How Aaron Swartz Envisioned Cambridge Analytica in 2012

I was reading through my old notes when I stumbled on a striking similarity between Aaron Swartz’ explanation of a futuristic “election winning machine”, and Cambridge Analytica’s election machine. For those who don’t know Swartz, he was an open internet pioneer, programmer, and activist with a fascinating story who was targetted by the US government and later committed suicide.

Swartz described an electioneering tool that would allow passionate candidates to win elections without being beholden to power brokers. He described a platform that uses social media to gain supporters virally, using A/B tests to determine the optimal talking points, and gamification to bolster data mining, recruitment, and engagement.

He also talks about how to radically optimize campaign spending:

Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions.

(Ever see ads for a free personality test? That’s what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn’t like)…

from Lawrence Lessig’s https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html (it’s worth reading through the whole thing)

The approach that Aaron described is eerily similar to how Cambridge Analytica mined Facebook users to better model their political and social profiles:

[Aleksandr] Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” — the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total — unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

… Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn’t you use it in your biggest campaign ever?

from Christopher Wylie’s whistleblower profile https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

This profile data was used to create what Christopher called “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool” to help elect Donald Trump.

Who Should Wield These Tools?

Perhaps the scariest part of Aaron’s utopian narrative is who would best wield this next generation electioneering machine:

He doesn’t talk like a politician — he knows you’re sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don’t trust a word he says — and you shouldn’t! But here’s the difference: he’s not in the pocket of the big corporations.

This sounds like a politician we know. But Aaron Swartz would never have supported a demagogue, so how does the candidate he had in mind prove he is not beholden to corporate interests?

And you know how you can tell [he’s independent]? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers

As it turns out, when you wield powerful election winning weapons, you only need to appear different from establishment politicians to win grassroots support.

This proves an important point: the weaponization of data and continued application of behavioural science to elections enable tools that can be used for any purpose. To convince anyone of anything.

What does this mean for the legitimacy of large scale democracies?

Cambridge Analytica may have been effective at manipulating voters (we don’t know exactly how effective yet), but they are far from the first political operatives to do it. Check out Sasha Issenberg’s book for a great history of this.

So are we doomed to fight an arms race in manipulative persuasion for our future elections?

Maybe. I’d love to write anothe article about Max Weber, who predicted that wealthy capitalists would naturally take over political parties and use science to more efficiently garner votes for their private interests. We should think about how to avoid this inevitability and what public interest election infrastructure would look like.

Thanks for reading!