Episode 213: Rewriting Cambridge Analytica (P1) feat Anthony Mansuy
Added 2022-12-23 20:04:39 +0000 UTCThe Cambridge Analytica Scandal involves data science being described as potent black magic, claims of psychological voter manipulation in swing states, micro-targeting, secret meetings, massive amounts of stolen data and a seemingly nefarious plan to use Brexit as a blueprint and catapult Donald Trump into the White House. But we’re here to tell you that the existing and broadly accepted narrative often reads more like a conspiracy theory. We are joined by guest writer Anthony Mansuy, a French reporter for Society Magazine, who in this first of two parts helps us tell the tale of a social media behemoth, a libertarian hedge fund billionaire, a sketchy political consulting firm, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and a host of Russian figures.
For this two-parter, Anthony conducted months of research and forty exclusive interviews. You’ll be hearing from Cambridge Analytica employees, data scientists, former Obama, Trump and Cruz campaign staffers, as well as friends and associates of Chris Wylie. There's also a long interview with Wylie himself and even one with Steve Bannon, who Anthony tracked down in Rome in 2018, just after the scandal broke.
The evidence lays out how Wylie spread numerous fabrications and exaggerations to minimize his contribution to the development of Cambridge Analytica's tools and conceal the true causes of his departure from the organization. More importantly, Wylie capitalized on the deepest fears held by the liberal media about the far-right, social media, and Russia; allowing him to craft the perfect narrative to fit the political moment — one that persists to this day.
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Anthony Mansuy: https://twitter.com/AnthonyMansuy
Les Dissidents (Anthony's book): https://bit.ly/3jgCFfK
Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com
Music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Comments
I just love when Julien speaks any of the Romance languages
2022-12-31 00:45:27 +0000 UTCHonestly, lost me with “quantum mechanics is easy to explain to a layperson”. Sure you can hand wave enough detail away from anything to come up with a pithy 250 character explanation-but it is critical to pay attention to what you’re skipping over and more importantly, how those gaps of understanding left behind are often exploited by charlatans and fake experts. While I do agree with you that many a key confusion regarding cryptocurrency are socially constructed, I think I disagree that the complexity of the underlying technology has nothing to do with it. Specifically, to your explainer I would say: be careful because a common misdirection is focusing on the “append only” nature of the data structure. It’s neither entirely accurate, nor unique to blockchain anything. However it’s easy to understand and thus a useful stand-in to paper over the reality of cryptocurrency centralization, forking, and other hacky things that happen kind of a lot. Please don’t get me wrong, I agree with just about everything you wrote!
John Swan
2022-12-28 20:00:40 +0000 UTCEverything is Theranos Pt. 29730
Null_null
2022-12-27 15:29:29 +0000 UTCMy Facebook profile is pretty dormant and one of the only pages I have “liked” is the official Shrek page, so they can have a field day with that I guess.
Samantha Miller
2022-12-27 03:12:42 +0000 UTCthings like "quantum mechanics" and "blockchain technology" are very easily explained to the layperson imo, as long as you keep it simple and tell them that most people making it complicated are trying to sell them something. Blockchain tech: imagine everyone involved in a process has a copy of the record of every single action taken that involves that process. It can only be added to, and everyone has to agree on it. Its all done with code to try to prevent human interference. The issue with something like blockchain isn't that the technology is complicated. An abstract explanation of it is pretty simple. The issue is that the social relationships involved in something like crypto "currency" are hard for people who arent consciously trying to understand them to even consider. So much of the anglo-sphere culture from birth teaches us to basically ignore that stuff, so its no wonder blockchain confuses the shit out of people. People are told that it is the technology behind magic internet money that everyone implicitly understands to be a scam at first glance, but "obviously it cant be because so many people are getting rich off it, so I must not understand the technology!"
2022-12-26 23:51:02 +0000 UTCJust the truth isn't it? They happily went into coalition government with the Tories in 2010 and underwrote all of their murderous austerity policies in exchange for a plastic bag tax and a referendum on voting reform (which they promptly lost). Awful party.
Interested Third Party
2022-12-26 21:04:14 +0000 UTCIncredible episode! I’m a data software engineer (market research, sentiment analysis etc), and the discussion about CA, Chris Wylie’s claims, and data science more broadly is long overdue. In my opinion, everybody is conditioned to be primed for the esoteric, which if left unexamined will cause major blind spots in our ability to process the complex but exoteric world around us. We are in the advent of highly complex transformer models that take about as much time to explain as things like “quantum mechanics” or “blockchain technology,” so hope of a constructive conversation about this particular topic is unfortunately drown out by nihilistic charlatans selling woo to people who believe in the black magic of data science. It is a very timely conversation to have heading into 2023 what with EA and longtermism entering our collective lexicon - something I wholly blame on these same nihilists exploiting the cultural classification of machine learning as esoterica.
John Swan
2022-12-26 18:15:30 +0000 UTC@Rood Street Films: It is a free episode 🙃.
2022-12-26 13:31:33 +0000 UTCAbsolutely was. No doubt.
Katherine
2022-12-25 06:49:43 +0000 UTCSuch a good episode. Please bring back the Frenchman again!!
Katherine
2022-12-25 06:49:15 +0000 UTCImagine being a gay vegan but also working for Russian oligarchs because "evil is sexy"
lowpolyzoe
2022-12-25 04:04:27 +0000 UTCGod, I hope this turns the narrative against Christopher Wiley and his nihilist sack of shit colleagues
Skeleven
2022-12-24 22:52:00 +0000 UTCYay Anthony return!
Shivvy
2022-12-24 21:08:52 +0000 UTCI’m not the cousin who took the color quiz.
2022-12-24 19:32:06 +0000 UTCI thought it was an open secret that those shitty Facebook quizzes were all about data harvesting and personality profiling.
Matt
2022-12-24 16:29:17 +0000 UTCI hope calling the lib dems "a center-right party" was very much intentional
Jamie
2022-12-24 15:43:24 +0000 UTC
