Mindf*ck by Christopher Wiley

Book Review

This book completely blew my mind 🤯🤯🤯. It reads like a wild conspiracy theory, but it’s entirely based on fact. If you’re still scratching your head trying to figure out how Trump won the 2016 presidential election or how the Brexit referendum passed… you may want to give this a read!

I knew a bit about this topic from watching the documentary The Great Hack on Netflix (if you haven’t seen it, go watch it!), but this book goes into great detail on the Cambridge Analytica (CA) sandal and how the company was able to essentially weaponize the public’s data to fuel a propaganda machine favoring the alt right. Written by a former CA employee turned whistleblower, the author highlights all those involved in this massive scheme and coverup - including Facebook, Wikileaks, Russian intelligence and more.

The book primarily focuses on the 2016 US election, though there are a couple chapters that discuss CA’s involvement with Brexit as well. So how did they do it??

Using data collected from Facebook and other sources, CA was able to create a virtual portrait of the voting public. Utilizing this data, they could identify and target the individuals they deemed “most persuadable”. Once they acquired their targets, CA created fake Facebook pages and news articles disguised as real groups and reputable sources. Once their fake content gained steam, they would stir up rage online and invite group members to IRL events to commiserate in person (oftentimes about made-up or exaggerated events) - thereby creating a new reality from their digital simulation. From there, these small IRL groups began to self-mobilize until the movement had spread nationwide.

The author makes it clear that CA was largely created to carry out Steve Bannon’s mission to dismantle Western society and create a new culture (confirming my suspicion that Steve Bannon is truly evil incarnate... at one point he refers to Hitler, Stalin and Bin Laden as artists worthy of admiration 🤮)

While the author does acknowledge some wrongdoing and expresses remorse for participating in CA’s creation and subsequent schemes to brainwash the American public, he chalks his complicity up to naïveté and the excitement of creating a virtual simulation of society... something he saw as a benefit to science. However, as a reader, I couldn’t help but wonder why it took him so long to realize his vision for a virtual science experiment was being used to promote the very institutions and behaviors he sought to dismantle. Nevertheless, it’s an incredibly captivating read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 stars