state, it requires international cooperation to stand up to them. No one country alone is going to do it. Question I've had on the tip of my tongue throughout all of this, how culpable is Facebook in this? And where does their culpability lie because they are not Cambridge Analytica they are somehow the conduit slash communications medium how does Facebook fit into all of this sort of stuff. this week, but Shoshana Zuboff was on a panel in the one that was screened on Capitol Hill. She's the author of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the sort of definitive treatise on this larger issue. She was highly influential in the filmmakers' vision of this. Roger Mammack-Name is a proponent of her as well.

And she made the comment that basically, and I think this is it, is Facebook was the host and Cambridge Analytica was the parasite, that that's the story here, is that the Facebook has tremendous culpability in creating this machine that had no mechanisms for security. That it was just used as it was meant to be used. It was used to sell skin cream and ski vacations.

And was deliberately designed to also then sell candidates and allow candidates to find voters. And it was deliberately designed and sold to sell election outcomes. And campaigns were infall- like the movie does a good job of reminding people that Facebook put its own employees directly embedded into the Trump campaign. And the movie does a good job of then hinting that Facebook had to have been aware that they were working side-by-side with Cambridge Analytica embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016, despite the fact that the company had identified Cambridge Analytica as a rogue operator that had violated their policies, that had required them to certify the deletion of illicit data. And so that Facebook knew that Cambridge Analytica was a sketchy operation.

Why do you think they allowed them to continue? Is someone getting a backhand or somewhere? Is their pressure from litigation or someone that has some power? Why are they allowing Cambridge Analytica to continue? That's the key question. What do you think? I mean, there are so many parts of the story that look like a cover-up to us. Weird things that Facebook did that make us lose trust in them. Well, when you dig into the story. So when you realize that the two academics from Cambridge University that created the company that actually did the data harvesting where Alexander Kogan and Alexander Kogan's post-doc researcher

an American named Joseph Chancellor. They formed the company together, and even though Kogan was the lead, he had a partner. When Facebook discovered that the data was being sold, which was against their own policies, they strangely ended up hiring Joseph Chancellor right into So basically a guy who was caught selling data, basically using academic research as a way to obscure the commercialization of it to be used for political purposes. That is a very, you know, that's like against Facebook's own policies. It's also illegal in the United Kingdom. And they hired him. And he worked there for a while.

And it was only when people started asking Facebook, meaning US senators on both sides of the aisle. Who is Joseph Chancellor? Tell us about him. What is going on with him? Why? Basically asking, why did you hire this guy? And they said they're conducting internal investigation. They said they completed their investigation and then he was dismissed without any explanation.

And so he doesn't work for Facebook anymore. He's never been interviewed. He's never made a public statement. Nobody knows anything about him. And it's just mysterious. There's too many unexplained things for us to just keep going on and, you know, everything is fine. The other thing I'm pulling on all of the different threads.

Yeah. Yeah. The other important part of this that sort of shows signs of a cover-up is the Attorney General in Washington, DC. Carl Ray-Racine has filed a lawsuit against Facebook for Cambridge Analytica because it violated consumer protection laws in the District of Columbia. And it's one of the lawsuits in the US that I'm following the closest. And after the release of the movie, he actually refiled his demand to have internal emails

unsealed. And because he's in the discovery of that lawsuit, he's gotten emails that show Facebook employees in Washington, DC knew about Cambridge Analytica way earlier than has been publicly disclosed. And there are specific emails that are redacted that you can see. And it's like them talking about Cambridge Analytica. And Facebook is desperate not to have these emails unsealed because it will show what they knew about this company, when they knew about it, and who knew about it.

And the who, what when, is still unanswered. And Zuckerberg asserted to Congress under oath that he learned about Cambridge Analytica from the first Guardian article in December 2015, which is incredulous. And even if that's true, then it means that there is a management crisis at this company that you could find a military contractor harvesting data on your platform and you do not escalate it to the sea level suite. Like, if that's the internal story, then that is a damning story of mismanagement. Or Zuckerberg committed perjury.

That's like, that's the only explanation that I can understand from knowing the details here. And that I think is why Facebook is desperate to keep those emails sealed. Because as soon as you get a verifiable email of, basically what I worry about is a Washington DC employee said, we did some Googling on this weird company. Yeah, they're a defense contractor,

they're scraping data. What do we do about it? What do you reckon the low level anxiety rating is in Facebook at the moment, like it's just going to be everyone's just going to be walking around with terror hanging over their heads at the moment that some things going to come out because I don't see how this ends well for them. As you've said, there's two options. One is that they are malicious in their purposeful deception. And the second is that they're incompetent in their naivety. I think it's both.

And yeah. That they achieved so much power so quickly and did not understand the power that they wielded and they did not have moral culture to understand their power as it was being abused at scale in multiple ways. So what we can tell that there's been like a kind of reckoning, but at the same time, the business model is inherently immoral. And it is not, there's no, the business model is asymmetric in its power and it's ultimately about dispossession and the movie does a good job of expressing that.

Our, that the the the the the the the bargain, the grand bargain of social media is completely asymmetric and is dispossessing us of not only ourselves and our free will, but it has a collective harm to our all societies, and that the whole deal has to be renegotiated. In order for us to, yeah. The implications are really, really broad, aren't they? One of the things that I've been thinking, I wonder whether you thought this yourself. I've certainly know that some of the listeners will have done. As I was watching

the movie, I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, but, you know, those, like, some people, some voters might have got taken in by this particular disinformation or the memes or whatever, the campaigns that were put forward, but like, you know, I'm probably a bit self-aware or maybe I'm not online as much as them or whatever it is. I found myself coming up with my own excuses for why I wasn't affected. I wonder how common that is that we believe we're so aware of our own biases, but looking at some of the stats that were cited at the end. So, like, 60,000 Facebook ads were online for Hillary, and 1.1 million were online for Trump. Is that around about right?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a shame that there hasn't been interest in doing the post-mortem on the Hillary digital campaign to the equivalent of the... Do you think that she's got some skeletons in her closet as well? So there are different kind of... There are different kind of skeletons in the Hillary digital campaign closet. And there's only been a few scant accounts of what went on there.

But I think it's an equally interesting story that I hope somebody tells some day soon because it's a different parable on the other side of the story. So as far as I understand it, Eric Schmidt of Google was very active in directly supporting the Hillary digital operation. And they had a AI brain essentially that they called Ava,

named after Ava LaLovlaice, who is the really important female programmer in the history of programming, she originally invented the algorithm. And it was basically like Alexa or Siri for digital campaigning. They would literally like ask Ava, where should we run ads tomorrow? And where should Hillary go campaigning tomorrow?

And Ava would crunch the numbers and give them the answers. And my hypothesis is that they were so enchanted with this, this basically immature AI, the shiny object of asking Ava for the magic answers. And they believed this robot way too much. And by sort of my worst case scenario, sort of imagination, is that they asked Ava where should Hillary go? And Eva never said go to Wisconsin, so they never went to Wisconsin. And Hillary needed to have campaigned really hard in Wisconsin. So you think that's an identity of a why there was some glaring omissions in a campaign

tour? Could be. We don't have enough information to know, but that's what I worry about. That the sort of unforced errors of the digital strategy were informed by something or someone who made those sort of core strategic errors. How is the data abused to make mistakes? How was the faith in technology overblown? How is this arms race to be better than the opposing side? How did that bite the Democrats in the ass in the end?

They were using technology that was not ready for prime time. That was version 0.1 instead of... The camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. ...the camera. the day. And I think that that's Brad Parscals core competency is just sort of old fashioned direct marketing techniques on steroids. And when you give that guy a huge budget, he gets trump voters by getting donations and selling merchandise and getting people to go to rallies. It is just old-fashioned direct marketing. And I don't think we should underestimate the power of people, you know, investing in a candidate with their own money, buying merchandise and branding themselves with the campaign, and going to these rallies which are the closest

thing you're ever going to see to fascist rallies in the United States, and being a part of this highly charged, very terrifying, on the ground movement. There's a question hanging over everyone's heads, even those of us in the UK who watched with, kind of like watching a sitcom, a terrifying sitcom unfold when the Hillary and Trump election night went on. Interesting, but not our problem kind of. There's a question hanging over everyone's heads, I think still to this day, even when I hear people talk about it, how did this happen? Or now it's how did that happen, I suppose. And this recent exposure that's coming out of the great hack, adds another, not excuse, but another reason,

another layer to that, that there's all of these questions, there's a Mueller report, there's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there's Facebook, there's all of these sort of different elements. And people, do you think people are starting to get a grasp of how did this happen? Because everyone's been post-hoc rationalizing, it was people wanted to change the Democrats, try to start to play the identity politics game and they let, they started to subsist to the left too far left, etc, etc.

All that's just post-hoc rationalizationization because no one saw it, except for like Scott Adams on Twitter, no one saw it in advance. Sure. And now there's more elements of this coming out. Do you think people are starting to get more of a grasp, or is it just the first in a number of unveilings to come? I hope people stop looking for single reasons for things and start to understand it's a complex network of factors that interconnect and interrelate and amplify each other. So as time has passed, we're able to actually have a more sophisticated understanding. I like the way the film also points to things that happened a long time ago that contributed toward this

outcome, the sort of butterfly effect that things happen and then the resulting effects echo down the road. So the way that the mortgage crisis in 2008 still reverberates to this day, the great recession that wiped the wealth out of so many Americans. What's not mentioned in the film, which I think is another significant social issue in the United States, is the opiates crisis and the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and the kind of crazy reverse racism that occurred there. So basically this hypothesis that the pharmaceutical industry like over-marketed opiates and doctors

over-prescribed to working white patients and actually would not prescribe to African-American patients. And so the white population in the United States is now like in this addiction plague. And we're just realizing it. And his destroyed families, destroyed communities, especially in these white working class states. So you had the great recession caused by the greed of Wall Street. You had this opiates crisis caused by the greed of pharmaceuticals.

Now you have this like crisis in democracy caused caused by the greed of Silicon Valley and the surveillance capitalists. So it's like a reckoning of years actually in the making of sort of the self-destructive pensions of American culture, growth at all costs, greed is good kind of way of being. And then we haven't even mentioned Fox News, which traces back to Ronald Reagan when he got rid of the what was called the fairness of the doctrine where the FCC that Regulated broadcast used to be a said a doctrine that you have to give both sides to the issue if you use the public airwaves and

Reagan got rid of that and that created the opportunity to create partisan news outlets. Is that still- Is that only in the States because the UK doesn't seem to have that same split? Yeah, basically up until the eighties broadcast news, broadcast news in the US was very balanced because of the fairness, the doctrine, this idea of the government owned the airwaves, the spectrum, news companies leased the airwaves from the government,

a public good, and in order for them to do that, they had to have a fair use of the airwaves from the government, a public good, and in order for them to do that, they had to have a fair use of the airwaves. Reagan got rid of that, let people do whatever they want with the public airwaves. It created the potential to then split news into political viewpoint. So This like dividing the nation rather than keeping it unified through technology and government policy and media is something that started in the 80s. 30 years in the mid-20s. Yeah. And then it just built and built and built. And then in the early 2000s, the internet came and radically changed the whole media and

business ecology of the world, but especially how news and media and advertising worked. So that contributed towards the acceleration of these trends, not only into like acceleration of these trends, not only into like hyperpartisan news outlets, but individualized hyperpartisan news feeds. And then the way that our personal data was collected without rights, without restriction, wild west of surveillance capitalism to create this business incentive to trap people into filter bubbles, to use fear and anxiety, to boost engagement to the maximum levels.

We built the machine that tore us apart because it made the charts go up and that's all people were looking at. They're engagement charts, they're financial returns, charts, saving money on their ad chart. The whole industry and society was just looking at these charts, and we're not looking out the window at what was happening on the streets. Yeah, they were asleep at the wheel. The businessmen got more profits and the users got

some good cat memes every so often and everyone was happy and the world continued on until this happened. One question, I can't remember whether you mentioned it in the documentary or not. Why did you file in the UK? What's specific about UK law? Yeah, so this is a subtle takeaway that I hope a lot of people realize is I had no US lawyers, I had no rights or recourse in my own country. I only had rights in the United Kingdom and the reason for that is US voter data was processed in the United Kingdom. So therefore, you get rights where your data is processed. If the Cambridge Analytica had kept American voter data in the United States and not exported it abroad, then I would have had no rights or recourse at all. I could have requested the

company and they could have ignored me and there would be no legal basis to challenge that. Because they were based in the UK, they were forced to respond to my request. And then the Information Commissioner and Parliament had jurisdiction to further support and advance my complaint. And so it is an incredible parable of what you could start to call the splinter net, where is the internet works differently depending on where you are in the world. And right now, if you're in the EU and you're a resident of EU member states, you are protected by the GDPR in internet. Whereas we don't have the equivalent of the GDPR in the United States, so we don't have

the basic rights that the GDPR enables. And one of the fascinating things that I learned about all this is because the EU is a relatively new institution, they have data protection rights enshrined in the charter. So, rights to your data is fundamental right to freedom of speech and freedom to get married and like all these things. It's fundamental because it was thought of in a world where we like knew this. The law that I was able to use is called the UK Data Protection Act of 1998. So, astonishingly, the British Parliament passed a law at the dawn of the internet in 1998 was first being commercialized and

they had the Wherewithal to predict that people would need basic date data rights. We never did this in the United States So there's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees Your access to your date data So whereas it is in law across the Atlantic. And so, that's the lesson to Americans is, there's a very specific right that we have to demand now. It is the right to our own data.

And it has to be fundamental. It has to maybe even be in the Constitution. Like the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, the right to your data is so fundamental in the Constitution. Like the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, the right to your data is so fundamental in the 21st century and this movie shows us why that matters and I hope people take that away and I hope that they then when they are trying to what do I do now? It is actually go to your lawmakers at the state and federal level and say, we need data rights, we need at least the equivalent rights of our friends in Europe and the UK.

That's a really, really interesting next step. The splinternet is something that I hadn't thought of, but you are totally right. I have a couple of more questions that have been sent through to me. The first one being that no matter how much traction this documentary gets, and I'm certain it's going to get a lot, lawmakers are going to take time catching up. You guys have a fairly important election coming pretty soon. What do you think we can expect over the next year? So the first I hope is realization that nothing has changed. We are not any more protected than we were in 2016. So the government did not act fast enough to protect us,

even though it's all we've been talking about. So the best we have is an awakening, a new awareness that we were asleep in 2016, and at least now we are awake. But we should expect the same actors to do the same things they did before, and even more sophisticated. So we just have to be even more vigilant and try to inoculate ourselves, and then not

give up on what we need to do. And to try to make this part of the campaign, it's an opportunity to pressure the politicians to confront this, because one of the paradoxes here is on both sides of the aisle, especially in the United States, they really don't want to kneecap Facebook too much because they realize they need Facebook to stay in power. They need Facebook to motivate their voters and to target them. So you're asking them to limit their own ability to stay in power. So we need to confront the extra challenge of asking our lawmakers to give us rights

and reduce their ability to manipulate us to keep them in power. And that's huge and really difficult. So we need to deal with that. And it's particularly interesting dynamic in the United States is the idea that there are laws passed at the state level. So California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act. So it's important that it's in California because obviously this is the home based of most of the industry.

And it moves the United States more toward the GDPR. It's not as strong as the GDPR, but it moves the needle in that direction. So already now, if there's going to be a national privacy act, it's going to have to supersede the state law and that's a fundamental sort of challenge to American politics that, you know, whenever you override the states, you have a particular political debate. And so, so that's, that's basically the industry is terrified of all the states passing their own privacy laws. So then they have to deal with a patchwork of regulations. Oh yeah.

The industry wants a national law badly. And so now they're basically going to have to figure out how to negotiate. The industry lobbyists are going to have to negotiate. What concessions are they going to give in order to supersede the state laws? And there are other states have laws in the work. So New York has a really strong privacy bill on the floor, which is even stronger than California's.

And so the many you get like, New York and California are passing laws which have a huge economic power in the country. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. That's gonna be this muscular force that's gonna sort of run the debate in Washington DC. And so I'm hopeful for that. And it's sort of where the kind of federalist dynamic of American politics will come into play

is that state voters will be able to influence the debate by passing laws at the state house, which then raises the bar for Washington DC to override those laws because people are going to be mad if Washington DC makes a weaker law than their own state law. So the advice that I would give to Americans listening is actually go to your state representatives first and engage with them and push things along in your state house. And that's going to have a stronger impact on what's going on in Washington DC in the big picture. That's interesting. I think the sad thing or the scary thing is that in 2020, if it's

unlikely that all of this is going to have been washed through by the time that we get there, yes, someone may have lost a couple of bullets of ammunition from their weapon with regards to the fact that had Cambridge Analytica, I mean, let's think about this as a different iteration of the world where the Cambridge Analytica scandal hadn't come out. And they've got another four years of voter data and they've got another four years of understanding behavioral change. Oh my God, you're just totally at the mercy. But as you say, it's likely that these tactics are going to be used again and realistically, because of the way that they're done, the presentation in the documentary,

like the reporter from the Guardian being targeted with what was actually a really funny, like very degrading, but very funny meme video, all of these sort of tactics that really understand what gets people engaged and what gets people going. We are at the mercy of our biases. We're just, you know, hairless apes as we often get called and inoculating ourselves from this sort of information is going to be incredibly difficult, I guess. I mean, are there any, apart from not using social media, are there any tactics that people can use to help themselves with regards to that, other than a critical eye? I actually wouldn't even say don't use social media

because as I used it in the film, Twitter was an important weapon in my battle. So social media can be used for good and it should be. And so I Actually don't think that people should delete their cat counts It doesn't really solve the problem So I think the key is to try to use these forces for good and for democracy and not for anti-democracy As best you can,

especially until we figure out how to better protect ourselves. So yeah, I think it's mostly awareness and the right kind of skepticism and to better understand like how these machines are manipulating us. Like one of the things I like about the movie is the way that it integrates the interface of social media into the movie.

So that you realize that the manipulation is right there in front of you. The sort of slot machine user interfaces are the first layer of manipulation. And to think that, you know, it's these like, you know, guys who are hacking our minds with Sysiops. It's these guys who are hacking our minds with sociops, even before you get there, it's just a slot machine of these buttons and the way that it's affecting the neurotransmitters in our brains, we have to start there

and think about how these machines are. And the fact that Instagram has removed likes is starting to test that out, is strong evidence that this realization that the manipulation happens right on the surface of these apps and interfaces, I think is a really important moment to question, not just the boogie man of Cambridge Analytica,

but the whole way we are spending most of our time. Scrolling system, right? Yes, yes. It's a, I promised that I didn't give David my notes before that, but that was my finishing point. The fact that we've done on this podcast 18 months ago, I did an episode called A Hacker in Your Pocket, which is after I heard the first Tristan Harris on Sam Harris podcast, which is what exposed

me and a lot of the listeners to Time Well Spent and the Center for Humane Technology and all that sort of stuff. Tristan's also now released his own podcast, which is fantastic. You're totally right. On the surface, I was thinking like, this is so terrible. My reptile brain's being manipulated with red buttons and we've got entire posts that are a rundown of how to change your notification settings on iPhone so that you don't get triggered as much. You know, we're playing, we're playing up here thinking that we're pulling weeds out. Whereas we're on top of an atomic bomb that's below it, and we're actually just like making no difference at all.

Like forget the fact that your phone wants you to be on your phone a fair bit and your attention spans gone down. Like your entire world view is being manipulated. It's so vast. Yeah. Yep. Yep, it is. It is. It is.

And, you know, until you learn how the sausage is made, it's hard to appreciate it. You know? Yeah, I agree. So, David, I really appreciate your time for coming on. If people want to find out more, first off, go watch The Great Hack on Netflix. After that, any blogs that you would recommend or where can people get in touch with yourself or find out more?

Sure. So as it's depicted in the movie, I'm very active on Twitter and it's so you can follow me on Prof Carol and I'm happy to engage with people there. And I think that's a good starting point. I tend to post a lot of what I'm looking at. And so I think it's a good jumping off point. You won't find me on Facebook anymore. But if you want to reach out direct to me, you can slide into my DMs and I can give you

my email address. Fantastic. David, I really do wish you luck with the rest of this campaign. I'm going to be watching with a lot of interest. I say I'm sure that the listeners will be super excited to go down the rabbit holes that your Twitter provides. And yeah, we'll see, you know, maybe in a year's time or something like that, we'll be able to do a catcher episode and we'll be able to see where the state of the 2020 year has taken us and stuff like that. But for now, thank you so much. And be on the lookout for a twist in the fall

to the way the movie ends. There's going to be a twist ending in a couple of months. So be on the lookout for that. Don't leave us with that open-loop, David A.D. You're so horrible. Well, on that note, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in. Professor Carol will catch you later on. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

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