Nautilus

12/26/2018

Are you saying this loss of individual control is feeding the breakdown of democracy?

Well, two things are happening at the same time. First of all, we’ve gained the ability to hack human beings. If you believe in free will, you will say this is impossible. Nobody can know me better than I know myself. Nobody can predict my choices or manipulate my desires, because they are a reflection of my free will, of my free spirit. But then you become the easiest person to hack and to manipulate.

Are you talking about the political groups that have used Facebook to sway political opinion?

That was just a tip of the iceberg. Or a wake up call. But, yes, the way that Cambridge Analytica and all these companies and bots behaved is they hacked humans. They got to know your existing hatreds and fears and biases. And once you know what are the biases and existing weaknesses of a particular person, you can work on that.

Fear and hate are primal emotions. Are you saying if you can tap primal emotions, you can control the political discourse?

Yes. If you want to destroy the ability to have a meaningful public conversation, you discover the fears and hatreds of people and magnify them. And you do it on the individual basis. You can’t just show the same story to everybody because different people have different weaknesses. So maybe they discover you have a built-in bias against immigrants. They will show you a fake news story about an immigrant gang-raping local women. They know you will believe it because you already have this bias. But your neighbor, she has a very different bias. She’s in favor of immigration. But her bias is she thinks everybody who opposes immigration is a fascist, racist idiot. So they show her a different story about a gang of right-wing fanatics who kill immigrants. And she will believe this as easily as you believed the story about the immigrants raping local women. It plays to her existing fears and hatreds and weaknesses. Now, if you think people make decisions out of completely free will, you will say this is impossible. But then you are very easy prey to such manipulation.

You said two things were feeding the breakdown of democracy. What’s the second thing?

The second thing is the future is leaving more people behind. Much of the resentment in the world today, especially in the U.S., is not about present-day difficulties. It’s about people looking to the future and realizing the future doesn’t need them. The center of so many political and social struggles in the 20th century was exploitation—the elites exploiting the working class. But in the 21st century, the big fear is not that the elites exploit us. The big fear is that the elites don’t need us. We are becoming irrelevant. To a large extent, this fear is justified. Many people will become irrelevant to the economy, to the political system. So they are trying to use their political power before it’s too late.