Who Are We on the World Wide Web, Spiders or Flies?
The year is 1992. Kids skate around clad in check and plaid, jeans ripped, grunge blaring. For Prince Charles and Diana, the fairy-tale is over. Meanwhile, the West gets it’s happily ever after. The Maastricht treaty is signed forming the EU; NAFTA fuses the economies of Canada, Mexico and the US; the Soviet Union had collapsed Christmas day 1991; and to top it all, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Beijing. The West was supersizing, and yes, it wanted fries with that.
Somewhere out in the American hinterland, Bill Clinton was on the campaign trail. It wasn’t going well. Clinton was behind in the polls, and swimming in scandal: marijuana use (“I didn’t inhale”), secret meetings with communists, and accusations of philandering all tarred his reputation. When the Democratic convention opened, Clinton was third behind incumbent George Bush Snr. and Billionaire independent Ross Perot. Bush rode high after victory in the Gulf, but with the economy in recession and the Soviet Union defeated, the glory of war was no longer an electoral panacea. Still Bush was a military hero and the last of the GI generation, Clinton was damaged goods. He could win the nomination but lose the war.
All was not lost though. Clinton had a secret weapon: the focus group.
Initial polls described an elitist philanderer who smoked pot and dodged the draft. When Clinton won the nomination, he presented the film: The Man from Hope. It told a simple story of a man from Hope, Arkansas, an average town in middle America, who against all odds headed to the Presidency. It was a heart-warming story for the whole family. It was true, but it was also pure Hollywood.
Hilary Clinton suggested the finale to his acceptance speech “I end tonight where it all began for me: I still believe in a place called Hope.”
Clinton jumped 16 points, putting him in the lead. Ross Perot dropped out. The focus groups had been right.
I AM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE
Focus groups began in the 1950s. Famously used by Betty Crocker, when grappling with selling cake mix to housewives. They hired Ernst Dichter, an avid follower of Freud and psychoanalysis, and master of public relations (PR), who had coined the term focus group. In this intimate setting, the women confessed their guilt using such products (which required only oil and water). Put simply, prepared foods made them feel inadequate. Baking was “in a sense like giving birth”. “Add an egg,” Dichter said — a symbol of fertility — and women felt more involved.
The product hadn’t changed, just the perception.
Dichter viewed people as a fervent sea of untapped irrational and unconscious emotions. Previously, market research sold the utilitarian aspects of a product. The need. Dichter sold desire. As he wrote:
“You would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do…What people actually spend their money on in most instances are psychological differences, illusory brand images… If you let somebody talk long enough, you can read between the lines to find out what he really means.”
Spreading from California, rampant individualism was replacing collective identities such as class or religion. Psychologist Arthur Maslow saw this as a path towards “self-actualisation”, where a person fulfilled all their basic needs, such as food, family and self-esteem, and realised their full potential, freed from the shackles of society.
Maslow said, “Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” The world of PR watched eagerly as Maslow conducted a survey analysing values and lifestyles (VALS). People were asked to respond to statements such as “I’d say I’m rebelling against the way I was brought up…” or “My Greatest achievements are ahead of me…”.
Amongst the data, patterns emerged of groups based upon the choices the individuals made, as discreet as the classes which had preceded them, as well as a contingent of self-actualised individuals cutting across the economic spectrum.
Believers — Low-income consumer; conservative; predictable; with lifestyles centred on family, community and nation.
Thinkers — High-income consumers, motivated by ideals, generally well-educated professionals who prefer leisure at home.
Innovators — High-income consumers, cutting edge, their image is defined by taste and character.
Advertisers began to tailor messages to certain lifestyles, increasing sales. The public saw themselves as consumers, less bound by group affiliations. Throughout the 1980s unions declined, and the politics of Reagan and Thatcher venerated the individual. The Left had relied upon organised labour and collective action to secure votes. The world had moved on.
In 1992, Philip Gould, a successful advertising exec, worked alongside Peter Mandelson in the British Labour party campaign team. He sensed voters wanted choice, divorced from the “minority agenda of the emerging metropolitan left, of militant rights in welfare, race and gender”. His research concluded, “everybody wants to be middle-class these days”, with a growing hostility towards benefits recipients, branded “scroungers” — who made up Labour’s heartlands.
Gould and Mandelson implored leader Neil Kinnock to cut taxes for the middle-classes, as the Conservative party under John Major promised. Shadow Chancellor John Smith refused. Afterall Labour was ahead in the polls.
Major was slammed for his fixation with taxes. Political soothsayers prophesied a long overdue Conservative loss, but bizarrely Major seemed calm and collected. Like Gould, he anticipated the mood of the country
For the fourth election in a row, Labour lost.
Gould packed up and went to work for Clinton. He made none of the same mistakes. The Democrats were rebranded as the New Democrats. The era of collective action was over.
The Man and The Message
Clinton, the son of a travelling salesman, was following in his father’s footsteps. His product was the message, and the message was simple: “It’s the economy, stupid”. He pledged to cut taxes for the middle-class, promising a period of economic prosperity. Bush Snr. made a similar pledge in 1988 — “Read my lips: no new taxes” — however, the Democrat-controlled Congress forced him to renege. Clinton lampooned his empty words in a TV ad late in the campaign, asking America “Can we afford four more years?”
At heart Clinton was an old-style Democrat, wanting to help the poorest Americans with government programs, the tax cuts were the price of admission. Clinton won the Presidency but was in for a surprise. The budget deficit derided throughout his campaign was higher than expected. The New Democrats had to make an old choice, cut social spending or cut middle-class taxes. Clinton rose taxes and helped the poor, the people he had known growing up. Middle America was furious.
The vicissitudes of political life are cruel, and Clinton’s popularity plummeted. In the 1994 mid-terms, Newt Gingrich went on the offensive calling a Clinton a “tax and spend” liberal, the Republican party got behind him. The resultant ‘Republican Revolution’ saw the GOP gain both the House and the Senate. The former had not been held for over forty years.
Clinton was shook-up. Terrified, he hired Dick Morris, a friend and pollster as campaign manager. Clinton’s communications director George Stephanopoulos said, “Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the president.” Like John Smith in the Labour Party, Stephanopoulos and the White House team resisted the new politics every step of the way.
However, Morris was as inexorable as the tide.
He hired an old friend, the bespectacled Dick Cheney look-a-like Douglas Schoen. Unfortunately, Schoen came as a pair, and Morris hated his partner Mark Penn, who made the bookish Schoen look sociable. Years before Penn had humiliated Morris in front of a client, and he had not forgotten.
Penn was regarded as brilliant, but absentminded. Yet his bumbling and pudgy veneer belied a razor-sharp mind. His speciality was chopping up populations like a cleaver through steak into digestible bites. His CV listed Texaco and Avis, and he saw Clinton as little different. If politics could be commodified for the masses, then Penn was the man to do it.
Schoen had worked with former Clinton rival and ex-Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, “Our polling then showed you as a middle-of-the-road Democrat” Schoen told the President, “Now you have to get back to the centre.”
Policy ideas trickled in. Crime ads aimed to shed the light-touch liberal image. A balanced budget showed fiscal prudence. Clinton accepted it as a necessary evil. “I have to do this” he lamented. The White House staff saw it as selling out; killing any policy they disliked, and only reacting to the flavour of the week. What was needed was a new recipe.
Penn pitched a “neuropersonality poll” similar to the VALS survey. Morris reluctantly agreed. Thousands of voters were asked: “Do you go to parties? … Are you happy with your current situation? … Do you consider yourself shy?”. The only political question was if they were sold on 73-year-old Republican Bob Dole, or if they were open to change.
Penn presented his results to the President in his soft and understated tone. The economy was not a major concern he said, instead a cacophony of small-fry issues such as imposing order in schools or banning tobacco advertising aimed at children was important. “Clinton voters watched MTV; Dole voters preferred Larry King. Clinton people liked rap, classical and Top 40 music, watched Friends and felt unsafe; Dole people owned guns, watched Home Improvement and listened to ’70s music. Clinton did well with intuitive types and emotion-based people rather than fact-based people.” Swing voters were thinker not feelers, in search of specific policies, not grand narratives.
Penn went further, grouping swing voters. Swing I voters (29%) were moderate left-leaning independents, who needed only a nudge. Swing II voters (25%) were right-leaning; tough on fiscal prudence and taxes. To them, welfare was political poison. Clinton needed 60 per cent of the swing I and 30 per cent of the swing II.
Neoliberal economics was smothered in family values and social justice, the Frankenstein patchwork was called the ‘Third Way’. Policies such as the V-chip (which blocked violent or sexual TV content), environmental protection, and balancing the budget became the focus. Each policy and advert was run by focus groups and mall tests — a technique Penn pioneered at AT&T — till they were laser-guided to the desired voting group. This was precision politics, or as Penn argued “We have this Balkanization of issues right now, where there’s no single dominant issue. So, in a lot of ways, you reach people in little slices.”
Penn was right. In his State of the Union address, Clinton’s biggest applause didn’t go to grand proclamations or insightful quotes, but a statement over enforcing school uniforms: “If it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require students to wear school uniforms.”
Powerful stuff…
Robert Reich, the then Labour Secretary, was sceptical. The abandonment of traditional left-wing policies in favour of courting unconscious fears and desires was a grave mistake he warned. Politics was about winning the populace over with the power of your argument and the strength of your principles. He asked the President “What’s the point of getting re-elected if you have no mandate to do anything once you are re-elected?” Clinton replied simply “What is the point of having a mandate if you can’t get re-elected? Isn’t the aim to get re-elected?”
Politics was flipped on its head. The Leader of the Free World was now being led by suburban swing voters on a trip to the mall. Even foreign policy was polled, including military activities in Bosnia.
Clinton rode high in the polls; the government shutdown was even blamed on the Republicans. Dole was a dinosaur, Clinton’s American was “On the Right Track to the 21st Century”.
The election was a landslide.
In the UK, Mandelson and Gould had observed intently the new tactics of policy triangulation, focus groups, and perpetual polling. John Smith sadly died in 1994, he had replaced Kinnock as the leader, the old Labour party died with him. Fresh-faced and eager, Tony Blair stepped up. He dropped the party’s anachronistic commitment to public ownership and focused on middle England. The support of Scotland, Wales and Northern England taken for granted.
A raft of survey’s and polling cut swing voters into bite-size portions: ‘Mondeo man’ and ‘Worcester woman’ were the prosperous and self-actualised classes, more concerned with getting on than the finer points of politics. Blair followed Clinton’s Third Way, taking phrases wholesale from the Clinton campaign “we’re giving a hand up, not a hand out” described a harsher stance on welfare on both sides of the Pond. Blair christened the party ‘New Labour’ in the ilk of the ‘New Democrats’.
Blair would define a generation. Politics had changed for good.
The Map and The Territory
In his 1981 book ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, post-modernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard presciently described the modern era. “We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”
The simulacrum, a copy without an original, is “the truth which conceals there is none. The Simulacrum is true.” Once objects sought to represent an aspect of reality, the uniqueness of a crown or a cross embodied its significance. Then, with industrialisation, mass production demoted the simulacrum to a commodity, the original identical to all objects on the production line. Finally, we arrived at the modern age, where the connection between an original and copy disintegrates to the point the simulacra precede the original. The simulacrum is true. Products were once created to solve needs, now advertisers invented needs to sell products until the adverts became a product in themselves. If you buy this, you’ll be happy, and you have to be happy, or so it goes.
In politics, power had been used to enact policies, now policy was invented to gain power. Politicians became the simulacra of public opinion, like shadows on the wall. A mould ready to be filled with whatever values and ideas the focus groups and polls suggested.
As Baudrillard writes, “‘True power’ — which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force… is nothing but a social demand… the object of the law of supply and demand… Completely purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption. Its spark has disappeared, only the fiction of a political universe remains.”
A balanced budget or military intervention were not pursued because of any real-world economic or foreign policy reasons but done cynically to attract a narrow-band of voters. They were informed by the media, who had commodified news based on the viewing habits of the public. Fiction preceded fact. That was if anyone could still tell the difference.
Baudrillard recites Borges fable. A great Empire commissioned its’ finest cartographers to create a map so detailed it covered the territory entirely. As the Empire declines the map frays, “returning to the substance of the soil”. “Today” he argues “… the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is… the map that precedes the territory… whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there.”
We mistook the map for the territory. Now as the real-world rots, we ask, can we even tell the difference?
Imagine a real bank robbery and a simulated one, Baudrillard asks. You’re likely to get shot if you attempt either one. Do the same for a real election and a fake one? A real crisis and the fabricated? Need or desire? You can’t. It feels the same, yet everything is different.
Take 9/11. Nineteen Islamists brought American to its knees and started the War on Terror. As the West combed through the mountains of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, who understood the symbolic war, was in Pakistan, a western ally. Iraq followed, under the fiction of WMDs. Several presidential aides accused Bush and Cheney of plotting the Iraq War as retaliation for 9/11 — “they were talking about it on 9/12”, despite briefings which explained Iraq was unlikely to be responsible.
The wars came first, the reasons came later.
The internet allowed the dissection of 9/11 like no other public disaster. A wealth of information fractured opinions, till stories began to be about opinions of 9/11, as opposed to the facts of the event. Everybody had an opinion, and everybody had an opinion on everyone’s opinion.
Was this the result of Islamic extremism or Western provocation? Or was it caused by corporations and secret cabals plotting for their profit? Or the military-industrial complex shoring up its interests? Or the natural conclusion of globalisation and democratic freedom? “All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation,” Baudrillard called it hyperreality, where the truth lay in the eye of the beholder, or the mind of a liar.
The Puppet Master
In post-Soviet Russia the communist utopia was dead. Under President Yeltsin, a capitalist class devoured the public sector. One Russian complained:
“Over the last 20 years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.”
“There is a puppet master in this country who long ago privatized the political system, puts pressure on the media and tries to manipulate citizens’ opinions,” Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov confessed in 2011.
He spoke of Vladislav Surkov — the grey cardinal — Putin’s former right-hand man, and the architect of modern Russia. The CIA is blamed for countless conspiracies, its name inspires paranoia. Alone, Surkov seems just as potent, clad in an unassuming charcoal suit, his sweep of hair reminiscent of a middle-aged accountant. But Surkov is far more than a puppet master. He is a conductor, a theatre director (as his Instagram profile read), a political artist playing with the truth. For Surkov reality is not the canvas, but the paint. The canvas is our minds.
He is cloaked in mystery, even his name is up for grabs. Is he Vladislav Surkov a powerful Russian official, or Aslambek Dudayev a young boy born in Chechnya, or perhaps Nathan Dubovitsky the controversial author? Maybe he is none of these things, or all of them, or something else entirely. Officially he was born in Lipetsk Oblast, other sources say Shali, Chechnya. Surkov himself stated his father was an ethnic Chechen and his mother a southern Russian, and that his first five years were spent in Chechnya.
At school, he was regarded as a brilliant and popular student, marked by his long hair and velvet trousers. In one essay he wrote: “The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky claimed that life (after the communist revolution) is good and it’s good to be alive… However, this did not stop Mayakovsky from shooting himself several years later.” Surkov’s ironic humour stayed, even if the long hair didn’t. Always a knowing glint present in his dark and piercing stare.
Following school, Surkov had a variety of careers. Officially serving in a Soviet artillery regiment in Hungary, a fact contradicted by the Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov who stated Surkov served in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. He moved in the performance art circles of Moscow. His associates included Oleg Kulik who gnashed his teeth and growled like a dog — ‘the post-soviet man’ — German Vinogradov who walked the streets naked, or Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe, Russia’s first drag artist who sauntered through the avant-garde parties dressed as characters ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Hitler — who he named the great symbols of the 20th century. He pushed the real identity to the point it collapsed, where the simulacrum subverts itself.
Cynical and cunning, Surkov wormed his way into PR, shocking the newly capitalist society with adverts flaunting extreme wealth. Surkov switched careers and masters almost as easily as he swapped ideologies. Beliefs were costumes, personas to be inhabited for a scene before being cast aside. Later Surkov bled into Russia itself. As Peter Pomerantsev writes, “[it] can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime”. Or as Surkov tweeted recently “I’m not a fascist, but I play one on TV”.
In the late 2000s, a book crept onto the market called Almost Zero, allegedly written by Nathan Dubovitsky. It told the story of Yegor Samokhodov, a self-serving PR man. Yegor, like Surkov, was born to a single mother, loitered around bohemian artists, before his rise into the slippery world of PR. He becomes a ‘Blackbooker’, buying the works of downtrodden poets and artists and attributing them to a regional governor. Then he bribes a newspaper editor to slur the governor with stories regarding chemicals in the air harming local children.
The publishing houses and PR firms inhabit an underworld of ghost-writing and literary subversion; fighting turf wars over the rights to certain authors. But amongst it all, Yegor stands “quiet”. One-character comments on him:
“Your apathy isn’t a product of weakness or stupidity … It’s the strength of your will. … You are indifferent and undaunted by everything, … everything around you is insignificant and meaningless. Only something truly grandiose can enchant you. Something so huge that perhaps the entire world will seem tiny.”
This is the man of tomorrow. Surkov’s Superman.
The Kremlin denies Surkov wrote the book, although he wrote the foreword, deriding the author as “an unoriginal, Hamlet-obsessed hack”, who simultaneously wrote, “the best book I have ever read”.
Surkov was having the time of his life. Ever a twinkle in his eye.
In 1999 he found his way into the Kremlin at Putin’s right-hand, developing a system called ‘managed democracy’. Unlike totalitarian systems of the past which stamped out all dissent, this new system attempted to own them all. To manage them.
He funded Orthodox Christian marches, whilst simultaneously backing the liberal students who opposed them. Human-rights NGOs were in favour one moment, then nationalists who denounced them as ‘Western stooges’ the next. He formed the youth group Nashi, a democratic and anti-fascist group who burnt books in the ilk of Almost Zero.
It is a simulation of democracy. Domestic divide and rule. Unable to ever find firm footing the opposition continually moves, dancing to the Surkovian beat. Putin went uncontested.
The Big Bang
In 2008, the economy went bang. Or rather the AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities were really subprime debt repackaged as the gold standard, the best debt Trump might say, tremendous debt. Except it wasn’t. It was dirt. At first, the banks had sold these AAA mortgages with ease, but the pool of customers with good credit and a solid job was shrinking. Globalisation was eating its own. The solution was so simple every drug dealer does it, you cut the good stuff with a little of the bad. So, junk (or “sub-prime”) mortgages began to get sorted in with the AAAs until that was pretty much all they were.
But how do you tell the difference? What was real and what was a simulation?
When finally, someone mentioned the Economy wore no clothes, it all came crashing down. As Aldous Huxley once said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”. Beneath the map of technical jargon and financial simulacra, a real-world still existed, and it was rotten.
The US housing bubble crashed. Defaults amongst junk debtors become the norm. Bank’s assets evaporated into thin air. Lehman Brothers collapsed shortly after. Globalisation had torn down economic barriers, letting the financial infection spread across the world.
By happenstance or some historical quirk, a cry for change was met by a rising star. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign had its fingers on the pulse, centring around three core themes ‘Hope’, ‘Progress’, and ‘Change’. A “Change We can believe in” the people were told, “Yes We Can”. However, what was to change and what the people could do were left intentionally vague.
Obama shared many similarities with Clinton’s 1992 campaign. A fresh-face senator marred by trivial scandals (for Clinton marijuana, for Obama his birth certificate), promising visions of change to a flailing economy. Both faced off against respected war heroes and seasoned politicians. As the first Black President, Obama had history on his side, a story of progress, but was by no means a shoo-in.
To win he needed to replicate Clinton’s success. He needed a campaigning revolution.
Technology had come a long way since the nineties. Facebook and Twitter formed in 2006, and by 2008 the online world was bustling in ways never seen before. The dawn of Big Data.
The Obama campaign saw their opportunity. Voters were assigned two values: one described the likelihood they would vote, the other whether they would vote for Obama. These scores were determined by a vast amount of survey work conducted throughout battleground states. Every week 5000–6000 voters in each state were assessed via a short-interview, and 1000 more voters were assessed in more in-depth discussions.
This treasure trove of data was compared with data points for each voter (derived from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses and past campaign contacts) in order for the algorithm to spit out individual-level predictions. Microtargeting models then informed volunteers which doors to knock on and which phones to ring, creating more data which was fed back into the system, refining the technique.
A social media site was started for volunteers called my.barackobama.com, pairing people with a task depending on importance and microregion. Volunteers could download names, addresses and phone number of voters in a neighbourhood who were likely to be swayed and go speak to them, leaflet in hand. Donations became a social event; supporters set fundraising goals and shared their achievements with like-minded people. If you moved to a new area you could see who was active locally, allowing people to network and coordinate the on-the-ground campaign.
As Mary Hart, then an art professor in her 50s said “I’m e-mailing people I haven’t seen in 20 years. We have this tremendous ability to use this technology to network with people. Why don’t we use it?”.
Obama won the election with ease. His modern and innovative campaign cemented him as a cultural landmark. However, just like Clinton, the honeymoon didn’t last long. In his first mid-terms, Obama lost control of the House, and the Democrat lead in the Senate became ungovernable. The disappointment was palpable, as independents moved rightwards and Democrats failed to turn up. Movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street sprung out of nowhere, the initial tremors of populism.
Data scientist Dan Wagner was hired as targeting director for the DNC in early 2009, responsible for the collection and analysis of voter information. But was dismayed with the tools at his disposal. So, Wagner pitched ‘Survey Manager’, a piece of software designed to take the raw data and produce stunningly accurate predictions.
When Ted Kennedy died, his congressional seat in upstate New York went to the vote. Wagner predicted the result with a margin of just 150 votes — five months from election day. The Democrats would lose the midterms he said and lose they did. His congressional predictions were off by an average of only 2.5 per cent. The DNC took notice. This was game-changing. Mark Penn had to interview small samples of people to guess the mood of the nation. Wagner could see the whole. Everyone was in his sights.
Now he set himself a goal: to get everyone who voted the first time, to vote Obama again.
Ghosts in the Machine
The DNC began investing heavily in the latest technology, notably a phone-dialling unit which made 1.2 million calls per day surveying voters’ opinions, and ‘Vertica’, which allowed the integration of the Democrats 180-million-person voter file, with the information coming from Obama’s online presence. A “constituent relationship management system” was then created, allowing campaign staff to see each voter as an individual and target accordingly.
Electoral wisdom said you won based upon the whims of 10–20 per cent of the electorate in the ideological middle. Data analysis and microtargeting now questioned this orthodoxy. In 2006, women’s group ‘Emily’s List’ sent direct mail to both middle-of-the-road and soft Republican voters concerning Democratic candidates for governor. To their surprise, soft Republicans were the most receptive.
The team under Wagner set about cracking this conundrum. They randomised voters to receive a particular sequence of direct mail, on the same theme, but varying slightly in emphasis and tone. Older women preferred policies coupled with reminders about preventative care, whilst young women liked being informed about regulations surrounding contraceptive coverage. Key issues which could draw Republicans to Obama were targeted with precision.
Microtargeting promised that the right message, on the right issue, to the right voter, can change votes. Or put simply, tell people what they want to hear. Politics at its most cynical. The warning of Robert Reich hung limply in the air: aren’t we suppose to stand for something?
Big data rolls with the waves of technology, but unlike the tide, its waters are ever-rising. The my.barackobama.com site of 2008 was reborn as the Obama 2012 app, embracing the smartphone and ubiquity of social media. Over half the electorate used Facebook alone, providing a space to test and analyse marketing strategies and distribute adverts at a fraction of the cost of TV ads.
In 2002’s Minority Report, Tom Cruise walks down a dazzling incandescent corridor. Adverts along the walls scan individuals and tailor the message to the passer-by. It knows everything about you, and exactly what you want. “Hey, Miss Balfour, did you come back for another pair of those shammy lace-ups?” the machine enquires, already aware of the answer.
Social media enabled the personalisation of messages. The app integrated Facebook data with the campaign’s website, becoming a one-stop-shop for volunteering and fundraising. Beneath the surface, it hoovered up all the data: friends, birthdates, locations and likes. The average friend list contains one-hundred-and-ninety friends; over a million people downloaded the app, giving the campaign access to millions of accounts. No one even knew. The perfect heist. “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”
If you “liked” a page questioning Obama’s foreign policy maybe you would receive a message from an old friend reminding you he withdrew troops from the Middle-East. Trust was weaponised. Research shows we are more receptive to people we know than total strangers, even old friends. And people shared evangelically. Ads and messages were tested with frightening rapidity, able to be analysed within hours, with the researchers able to see which ads each user was selecting.
Various combinations of headlines, images, and text were tested for the most clicks and shares. Eventually, pinpointing which ad should target which person and for how long. Microtargeting had gone Nano.
Our lives were ghosts in the machine.
Voters of different persuasions began to be presented with very different versions of reality, each like a shard of glass containing a slither of truth, but only ever partial and obscure. It was innately polarising. Big data ground reality down, atomised it, till it became impossible to find a coherent answer.
This was inevitable.
Imagine a long stretch of beach. You are tasked with measuring it. Easy you think, as you fetch a measuring wheel and stroll from end to end. The beach is a mile long. The taskmaster is unimpressed. The measuring wheel is too imprecise and does not take account of the undulations of the sand. So, you use a piece of string to painstakingly measure every ripple. The beach is actually three miles long. Again, the taskmaster is disappointed, “what about the gap between each grain of sand?”. This time you find the beach is one-hundred miles long. And on and on it goes down to atoms and absurdity.
Which measurement is right? It seems the more data we get, the less sure we become. And if we can’t agree on the facts, how do we navigate the world?
A series of diaries kept by voters were tracked by the Obama team, “The entries frequently used the word ‘disappointment’”, in part due to Obama, but more broadly in the stagnating economic conditions, he had failed to act upon. The cartographers had expanded the map into cyberspace, but the territory kept on rotting.
“Who are we on the World Wide Web, spiders or flies?” Surkov asks. Or in the language of PR: are we the consumer or the product?
The Puppet Master Returns
In early 2014, black-ops teams and pro-Russian insurgents launched their campaign in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea; meanwhile, a sci-fi short story was released by Nathan Dubovitsky called ‘Without Sky’. It described World War V, the first “non-linear war”, where the alliances and coalitions of nations had turned to dust. This war wasn’t “two against two or three against one. It was all against all.”
The timing was no coincidence: The Grey Cardinal was back.
“…some provinces took one side, some took the other, and some individual city, or generation, or sex, or professional society” formed their own faction. “And then they could switch places, cross into any camp you like, sometimes during battle.”
Atomisation in the West was reaching its conclusion. Beginning with consumerism and PR politics, and compounded by big data and the internet, people felt a subliminal disconnection from the real-world and everyone around them. Loneliness was a Western epidemic. Into the void various forms of identity politics were poured. Maslow’s categories of individuals based on values and lifestyles had metastasised to cyberspace, creating an online culture increasingly obsessed with attacking one another. Economic disparities and rapid cultural change either precipitated or exacerbated the trend. And the multiplicity of information meant no one could agree on the truth.
Surkov’s non-linear war was a parody and a prediction of the culture wars which plagued a West unsure of what it was, or where it was going.
“The goals … were quite varied … the forced establishment of a new religion; the high ratings or rate; … the final ban on separating people into male and female, since sexual differentiation undermines the nation” continues Surkov as he pokes fun at the confusion over gender. Wars since Vietnam had often had no fixed and achievable goals, they were open-ended, a “part of a process” as Surkov writes, and not necessarily the most important part. It was the ideas which mattered, the perceptions.
The battle rages in the “calm and cloudless” skies over a small village, where the “sun flowed… like a wide, peaceful river”. Noise reduction muffled the battle so that the horror was masked by the latest technology. Most aircraft were not even manned. The war raging in the “silence of [a] tomb”.
In 2014, Surkov worked as Putin’s personal advisor on Georgia and Ukraine. When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed over the Ukraine-Russia border, the Russian media and internet became flooded with various contradictory narratives. The plane explosion was masked in the white noise of information.
Surkov wasn’t writing fiction, just description.
When the narrator awakens to the aftermath, he finds a “two-dimensional world… without height. Without sky”. The survivors “understood only ‘yes’ and ‘no’, only ‘black’ and ‘white’.”
The story ends:
“We founded the Society and prepared a revolt of the simple, two-dimensionals against the complex and sly, against those who do not answer “yes” or “no,” who do not say “white” or “black,” who know some third word, many, many third words, empty, deceptive, confusing the way, obscuring the truth. In these shadows and spider webs, in these false complexities, hide and multiply all the villainies of the world.”
Surkov, the apostle of the ‘complex and sly’, the spider spinning the web, was still playing games. Like a Bond villain who tells you his plan before its execution. Hidden behind smoke and mirrors, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was exacerbating Western tensions. Where Clinton and Obama had trod, Surkov followed.
We have left the back door open, and the bear has gotten in.
The Information World War
As 2011 bled into 2012, the Russian division of Anonymous — the online hackers — teased a glimpse of the Kremlin’s online legionnaires, the foot soldiers of the new disinformation war. The Federal Youth Agency (FYA) run by Vasily Yakemenko had been tasked with discrediting the opposition. The organisation was paid $10 million running Pro-Kremlin propaganda, and above it all, Surkov was pulling the strings.
The group experimented with fake Twitter and Facebook profiles, illegally purchasing likes and fake traffic to promote their profiles and websites. Over 20,000 Twitter accounts including bots spammed answers to certain topics.
In 2011, they were used against anti-Putin protests. Surkov publicly expressed sympathy, he understood this was a “natural consequence of his own deceptions and illusions”. However, both the FYA and Surkov had miscalculated. The opposition gained the upper hand. The joke had gone on long enough, Putin was no longer amused. Surkov was fired.
His replacement in the FYA was Vyacheslav Volodin, known for placating Russia’s most prominent news websites. Volodin moved the FYA from Moscow to three sites around Russia. We know the details of only one, situated in the suburbs of St. Petersburg — the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
In late 2014 Marat Mindiyarov arrived at its doors. He had applied for a job, curious about the belly of the beast, and besides “it was next to [his] house”. After only a brief tenure Marat quit, but what he saw was a substantial operation. “It was a four-storey building with ten rooms on each floor. In each room, there were about twenty people writing.” They worked from dawn till dusk.
The supervisors were harsh and repressive. This was work. They were soldiers, whether they considered themselves it or not.
Every morning “you got an email with a lot of links … They told you which topics you should comment on and how to write your comments.” Marat found the whole thing depressing, like a drone in the Ministry of Truth, the Orwellian nightmare was not lost on him “When you’re writing that white is black and black is white, it’s the same as what Orwell wrote.” He had become a spider in the web.
In 2016, the IRA turned its attention away from Ukraine, setting its eyes upon the West. A report produced upon request of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) set out the scale of the operations. Of the data, they had available: 10.4 million tweets from 3841 accounts were found, 110 YouTube videos from 17 channels, 116,000 Instagram posts and 61,500 unique Facebook posts. The operation reached an estimated 126 million people on Facebook alone.
The IRA set up accounts covering a whole variety of topics, but amongst the most prominent were Black activism, Texan secessionism, minorities (Muslim and LGBT), feminism, and Pro-Trump and Anti-Clinton content.
Whilst the memes and the groups were sporadic, a unifying messaged can be deciphered. Pro-Trump messages were common, with “gender-specific political targeting … focus on men aged 18+ interested in ‘Breitbart or conservative daily’ and ‘Donald Trump for President’”. However, the pro-Trump message was just the tip of the iceberg. The main aim was the create a sense of division and alienation. To break society from the inside.
The IRA was especially active in the online Black community with a range of professional-looking pages and accounts themed around police brutality and anti-racist sentiments. Black people were frequently encouraged to stay home, not to vote as ‘America was not for Black people’ and ‘the candidates don’t care’ etc. The sites and pages first aimed to build a community; one such Facebook page was ‘Black Matters’. Users submitted pictures of Black women for a calendar and created posts to enable “1:1 engagement with people … looking for everything from designers to immigration lawyers”.
Once a community was established the IRA would sow the seeds of division. What you were increasingly mattered more than who you were. This was what the IRA relied upon.
Memes are often dismissed as cheap laughs, the informational plankton on which the behemoths of social media feed. Simple and often emotionally powerful, memes can be so much more, spreading a message like a virus, each share or like spreading the meme in an exponential fashion.
A Black-owned leather goods company (Kahmune) sent the above picture asking “What is your color? @expression_tees @kahmune #blackexcellence #blackpride #blackandproud #blackpower #africanamerican #melanin #ebony #panafrican #blackcommunity #problack #brownskin #unapologeticallyblack #blackgirl #blackgirls #blackwomen #blackwoman”?” It was reposted by @blackstagram — a Russian account — was this a real business or an IRA front? Posts such as this promoted an in-group identity to the exclusion of others.
Online people had the illusion of participation. One YouTube contest asked people to ‘Pee on Hillary’, or rather a picture of her and submit the video.
In May 2016 ‘Heart of Texas,’ a secessionist Facebook group organised a rally to “Stop the Islamification of Texas”. Meanwhile, a separate group — United Muslims of America — advertised a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally in exactly the same place and time. The IRA was behind both.
In Baltimore, an account called Blacktivist was attempting to stir racial hatred over Freddie Gray, who had died in police custody the previous year. A march was organised but nobody knew the organiser. The account was soon rumbled. “I found it very disturbing that there was this orchestrated, well-funded attempt to exploit our divisions” lamented Antonio French, an activist and Black Lives Matter supporter.
These pages focused on high-tension issues, micro-targeting communities to ‘stir the shit’ and watch the pot boil over. “This is about the Russians exacerbating pre-existing tensions. By building upon these existing divides” explains Mark Jacobson, a Georgetown University professor.
Russia hadn’t created these divisions. The lack of trust in politicians, the growing divisions fuelled by left- and right-wing identity politics, and the resentment over globalisation long predated the IRA. But the organisation added fuel to the fire, accelerating division. This war wasn’t “two against two or three against one. It was all against all.”
At one point an entire event was fabricated. The Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax began in 2014 when residents in Centerville, Louisiana were sent texts and social media messages claiming an explosion had occurred in the local chemical plant. ISIS was reported to be responsible. The hoaxers even created functional clones of Louisiana news websites to promote the story. The chemical company released a message denying any explosion, but by then the news had spread.
A similar story at the wrong place and wrong time. Who can imagine the results?
What was real and what wasn’t became lost amongst the pixels on the screen. “‘You are the model!’ ‘You are the majority’” mocks Baudrillard as he describes the moment people mistake the model for reality. The internet was a model of the world, containing a facet of a person’s thoughts and opinions, curated and presented for maximum social gain. Life through 140 characters. “You are information, you are social, you are the event, you are involved”, and you are significant.
It was the message of Clinton, Blair and Obama. The self-appointed people’s champions. But power had fled from the halls of democracy to shadowy global dealings of trade talks and corporate meetings. There was “no more subject, no more focal point”.
It was only a matter of time before tensions erupted. Sick and tired of fabrications and spin, of curated messages and vacuous speeches. People turned to the most real thing they could find, a reality TV star. Donald Trump. A man visceral and forthright. What you saw was what you got. The people were just nudged along the way.
In total, the IRA spent around $12.2 million in 2016, and not all on US operations. A Tomahawk missile will only set you back $1.87 million. This was chump change. Back of the sofa money. Yet it bought political chaos. Neighbour against neighbour. The tactics of the IRA were simple when compared to the mastery of the Obama campaign. Is this the first skirmish of something greater? How many governments can spare $10 million, how about $100 million?
On 15th August 1914, Miograg Tomic a Serbian pilot came across an Austro-Hungarian plane on reconnaissance. At first, they simply waved at each other, before the enemy started firing his pistol. Tomic fired back. It is regarded as the first exchange of fire in aircraft history. As little as two decades later hundreds of planes would battle in fire and fury over Europe in the hopes of dominance.
Innovation today is accelerating. New advancements will come thick and fast. The battleground will be in cyberspace, Surkov’s sky without sound, where the clash occurs in the perfect silence of social media. The click of a mouse, the low clatter of fingers on keyboards.
There is no goal. No defined victory. Just the Forever War. As Renee DiResta says “If you’re aren’t a combatant, you are the territory.”
