Christopher Wylie | Fashion Models and Cyber Warfare | #BoFVOICES 2018

Summary

In a compelling talk at the BoFVOICES 2018, Christopher Wylie delves into how Cambridge Analytica leveraged psychological operations to influence culture and politics, drawing parallels with the world of fashion. Recounting his experiences from initial meetings to working with military contractors, Wylie paints a picture of how data can shape narratives and influence public perception. He underscores the powerful role of cultural narratives and fashion in societal manipulation, highlighting the urgent need for more responsible and diverse storytelling in media and culture.

Highlights

• Cambridge Analytica's inception involved leveraging data to analyze and influence cultural trends. 🚀
• Fashion narratives were used to create psychological operations and influence decisions on a large scale. 👗➡️🧠
• The military’s interest in culture signifies its importance in modern warfare strategies. 🪖+🎭
• Social networks like Facebook have become dominant powers in cultural and informational warfare. 🚀🌐
• Cultural narratives were weaponized to manipulate societal perceptions and political outcomes. 🎭🔥
• Wylie challenged the cultural sector to recognize their power and responsibility in shaping society. 🌍⚡
• There is an urgent call for more diverse and responsible narratives to prevent manipulation by extremist ideologies. 🏳️‍🌈👥
• The interplay between cultural identity and data presents both opportunities and threats in shaping futures. 🔮

Key Takeaways

• Culture and data are intertwined; understanding people’s cultural identities through data can influence societal trends. 📊
• Fashion is not just about aesthetics; it’s a powerful tool in understanding and influencing cultural identities. 👗
• Cambridge Analytica used data from fashion and cultural narratives to manipulate public perception and political outcomes. 🤯
• The digital age has increased the potential for cultural warfare via algorithms and targeted narratives. 💻
• Cultural creators hold a responsibility to promote narratives that defend democracy and cultural diversity. 🛡️
• Hyper-personalization in digital media is creating echo chambers and cognitive segregation. 🔊
• Fashion choices can signify deeper psychological and cultural traits, offering insights into societal dynamics. 🌍
• Tech companies wield immense power in culture-shaping, often with little accountability. 🕹️
• Military strategies have expanded to include cultural operations, blurring lines between defense and cultural manipulation. 🎯

Overview

Christopher Wylie, a renowned data scientist, paints a vivid picture of the ties between culture, fashion, and data-driven operations in his talk at BoFVOICES 2018. Initiating with a curious meeting in 2013 which led to his involvement in Cambridge Analytica, Wylie unravels the intricate ways data can reveal and influence cultural trends, akin to how fashion trends reflect societal behaviors.

Delving deeper, Wylie explains how fashion's psychological underpinnings serve as a formidable force in manipulating narratives and shaping public perception. He reveals how Cambridge Analytica, influenced by military cyber operations, exploited these insights to influence political outcomes globally, using targeted cultural content to resonate with and manipulate audiences.

Wylie’s talk embodies a call to action for cultural creators; recognizing their power in this digital age is crucial. He urges for the crafting of diverse and inclusive narratives to safeguard democracy, underscoring the potential of cultural and media sectors to act as both architects and defenders of societal values.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 05:00: Introduction and Meeting with Steve Bannon The chapter titled 'Introduction and Meeting with Steve Bannon' begins with a story about the inception of Cambridge Analytica. It all started in the autumn of 2013, at a conversation in Cambridge. The narrator recalls sitting in a hotel suite when a man entered, leading to a discussion where it was mentioned there might be a potential client.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Military Contracting and the Birth of Cambridge Analytica The chapter "Military Contracting and the Birth of Cambridge Analytica" begins with a conversation between the narrator and another individual who flew in from America. During their discussion, the American asks the narrator to explain what they do. At first, the narrator offers a philosophical explanation by saying they use computers to "glimpse into the destiny of cultures," which the American finds unimpressive, prompting him to ask for a more straightforward description.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Military Strategy and Cultural Weapons The chapter titled 'Military Strategy and Cultural Weapons' explores a vivid moment involving an individual who had recently traveled from America. The person, described as wearing two Oxford shirts and looking disheveled, seemed to be in a hurry, possibly having skipped normal routines such as showering and changing clothes. This sets the scene for a discussion or reflection on the intersections of military strategy and cultural aspects, hinted by the phrase 'do you actually do what so what is culture then.' The chapter might delve into how cultural elements act as strategic tools or weapons in military or international contexts.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Cultural Narratives as Weapons The chapter titled 'Cultural Narratives as Weapons' discusses a notable conversation with a character who appeared disheveled and somewhat gritty from travel. Despite his unkempt appearance, likened to that of a 'divorced car salesman,' his speech was marked by a distinct awareness and insightfulness. This conversation was memorable due to the individual’s unique perspective and articulate expression, which the narrator compares to dialogues encountered in other 'woke' circles.
• 20:00 - 30:00: Fashion Brand Analysis in Cultural Politics The chapter explores the intersection of fashion brand analysis and cultural politics through the lens of critical theory. It mentions influential theorists such as Foucault and Judith Butler, emphasizing the performativity of identity and the complexities of self-identity in the contemporary world. Despite the theoretical focus, a point of tension arises between philosophical discourse and the practical need for quantifiable data, highlighting a dialogue between conceptual understanding and empirical analysis.
• 30:00 - 40:00: The Influence of Fashion Data on Politics The chapter delves into the concept of culture, discussing its foundational elements and origins. It suggests that culture is born out of humanity, implying that individuals and their intrinsic qualities are the fundamental units of culture. By understanding and measuring what is inside people, the text argues, we can predict what cultural products will emerge from them.
• 40:00 - 50:00: The Historical Context and Consequences of Data Exploitation The chapter delves into the understanding of culture as a distribution of inherent attributes within individuals that manifest in broader societies. It discusses light stereotyping as a means to understand cultural distinctions. Through examples, it points out how Italians are often perceived as passionate, utilizing familiar cultural stereotypes to illustrate broader points about data exploitation and its historical context and consequences.
• 50:00 - 60:00: The Role of Tech Companies in Modern-Day Colonialism The chapter discusses the stereotypes and broad generalizations that are often applied to different cultures, using examples like Italians and Germans. It emphasizes the importance of language in shaping these perceptions and cautions against using singular traits to describe entire cultures. This conversation serves as a starting point for a deeper exploration into how these perceptions might relate to modern-day colonialism, especially concerning the role of tech companies in perpetuating such stereotypes or biases.
• 60:00 - 70:00: Cultural Warfare and the Importance of Cultural Defense This chapter explores the concept of cultural warfare and emphasizes the significance of cultural defense. It begins by discussing the language used to describe people and cultures, suggesting that these terms are based on an implicit understanding of distribution, where certain traits are more common in some groups than others. The conversation transitions to how cultures change, drawing parallels with fashion trends; as one of the speakers had been researching fashion trends at the time. This comparison facilitates an understanding of cultural dynamics and transformations over time.

Christopher Wylie | Fashion Models and Cyber Warfare | #BoFVOICES 2018 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 i'm going to start uh with a story about how cambridge analytica came to be and it all started with a conversation in the autumn of 2013 at uh cambridge and i was sitting in a hotel suite and a man came in and we started talking and i was told uh you know you we have a client potentially and you
• 00:30 - 01:00 need to have a chat with this guy so he flew in from america and we started talking and he asked so tell me what do you do and i said the the best way to describe it is i use computers to try to glimpse into the destiny of cultures and he sort of looked at me and grimaced and rolled his eyes and he said cut the just tell me like what
• 01:00 - 01:30 do you actually do what so what is culture then and i remember this this moment just so vividly because he he was dressed with two shirts on top of one another two oxford shirts as if he had either forgotten to take off the shirt before or that he was somehow trying to i don't know keep everything and carry on and skip the luggage he'd just flown in from america and i could tell that he hadn't had a shower
• 01:30 - 02:00 and he had that sort of layer of grime that you get after a transatlantic flight and he looked somewhere in between a disheveled madman and a divorced car salesman who was sort of acquiescing to his inevitable corpulence but this conversation stays with me because he spoke with a certain wokeness that i haven't heard except at places
• 02:00 - 02:30 like berkeley um you know he talked about foucault we talked about judith butler the performativity of identity the nature of our fractured selves and he talked a good game and i was like girl you've read some third wave cool but i said that's all great but as a data scientist i need quantifiable units not just theories and so we started talking about
• 02:30 - 03:00 okay so what are the units of culture if in order for us to understand what is culture what are the units of culture and i said that culture has to emerge from something and i said i suggested to him that culture emerges from people and that it is our humanity that is the unit of culture so if we can measure what is inside of people we can estimate what will emerge from them and that by
• 03:00 - 03:30 looking at culture as a distribution of attributes within ourselves that then plays out in the wider worlds we can start to understand uh where it goes and so it if we if we indulge in a little bit of light stereotyping if you think about how we describe for example an italian right or italians in general or germans right we might say that italians are when you go to italy they're more passionate or
• 03:30 - 04:00 they're a bit more extroverted if we talk about germans they're precise and they're good at engineering right and of course that's not true for every italian or every german but what we're what we're using what the language that we're using is really important because we are using the same words that we would describe ourselves or the person over here to describe an entire culture and so in this conversation we started unpacking well perhaps there's something to that
• 04:00 - 04:30 perhaps that these these words that we use to describe people and cultures are actually an implicit understanding of a distribution a curve and that some that there are more people in one place that might be one way and more people in another place that might be another way and so he then asked so how does culture change then and that's when we started talking about fashion trends because at the time i was also researching fashion trends and we talked about the difference
• 04:30 - 05:00 between crocs on one hand and chanel's little black dress on the other and all of the variables that get put into making one quick and fast and regrettable and another enduring and iconic and it was in this moment that i had the captive audience of an interesting and interested man
• 05:00 - 05:30 and we flirted with ideas that no one had ever really talked about and it was in that moment that he was sold but i didn't know in that moment sitting in that hotel room that we were about to destroy the world together and it was in that moment that i became icarus and i put on wax wings and i flew into the sun and i dragged millions of people with me and it was from this conversation this
• 05:30 - 06:00 folly that the world then burned so before meeting steve bannon i was recruited to work at a military contractor called scl group and our our clients our largest clients were the pentagon our largest clients were the ministry of defense nato and the reason i got hired was because my predecessor uh died in his hotel room in kenya on a project and at the time
• 06:00 - 06:30 the company looked at this opening as an opportunity to shift its focus more into cyberspace because at the time darpa which is the u.s military's research agency was expanding its capacity in cyberspace so it had programs called narrative networks it had a program called strategic communications and social media it even had research into how to take
• 06:30 - 07:00 memes like lol cats and weaponize them and it was through engaging with darpa and the military that i learned that you can pretty much sum up military strategy in one word and that word is dominant every military strategy is about dominance and in military doctrine they talk about something called the five-dimensional battle space so that's land air sea space as in outer space
• 07:00 - 07:30 and then the fifth dimension is information and within information that is where you have psychological operations that is where you have cyber operations and that is where you have cultural operations so how does the military fight in culture like anything else it builds weapons and so we have to sort of unpack the meaning of
• 07:30 - 08:00 weapon in order to understand what a cultural weapon is so there's a distinction that the military makes between something called kinetic weaponry which is things that use explosives ballistics things that blow up you know they're like boys with toys and hybrids and non-kinetic approaches like information like psychological manipulation where you are attacking the belligerent or undermining the belligerent
• 08:00 - 08:30 using non-kinetic means without blowing stuff up and so this is called hybrid warfare and i think the easiest way to think about weapons is if we start if we unpack what a knife is so if we think about a knife and we imagine what a knife is right it's sharp you can stab stuff but the knife in itself isn't a weapon until the context becomes weaponized so if if i'm chopping vegetables right and i'm a chef i'm not that this
• 08:30 - 09:00 knife is not a weapon it's a tool but if i take this knife and i stab it into your abdomen is it a weapon it might not be what if i'm a surgeon and i'm cutting you open because i need to perform heart surgery it is a very specific context that this knife becomes a weapon right and it is when it's intended to hurt someone or stop someone and when you look at weapons research
• 09:00 - 09:30 you have two components you have a targeting system and a payload delivery system so if we think about a missile right we've got the payload which is the explosives and the targeting system which is the radar and how you aim it and in information and in culture we also have a targeting system that targeting system is algorithms that targeting system is is literally called targeting online and the payload
• 09:30 - 10:00 delivery is a cultural narrative and the role of a cultural weapon is to create what is called informational asymmetry which is where you have so much more information around your target that you can understand their environment what goes on their head and you can seek to manipulate them
• 10:00 - 10:30 the facebook the facebook profiling and the role of the facebook profiling was to gain informational asymmetry because in order to dominate your opponent whether they are an isis extremist you know whether they are a north african extremist or whether in in the case of cambridge analytica an american voter you need to control the entire informational environment and that facebook data was used
• 10:30 - 11:00 to profile people and then forecast the spread of narratives if you touch this person what is the likelihood that you can undermine their perception of reality and then for them to share that disinformation with another person and then another person and another person and what i realized putting my my fashion hat on for a second is that darpa and the nsa were trying to recreate wgsn
• 11:00 - 11:30 they were trying to recreate saatchi and sochi they were trying to create a social influencer agency and that information operations is actually just the military trying to engage in culture like any kind of brand would do and i remember thinking how cool is that that i get to work in culture but i also get to help defend our country and they just use different terms so
• 11:30 - 12:00 they talk about for example inauthentic coordinated behavior or or influencer analysis or influence attribution or my favorite target profiles observed acting in concert ooh scary so if you think about it what these words targets observed acting in concert what what the hell is acting in concert so
• 12:00 - 12:30 when you do something together right so if i'm wearing something that you're also wearing and you're wearing and you're wearing right that's us acting in concert we're dressing in concert we might be hashtagging in concert we might be listening to the top 40 in concert or going to a concert in concert so the cultural zeitgeist itself is just people acting in concert it's a trend we were looking at trends
• 12:30 - 13:00 we were working with the military to try to figure out how to examine trends that's it that's what we were doing um and at the time i was studying for a phd in fashion and you know people would ask me so why why bother trying to model cultures you know in a computer and my favorite physicist because i have a favorite physicist um richard feinman he said that the only way for you to know that you
• 13:00 - 13:30 know something is for you to be able to recreate it so the logic that i had is if i could recreate a fashion trend in a computer then that is the moment where we will start to unpack what actually is a fashion trend what is fashion what is style and why do people like what is this contagion factor of us if i wear something and somehow somebody catches the fashion and starts starts spreading um and
• 13:30 - 14:00 it it was looking at the micro interactions of people and using data of people that we could then start to unpack these sort of macro effects and fashion is a really ideal way to study people because choosing what to wear is a choice that every single person in the entire world makes every day and the performance of wearing clothes
• 14:00 - 14:30 is is one of the few things that actually distinguishes us from animals and from the extra from the mundane to the extravagant people in all cultures make choices about how to adorn their bodies and so wearing clothes is a near universal and uniquely human behavior and in this light fashion can be seen as pervasive to the human condition so why did i say that because fashion is powerful
• 14:30 - 15:00 and when we think about fascist movements or extremist movements or communist movements the first thing that normally happens is they develop an aesthetic so we can very very very pointedly imagine what a nazi looks like right what a skinhead looks like what a maoist looks like what an isis fighter looks like right they have a very distinct aesthetic and
• 15:00 - 15:30 there's a reason for that because fashion is powerful and when scl group this military contractor became cambridge analytica after steve bannon and alt-right billionaires bought it and changed the research that we were doing one of the first things that they realized was how powerful fashion is and how powerful it is to understand how people engage with clothing because there are
• 15:30 - 16:00 strong relationships between the brands and the styles and the aesthetics that people engage with and how they see themselves and their identity and if you are seeking to understand the dynamics of a society through people's identity looking at what they wear is a really good entry point and so i think we've got some stuff on the screen which i will try to explain to you okay these are um actual items
• 16:00 - 16:30 from surveys that were put out in the application in this facebook application that people talk about that harvested 87 million people's records one of the one of the key inventories that was used was about fashion and so if you if you look at here right you know compared to my friends i own few new fashion items right what would that tell you about a person intuitively you understand who this person is if they tell you about it right
• 16:30 - 17:00 so these are two brands does everybody know these brands mostly yeah mostly okay all right so wrangler it's a gene company an abercrombie gene you swear i don't know what to call it all right so are people who wear wrangler different to people who wear abercrombie do you does that feel intuitive to you if i say my favorite brand
• 17:00 - 17:30 is wrangler and you don't know anything about me can you imagine me and if i say i love abercrombie i love the models i don't love abercrombie sorry if anybody's here from abercrombie um so we we we can we can we can imagine who this person is why because brands have meaning and when people engage with the brand what they're doing is matching themselves and their identity to the meaning of that brand so they call that self-congruity theory
• 17:30 - 18:00 and one of the things that cambridge analytica noticed quite quickly when it started pulling all of this facebook data is the things that produced correlations the most it was fashion brands it was music it was tv shows um and so if we move to the next slide we can take a look at the the actual difference between abercrombie and wrangler so here this is the mean this is this is this is the mean point and this is the difference
• 18:00 - 18:30 of people who like abercrombie or people who like wrangler compared to average okay and so we can take a look okay so let's let's just like take a guess right um in terms of ex in terms of excitement seeking do you think about people who like abercrombie want to seek out exciting things or people who wear wrangler abercrombie and if you look at the the the narratives that abercrombie puts
• 18:30 - 19:00 out it's flashy it's exciting wrangler is all about you know it's like a cowboy it's sort of like it's sort of it's a bit older so if we look at all of these axes these are these are personality traits we've got liberalism down here at the bottom and we can see that there is actually quite a clear difference between a person who's at who likes abercrombie and a person who likes wrangler right is modesty do you think somebody who wears wrangler is more modest than
• 19:00 - 19:30 somebody who wears abercrombie yeah it's up there you can see it you can cheat you can just look at the data that's that's the thing that's the thing as when i when i work in trend forecasting i don't i don't imagine anything i just look at data and tell people so this is actually from cambridge analytica data and the reason i'm showing you this is because this is a really clear difference this is this is what you call producing a signal and if we move to the next slide
• 19:30 - 20:00 oh it's all sideways okay cool um so these are the five five core personality traits against tons of fashion brands and what's really interesting is when you organize personality data into into clusters it starts organizing people based on their personality and if you ask what is in this group versus that versus that group what are the what what's what what
• 20:00 - 20:30 are the what are the uh brands that distinguish these people from other people and it actually starts to categorize the fashion market without using any fashion data and it's really interesting when you start to unpack this right like people who who like lululemon are more extroverted that makes sense extroversion is like activity it's excitement seeking it's somebody who wants to go out and run right and if we look on the other end right here lookbook i don't know if people know lookbook it's a sort of
• 20:30 - 21:00 blog type site people take pictures of themselves and post it about their like the clothes that they're wearing so you've got people who are very open but also very neurotic and that's not a criticism of that's not a criticism of lookbook it's a cool site but you've got people who really like creative stuff really like new stuff and but perhaps they're more self-conscious more anxious right and so by posting on lookbook they might be getting the kind of validation that would boost their confidence right
• 21:00 - 21:30 so it kind of makes sense and we then look at a brand like ll bean right which is quite high in conscientiousness which is order structure you know dutifulness and low in openness these are people who like to be more conventional and if you look and you've imagined the aesthetic of l.l bean it is pretty conventional right you don't imagine ll being on you know llb and kenzo are quite different right
• 21:30 - 22:00 and the people who engage with that are quite different all of this seems intuitive right but the cool thing about this is this is borne out in data so if we go to the next slide there we go so we can now see this is this is from cambridge analytica and this is them organizing groups of people according to personality traits on the top and fashion brands on the bottom on the side there and this is how i see the world i see
• 22:00 - 22:30 the world through matrices and dendrograms and things like that but we can see that there are clear signals being produced and there are clear divisions of people on a psychometric basis and how they engage with fashion brands and fashion brands in that light is sort of a clue as to who these people are and people say you know don't judge a book by its cover and i agree with that but books have covers for a reason they're a synopsis they're clue as to what's going to be inside just reading the book is much more
• 22:30 - 23:00 interesting than just reading a synopsis but one of the things that cambridge analytica realized was fashion brands are like the book cover right and so actually they are really useful in producing uh algorithms to identify how people think and how they feel so if we move to so this is a map that was also produced at cambridge analytica and it's a bit pixely so you might not be able to see this is the burberry check there these are people who engage
• 23:00 - 23:30 regularly with the burberry brand right and these are literal people actual people like these are actual people like you can phone them you can talk to them right and the reason i show you this is because the data that cambridge analytica was looking at didn't just look at brands in the aggregate like these are about people it's important to understand like every these are actual people actual humans engaging with burberry and
• 23:30 - 24:00 that engagement was put into a funnel that built those algorithms so if we all right cool um if we also move the sorry i feel like a conductor there stop yeah there okay cool so how is this data used fashion data was used to build ai models um to help steve bannon build his insurgency
• 24:00 - 24:30 and build the alt-right and the alt-right is an insurgency we used weaponized algorithms we used weaponized cultural narratives to undermine people and undermine the perception of reality um and fashion played a big part in that and it's really important to understand what that does to a democracy um and so if we imagine what is a democracy or what is you know uh you know what when we think
• 24:30 - 25:00 about an election we think about a candidate we think usually about you know somebody like me standing up on stage and talking to you right and this situation is a really good example if we're having like a town hall event if i'm a candidate standing for election you all hear exactly the same thing right you hear me you have a common perception of this reality right and you all see other people seeing what you're seeing and there might be journalists in the
• 25:00 - 25:30 audience there might be civil society in the audience there might be joe who just knows a thing or two and if i say something that's untrue if i lie to you if i deceive you somebody in the audience can say that's but what targeting and hyper personalization has done is i can now make myself invisible and so rather than standing here in this town square doing a town hall i can go
• 25:30 - 26:00 and whisper into each and every one of your ears and i can do that without anybody else seeing and i can do that i can whisper into your ear and sometimes i look like a newspaper sometimes i look like your friend sometimes i look like an expert you don't see who i am and
• 26:00 - 26:30 i can appear like anything to you with the benefit of having followed you for months on end listens to the conversations that you have reading your text messages reading your ims looking at what you like what you watch where you go do you take the bus do you take an uber where do you work how much money do you make by the way these are all the things that are in the terms and conditions of facebook by the way um and i can i can i can take all of
• 26:30 - 27:00 that information and seek to undermine your perception of reality by figuring out that one thing that makes you anxious that one thing that makes you worried that one thing that makes you paranoid and we have to take a step back and look at history the civil rights movement was fought to desegregate society and when we look at history there are a
• 27:00 - 27:30 lot of pretty profound problems that happen when we separate people right and so we often talk about segregation on racial grounds or ethnic grounds but under the the auspice of personalization algorithms are starting to re-segregate society right we we are creating echo chambers we are creating cognitive monocultures we are creating informational ghettos the segregation that is happening now online
• 27:30 - 28:00 it may not be on ethnic terms it may not be on religious terms it's on cognitive terms we are cognitively segregating our society under the auspice of hyper personalization and that's a problem because people can get hurt when we stop talking to one another and the real problem is that we've got tech companies who see cyberspace as a holy lawless frontier and i think that colonialism is a really good
• 28:00 - 28:30 way of understanding what is currently happening in silicon valley so they see the internet as a terra nova what what what europeans used to call terra nova not recognizing that people actually live in the quote new world and it wasn't new for them they would call it terra nova it's new territory that means we can do what we want and you know when we when we look at you know the the the first contact that
• 28:30 - 29:00 europeans made you had these men on ships tall ships wearing steel with guns with technology and they land on the beach and they meet indigenous people and those indigenous people go wow look at these people these big white men with their giant ships and their steel and their gun powder we've never seen anything like it these these must be you know divine messengers but they weren't
• 29:00 - 29:30 they were conquerors they were seeking to exploit people they were seeking to exploit resources you know in in in in that day it was gold right it was oil it was rubber it was human flesh and slaves um but but now um you know we've got we've got these silicon valley leaders these founders and
• 29:30 - 30:00 over the past 10 years there's been this narrative look at how amazing these companies are right look at look at all the amazing things that they can do they must be our saviors but in the same way that colonists turned out to not be saviors for indigenous people these companies are not our savior they are seeking to colonize us and you can look at what is happening even now right you look at what happened in myanmar with facebook's free basics
• 30:00 - 30:30 program right facebook goes into countries and creates an internet infrastructure that did not exist before and seeks to edit the internet it decides what is considered basic internet and not basic internet and these services got used to to rapidly spread disinformation about muslims in myanmar or in sri lanka and there are countless numbers of examples where people were literally murdered because of these
• 30:30 - 31:00 narratives and facebook's response was literally we are not perfect we are on a journey that was their response to people being murdered in myanmar and that's a real problem because facebook is emerging as the new east india company of the internet it is seeking to exploit us it is seeking to exploit resources and when
• 31:00 - 31:30 there's a problem it will outsource that or just leave and that's what colonizers do and this is this is dangerous because the resource that they are seeking is data there's data about you and as soon as when we look at history and we look at what happens when people fall into narratives about being products when people become products we have the slave trade
• 31:30 - 32:00 we have the sex trades we have the organ trade and we are now at the precipice of creating a data trade where who you are as a person your identity is a product and you look at the really insidious language that silicon valley uses they they say oh no no no no these aren't mass surveillance networks they're communities that you know the the the the data that we're using is data exhaust or digital breadcrumbs as if your
• 32:00 - 32:30 identity is a waste product and that's dangerous because if we imagine ourselves going into the future right this is not just about ads on facebook right people now are starting to put ai into their homes right you've got people putting in alexa or google home facebook now has some camera that you can put in your living room that connects to the ad network if you want to do that um and if we imagine what is the direction
• 32:30 - 33:00 five years down the road 10 years down the road 20 years down the road when all of these physical ai systems start interconnecting where you get up and your house knows and your living room thinks about you and your kitchen thinks about you and your bathroom thinks about you and your kids toys think about them think about your kids whilst they're playing and when you get into your car your car that talks to your house and thinks about you and then talks to the street and the street thinks about you
• 33:00 - 33:30 and for the first time being human will be fundamentally different because for the first time we will be sitting in an environment that watches us that thinks about us independence of other humans and what happens when judgment calls are made what happens when ai treats you not as a person not as you but as
• 33:30 - 34:00 something to be optimized right and it can be as simple as the street decides that you should be late for work because you haven't paid for premium access or it can be as perverse as your house decides that you shouldn't see the news today you shouldn't see anything and the real problem is who gets to decide how you get optimized or even should you be optimized the difference between facebook
• 34:00 - 34:30 or cambridge analytica all these tech companies and the nsa right the national the the the the surveillance organization for the united states government is quite simple but it's quite profound the nsa their targets are extremists our spies our foreign countries you are collateral collection for them on facebook you are the target um and you know we are building
• 34:30 - 35:00 addictive environments and they're intentionally addictive you think about instagram right and you're swiping if you think about slot machine it's called ludic loops it's a precursor to addiction repetitive tasks that give you an occasional reward make you addicted to and these companies know that and that's why they design user experiences to be addicted and the the my concern is that we are on the precipice
• 35:00 - 35:30 of building a dystopia just so that we can make people click ads i think that's up cambridge analytica was just the canary in the coal mine when we on you know when we unpack what is a weapon or more importantly in my view what is a weapon of mass destruction a weapon of mass destruction is an
• 35:30 - 36:00 indiscriminate weapon that causes chaos and grievous harm to an entire society that endures for generations and cambridge analytica detonated a weapon of mass destruction an informational weapon of mass destruction on facebook and facebook did nothing to stop it facebook was aware and they did nothing to stop it and what the cambridge analytica story really shows is that we cannot
• 36:00 - 36:30 keep relying on the promises the apologies the good intentions of tech companies to protect citizens you and your kids because they have failed far too many times to deserve our trust you know the first thing that facebook did when they found out that the story was coming out is they immediately threatened to sue the guardian for defamation they said none of it's true at the same time they sent me a letter saying it's all true but that means
• 36:30 - 37:00 we're going to report you to the police not realizing that i'd already reported facebook to the police and when they realized that they couldn't threaten or intimidate you know the guardian or the new york times or me with legal threats they decided to try to deflect and change the narrative and so they banned me um a whistleblower off of facebook and instagram and anything else that uses facebook or
• 37:00 - 37:30 instagram i can no longer use um and i say that not just not to you know not as a boohoo story well woe is me i can't you know look at well-curated pictures of avocado toast anymore but i say that because it reveals my ban as a whistleblower reveals the unrestrained power that technology companies have over users when in a person's entire online
• 37:30 - 38:00 existence can be so abruptly eliminated from existence and there was no due process there was no appeal it was a unilateral decision taken by facebook and we have to ask a question because what happens to our democracy when a tech company can just delete people at will who dissent or who scrutinize or who speak out and it was this unrestrained power
• 38:00 - 38:30 and what happened that allowed facebook to delete me off of the internet i mean literally i can't i can it's so hard to use the internet now because you wouldn't believe how much how many websites connect facebook it's it's crazy you start so you only start recognizing how pervasive this company is when you no longer could use it but so we can't rely on tech companies to solve this problem we also can't rely on the military because the military
• 38:30 - 39:00 you know they don't hire people like me right i've got neon hair and i run my mouth and i'm always late and i don't salute unless it's you know late at night after a grinder message or two um and you know that was tmi uh and you know frankly do we really want the military engaging with our culture you know do we
• 39:00 - 39:30 do we really want the military to be sliding into our dms once in a while saying hey the army thinks you shouldn't be looking at that probably not because that sounds pretty scary too and so all of that said that's why i'm here because it's actually the cultural sector who we need we need you what i just showed you before on that graph you know that music the art the fashion
• 39:30 - 40:00 can tell you lots of stuff about people right that that it moves people that it reveals their identity you guys already know that that's intuitive like i've just you know essentially mansplained your industry to you the graph um but that's because you work in culture and you understand its power but so did cambridge analytica and the thing that i really want to say to you guys is that cambridge analytica exploited
• 40:00 - 40:30 the cultural narratives that these sectors were putting out right cambridge analytica exploited toxic masculinity it exploited feelings of shame and feelings of failure and you know unattainable these these narratives that are completely unattainable that are put out on a day-to-day basis by fashion by music by media and that was exploited so when we talk
• 40:30 - 41:00 about things like the need for diversity right and the representation of minorities or people of color you know so that you know a black person or a lesbian woman or person in a wheelchair can see themselves in the narratives that you create you know we we talk about it as if that's the value we are past that point because we need new narratives in our culture not just so that a minority or person of
• 41:00 - 41:30 color can see themselves we need it so that you know straight white men in alabama can see a person of color once in a while right we need you guys to do a better job at cultivating our cultural narratives for our own national security and for the preservation of our democracy the shame the colonialism the racial biases the toxic masculinity
• 41:30 - 42:00 the fat shaming that this industry puts out is and has been putting out for decades is exactly what cambridge analytica sought to exploit when they were seeking to undermine people and manipulate them and russia exploited it cambridge analytica exploited it brexit exploited it bannon exploited it and who knows who will continue to exploit it right when we when we talk about cultural
• 42:00 - 42:30 warfare it is warfare and culture and you guys make culture so that's why we need cultural defense and cultural narratives are the arsenal to defend ourselves in that cultural war we all make and define these narratives and like i showed you in the graph conservatives a lot of conservatives and even people in the alt-right
• 42:30 - 43:00 shop at your stores buy into your brands and get consumed by the narratives that you immerse them in and the thing that i want to say is that there is no difference between your customers and voters they are the same people so i hope that you guys will start conversations with your customers and that begins by how you craft your
• 43:00 - 43:30 brands how you craft your imagery how you craft your clothes how you show your values because we depend on you guys frankly not only to make our culture but also to protect our culture we are in a cultural war you guys have created the battlefield and is up to you if trump or if brexit
• 43:30 - 44:00 or if the alt-right either become crux or become chanel of our political age the technology sector may live by zuckerberg's mantra of move fast and break things but society is being broken in the process and so it is time for culture makers to step in and hopefully to move fast
• 44:00 - 44:30 so that we can fix things so fix these narratives start by engaging your customers challenge them make them think make them feel make them understand show them a reality for once and you have to we have to because if we lose our culture we will lose our humanity in the process so that's my challenge to you thank you