We’re the Real Creators of Rebekah Mercer’s “Billionaire Parlor Game”
Well this is bizarre. In yet another ironic science fiction becomes reality moment, the roleplaying game that Scout.ai designed to help protect democracy from the manipulations of algorithm-wielding billionaires has fallen into the hands of the algorithm-wielding billionaires themselves.
Yesterday, in a New Yorker article, Jane Mayer wrote that Rebekah Mercer herself, daughter of billionaire Robert Mercer, distributed the rules of a scenario planning game called “The Machine Learning President” at an exclusive retreat she hosted in Vail in March. When I first found Mayer’s article, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. The Scout.ai team had run a scenario planning game by the same name in early February. The Mercer network was one of the teams in our game. Was this some bizarre coincidence?
The original Mayer article didn’t mention Scout by name, but quoted directly from the rules we wrote and played with about 40 attendees back in early February. We spent weeks planning and developing the event with the help of science fiction author Eliot Peper, Randy Lubin of Diegetic Games and Tech Dirt’s Mike Masnick. The folks at The Long Now Foundation stepped up to host at their cafe, The Interval. (Here’s the original reminder email I sent out to attendees on the day of the event, which lays out fake techno-political news from the future to help set the tone for attendees.)
Definitely not a coincidence.
As Gizmodo reported yesterday, and as I can personally attest, our original intention in creating “The Machine Learning President” was to avoid the outcome of the 2016 election, not relive it. We wanted to help technologists and policymakers anticipate how financial backers and political actors, including people like Mercer and her father, AI-savant billionaire Robert Mercer, might weaponize tech platforms to manipulate the 2018 and 2020 elections. The initial event was not designed as a billionaire’s “parlor game” but a way to bring bipartisan pro-democracy forces together to help anticipate new uses of technology, strategize new and unusual political coalitions, and generally avoid the same kinds of mass manipulation and deceit we experienced in 2016.
For the record, none of us has any idea how Rebekah Mercer got her hands on the basic rules of the game. Luckily, as far as we know, Mercer and her guests didn’t have access to the game’s backend or materials, in which case she couldn’t have actually played the full game. Even if she had, it’s unlikely she would have been able to interpret how it worked. Putting on the event in SF required extensive logistics, elaborate props, and a full team of facilitators.
Mayer clearly didn’t have enough context to know any of this for her original report, but we’ve reached out to her to help correct the record. The story has already been picked up by Vanity Fair, Haaretz and Splinter News among others.
I can’t tell you how bizarre it is to start your week off with the realization that a billionaire like Rebekah Mercer stole your pro-democracy scenario planning game, in which she is a character, to liven up her exclusive Vail ski vacation. And today’s only Tuesday.
If you’re interested in attending or staging a future version of The Machine Learning President, feel free to shoot me an email at berit@scout.ai.
