Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

The Zuck then apologized for this undocumented API access leak and FB subsequently patched it out of their platform. It had nothing to do with running ads. We shouldn't let time paper over the details here.

[1] "It also gathered data from their Facebook friends, which reportedly resulted in Kogan having access to the data of millions of Facebook profiles". https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...

In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:

They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.

For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.

You have been brainwashed. Or was it Russia as well?

Everything started much longer ago. You can't go along in life just assuming everything will converge to some whig paradise.

Claim: Brainwash was very successful in Brazil. Reality: The government in power for 12 years turned out to be as corrupt as any they had previously criticized, generating a massive institutional crisis.

Data promised to improve lifes, it has done so in many aspects, but also has made countless things worse.

From physical and digital products squeezing the last cent instead of improving user's experience, algorithms getting every single second of your attention, from deciding the kind of music and tv shows getting produced, to the kind of dull ever repeating style of everything really on every corner of the planet from hotels to restaurant and menus it's all a data-driven conversion to the mean in boring-and-safe or money-squeezing fashion.

Data has entered sports and transformed them from the times of money ball. Basket, soccer, football, are all much less enjoyable and creative because again, it's all about applying data.

And yes, data has entered politics at a level it could not before computing power and data collection and our understanding of human manipulation didn't reach those levels.

It has understood you only need 50%+1 of the votes and efforts to get 50%+2 are a waste and less efficient.

So politicians, especially in weaker democracies characterized by winner-takes-all mechanics, are incentivized to be divisive, not representing the majority of the citizens.

Again, you only want 50%+1 of the votes, if you trying to get a single more you're dispersing your efforts and decreasing the chances to win.

Computers can't replicate on their own, so they need entire corporations/societies to build them. A computer's reproductive locus of control is at the corporation/society level. Human individuals get sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressure and will eventually integrate (ENIAC -> desktop -> laptop -> smartphone -> wearables -> neural interface). Today it merely influences what you see on the phone, eventually it will be behavior-changing signals from the datacenter delivered straight into the brain. A similar thing happened in our evolutionary past when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.

In the long run, this cannot be fought because it's the physical tendency of matter to gather and form more complex things. There is however a second path with equally strong evolutionary precedent, which is for the human individual to integrate vertically by taking the computer in as an endosymbiont, thereby preserving the human's individual sovereignty / bodily integrity. We can pull down the computer's reproductive locus of control to the individual level, instead of being pulled up by it to become part of a larger organism at the corporation/society level. In practice, this requires miniaturizing fab tech so that each person can manufacture a custom computer from raw materials using a fridge-sized chip fab + 3D printer home appliance. We will obviously not get there immediately, but the will exists, and attempts to diffuse fab tech are already underway (such as https://fab2.com/, which started as a DIY attempt to manufacture chips at home https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/).

It's worth noting that any evolutionary path may fail, especially the horizontally integrating kind because it must solve the very hard problem of constituent individuals becoming less likely to reproduce as a result of the environment changing in the emerging superorganism's favor. Some people think they can sidestep this problem by automating humans out of the computer production loop entirely, which removes integration pressure and creates a new digital species. Best of luck to Elon and various other mostly Chinese companies making the attempt. But that's an extremely risky bet, and it's basically giving up on yourself/humanity. We ought to attempt all available paths at once instead of putting too much faith in any single one. And that includes preserving pockets of pre-digital civilization where life happens without much technology at all, rather than dragging everybody along.

Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.

Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used, or if personal information about citizens is obtained illegitimately, then they could constitute crimes in their own right. Whether the crime is aggravated by its intent to subvert the democratic institution would be a legitimate question, but without the accessory crimes, I don't think political campaigns from non citizen actors are themselves illegal, just icky.

I think people wanted to believe there was some external hand at work, and it suited CA to pretend they were more capable than they were.

Cummings spoke about using normal Facebook ad segmentation to target some demographics.

(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).

But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.

Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!