SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Guardian has an interesting article describing how Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage used techniques developed within the military to influence Britain's vote to exit the EU. Although it appears that the companies involved (AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytics) are private companies, they have deep roots within the military.
The article describes Britain as a "managed democracy", with major decisions controlled by a US Billionaire.
[ n1: The article is an interesting read, including a reference to how in 2013, Google Founder Eric Schmidt's daughter Sophie suggested Cambridge Analytics get in touch with Palantir, Peter Thiel's data mining contractor for the GCHQ and many US military and intelligence agencies. Sophie currently works at Uber. According to a former employee, in 2013 Cambridge Analytics was just a "psychological warfare firm [...] before we became this dark, dystopian data company". ]
It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t.
[...] The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.
[...] I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ. “I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. [...] Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights."
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 15 2017, @02:59PM
I generally agree with you, and the influence of business interests within many western democracies is getting out of control.
On the other hand, there's definitely some significant "spin" here -- just look at the headline: "Military... Techniques" -- ooh, scary authoritarian stuff! "Psychological Techniques" -- ack, I won't even know if I'm being influenced?! Are they hypnotizing me?
Here's the reality (as weirdly noted by Runaway in a post below): there have been coalitions between corporations and governments and psychologists for at least the past 75 years. Almost all advertising today -- political or otherwise -- uses "psychological techniques." I'm sure some of them were developed in military sources, but I'm not sure what that adds to this story other than a greater chance of incompetence. (Recall that PSYOP crap dealing with ESP and all sorts of other weirdness was intensively pursued by military "psychological" research for decades.)
I'm not at all saying this isn't a significant story. But the story is perhaps who did was using influence, how much they were investing, etc. -- NOT that there were (spooky! scary!) "military psychological techniques" involved.