William Davies on Cambridge Analytica
If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.
.. It’s true that Cambridge Analytica was recruited to work on the Trump campaign, though not necessarily because of its Machiavellian brilliance. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, was on the board of the company at the time, and probably tossed it a contract for some data analysis so as to keep things between friends.
.. First, there is no firm evidence that Cambridge Analytica provided consultancy services to any of the major players in the EU referendum of 2016. Nix initially bragged in an article that it had, but confessed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in February this year that the article had been drafted by a ‘slightly overzealous PR consultant’.
.. Second, there is not – and cannot be – any evidence that it swung the election for Trump (by the same token, it isn’t strictly provable that it didn’t), though unsurprisingly the company claims otherwise. This still appears painful for Clinton herself to accept. Interviewed for one of the Channel 4 reports, she speaks of Cambridge Analytica’s ‘massive propaganda effort [which] affected the thought processes of voters’. And yet data analysis is at the heart of modern political campaigning. Clinton, after all, preferred to study data on Michigan from the comfort of her Brooklyn campaign office than actually to visit the state, even as panicking Michigan Democrats pleaded with her to spend time there in the final weeks. If things had turned out differently, there would no doubt have been star-struck puff pieces on the bleeding edge data analytics that were behind the election of America’s first female president.
.. no one, surely, will be surprised to discover that data collected in one arena is put to work in another. Using data in novel (and secretive) ways is virtually the governing principle of the digital economy – what Shoshana Zuboff has termed ‘surveillance capitalism’, and Nick Srnicek calls ‘platform capitalism’.
.. It’s worth remembering that throughout the 1990s, the internet was viewed as a threat to capitalism as much as an opportunity. Napster was the iconic example. It wasn’t clear where the profits lay, once information was abundant and individual anonymity was the norm. What changed, as Zuboff and Srnicek both explore in different ways, was that the internet began to be treated as a surveillance device of potentially global proportions: cheaper, better or free services were provided on condition that the ‘user’ would be tracked in everything they did and anchored in their offline identity. The fact that most tech giants made – and in Uber’s case still make – vast losses for the first few years of their existence is integral to this strategy. People must be lured into using a service and then kept using it by whatever means necessary; only later is this power converted into revenue.
.. The second aspect of the recent scandal is grubbier but ultimately less significant. If its own sales pitch is to be believed (an ‘if’ that grows larger by the day), Cambridge Analytica likes to play dirty.
.. Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically different from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics.
.. a displacement of horror that really stems from something deeper. Part of that must lie with Trump and Trumpism. A terrible event must surely have been delivered by equally terrible means.
.. Cambridge Analytica looks conveniently like a smoking gun, primarily because it has repeatedly bragged that it is one. Nix and Turnbull do for the events of 2016 what ‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre, former Goldman Sachs banker, and Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, former boss of RBS, did for the banking crisis of 2008, providing grotesque personalities on which to focus anger and alarm.
.. But as with the financial crisis, the circus risks distracting from the real institutional and political questions, in this case concerning companies such as Facebook and the model of capitalism that tolerates, facilitates and even celebrates their extensive and sophisticated forms of data harvesting and analysis.
.. Just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to be levelled at Silicon Valley should be ‘leave it in our heads.’ The real villain here is an expansionary economic logic that insists on inspecting ever more of our thoughts, feelings and relationships. The best way to thwart this is the one Silicon Valley fears the most: anti-trust laws. Broken into smaller pieces, these companies would still be able to monitor us, but from disparate perspectives that couldn’t easily (or secretly) be joined up
Populists of the World Unite
Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon’s starring role at the recent convention of France’s far-right National Front is the latest indication that a transatlantic populist alliance is forming. Can it be stopped?
PARIS – In 1965, Henry Kissinger wrote a book called The Troubled Partnership, in which he examined the tensions affecting the transatlantic alliance during the Cold War. A stable international order, he argued, demanded the leadership of the United States – a powerful model for democracy in the world – supported by strong ties with Europe. Kissinger probably never would have imagined that, less than six decades later, the US would be playing precisely the opposite role, as a new, darker version of the transatlantic alliance emerges.
.. Even Germany has, to some extent, fallen victim to populist forces. To be sure, a new grand coalition government – comprising Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the Social Democratic Party – has been formed. But it took more than five months for the parties to agree, and the largest opposition party is now the far-right Alternative for Germany. In a country that seemed to have been vaccinated against populism by its Nazi history, this is a particularly distressing development. Democracy is more fragile than it may seem, and it can never be taken for granted.
.. So how can we stem the populist tide? For starters, political elites on both sides of the Atlantic who still believe in liberal democracy must recognize that it is they who are responsible for populism’s rise, owing to their failure to respond adequately to the concerns of the electorate. They must work tirelessly to find real solutions to the problems, from inequality to migration, that have fueled support for populist forces. Those solutions must address not only technical challenges, but also citizens’ feelings – skillfully tapped by populists – of disenfranchisement and loss of identity.
.. it is Macron – not Le Pen and her rebranded party – who holds the key to the future of democracy in France. If he fails to make the system work for more of the electorate, France could well go the way of the US, setting a dangerous precedent for the rest of Europe.
A Hawk Takes Flight
Now that John Bolton has finally ascended from the limbo of the green room to the Valhalla of the White House, we need to settle the first question of his tenure: Is he a “neocon” or a “paleocon”?
.. Foreign policy conservatives can be grouped into four broad categories. The first group, the genuine paleocons, are the oldest and least influential: Their lineage goes back to the antiwar conservatism of the 1930s, and to postwar Republicans who regarded our Cold War buildup as a big mistake
The last paleocon to play a crucial role in U.S. politics was the Ohio Republican Robert Taft, who opposed NATO and became a critic of the Korean War. Pat Buchanan tried to revive paleoconservatism in the 1990s; The American Conservative magazine and the Cato Institute carry the torch in intellectual debates. But the tendency’s only politically significant heir right now is Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
.. even Paul, wary of the label, would probably describe himself instead as a realist, linking himself to the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush — internationalist, stability-oriented, committed to the Pax Americana but skeptical of grand crusades
.. neoconservatives, a group best defined as liberal anti-Communists who moved right in the 1970s as the Democratic Party moved left, becoming more hawkish and unilateralist but retaining a basic view that American power should be used for moral purpose, to spread American ideals.
.. Thus neoconservatives despised the Nixon White House’s realpolitik; they cheered Ronald Reagan’s anti-Communism; they chafed under George H.W. Bush’s realism and backed humanitarian interventions under Democratic presidents; and most famously they regarded the Iraq War as a chance to democratize the Middle East.
.. they became the natural scapegoats …
… Even though some of the most disastrous Iraq decisions were made by members of the fourth conservative faction, the pure hawks, the group to which John Bolton emphatically belongs.
The hawks share the neocons’ aggressiveness and the realists’ wariness of nation building; they also have a touch of paleoconservatism, embracing “America First” without its non-interventionist implications.
.. The default response to any challenge should be military escalation, the imposition of America’s will by force — and if one dangerous regime is succeeded by another, you just go in and kill the next round of bad guys, too.
.. Donald Trump’s vision, though, promised a different combination, mixing a revived paleoconservatism — hence his NATO skepticism, his right-wing “come home, America” pose — with a realist desire for a Russian détente and a hawkish attitude toward terrorism.
.. Trump made his antipathy to neoconservatives obvious, and they returned the sentiment: The most anti-Trump voices on the right belong to the democracy promoters of the Bush era.
In Trump year one, the paleocon-ish elements in his circle — Steve Bannon, most prominently — were sidelined by H. R. McMaster and James Mattis, and Trump ended up with a realist-leaning foreign policy run by businessmen and generals, with Nikki Haley occasionally sounding neoconservative notes at the U.N.
.. But Trump didn’t get along with McMaster and Rex Tillerson — and he clearly thinks he might like hawks better. So now we have an administration in which both paleoconservatism and neoconservatism are sidelined, and straight-up hawkishness is institutionally ascendant as it has rarely been in modern presidencies — save in the Peak Cheneyism following 9/11.
.. Mattis’s military form of realism might have a restraining influence over Trump, and Trump’s bluff and bluster might not readily translate into okaying the war-on-all-fronts strategy that Bolton has tended to endorse.
But a foreign policy team managed by hawks, untouched by neoconservative idealism and cut loose from Trump’s paleocon tendencies, seems more likely than not to give us what the hawkish persuasion always wants: more wars, and soon.
‘You should do it’: Trump officials encouraged George Papadopoulos’s foreign outreach, documents show
As late as December 2016, as President-elect Trump was preparing to take office, Papadopoulos tried to serve as a conduit for the defense minister of Greece, transmitting what he said was a proposal for a strategic alliance from the Russian-allied Greek official that was reviewed by Bannon and Flynn, then in line to be national security adviser.
.. Papadopoulos is the only Trump associate known to have told prosecutors he had advance warning the Russians held emails that could be damaging to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. A London-based professor told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails
.. The documents also indicate that amid Papadopoulos’s advocacy of closer ties to Russia, he retained access to top officials — even after Trump’s victory.
.. In July 2015, Papadopoulos contacted then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski about his interest in joining Trump’s campaign,
.. In December 2015, Papadopoulos went to work for the campaign of neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who was then challenging Trump for the GOP nomination.
After several months, Papadopoulos reached out again to the Trump campaign to inform them he would be leaving the flagging Carson campaign.
“I wanted to let you know that I stopped working as Ben Carson’s principal foreign policy adviser. I’d be interested in getting on board with the Trump team. Is the team looking to expand?” Papadopoulos wrote to Glassner early in March 2016.
At the time, Trump was surging in the polls, and the real estate developer was under increasing pressure to name foreign policy advisers to his team.
.. Later that month, Trump himself named Papadopoulos among a list of five people advising his campaign on foreign policy during a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. “Excellent guy,” the candidate said.
At the end of March, Papadopoulos attended a meeting of Trump’s newly named national security advisory group at the candidate’s not-yet-opened hotel in Washington. After introducing himself, the young adviser announced he could organize a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump, according to court documents.
In May, Papadopoulos forwarded to campaign officials a note he received from Timofeev informing him that Russian Foreign Ministry officials were open to a Trump visit. That idea was batted down by campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who emailed his associate Rick Gates: “We need to communicate that DT is not doing these trips.”
.. The emails show Papadopoulos was the first to alert the campaign to al-Sissi’s interest in meeting and that he then connected top campaign leadership to the Egyptian Embassy.