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drsallygrissom · 7 years ago

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Why We Love ars PARADOXICA

Back in 2016, the fandom made a list of 43 reasons why we love ars PARADOXICA in honor of the 73rd anniversary of Dr. Sally Grissom’s first audio diary on October 29, 1943. When I learned that the podcast was going to end after its third season, I decided to pull together another list that was double the length of the first.

However, the fandom was so passionate that we blew past our goal, and reached triple the length of the original list!

Without further ado, here are the 129 of the reasons why we love ars PARADOXICA:

Helen Partridge, my beautiful, beautiful wife

I just love Kristen’s laugh and it never fails to make me smile.

Mischa’s outros! “Brought to you by the internet:”

The TimeSwimmers episode. That whole thing was a masterpiece

Sally and Nikhil's friendship

Petra, my sassy troubled daughter

The effort that went into making such a truly unique and ambitious take on time travel-based fiction

Sally, my favorite disaster ace

All of the characters are just so beautifully flawed in their own ways and are so well depicted it’s hard to pick a favorite

Every episode makes me feel SO MANY EMOTIONS

The sound effects are just so well done that I feel like I’m right there with the characters

The subtle yet mind blowing foreshadowing

The way it endlessly inspires me to create fan content

The decryption team, who I don't understand yet love to watch unravel codes

The ability to make us both love and hate a character at the same time as much as we do Esther Roberts.

Jack Wyatt

The sass, and in general wonderful interactions with the fan base on social media.

The schoolyard brawl!

Very obviously not being afraid to have fun with ads/sponsored content.

Actually making me want to listen to the version with ads even though I'm a patron

Buttsticks…

Plasticity

The outro music is simple but so, so good

Lemon drops and Limestone

My curiosity about what Esther wrote in the letter

Golden boi and his devils lettuce

With three episodes left it felt like there was so much story left to be told and such little time to tell it

The generosity to keep us entertained between seasons

The subtle symbolism of Esther's mind being represented with card games

The heart-wrenching ups and downs of Esther and Bridget's relationship

Esther and Sally’s lesbian/aroace solidarity

Bridget, my mom

Sally's #relatable ace anxieties and Nikhil's comforting response

The super cool theme song by Mischa "i do not play piano" Stanton which they apparently HEARD IN A DREAM?!

The found footage pieces between scenes

The amount of detail put into it, and being able to notice new things on each relisten

Easter eggs like QDAM

Seemingly infinite pop culture references

The commitment to posting a transcript for each episode

The GOLDEN BOY smokes the devil’s lettuce?!

The Super LUminal Recursive Processor

All of the machine code names really

Mischa’s wonderful sound design that makes me feel like I’m actually in the location the episode takes place at and made me realize how wonderful podcasts could truly be.

Sally Grissom. The wonderful disaster ace and the first ace rep I ever found.

The sound design of the show, especially the tapes adding to world building, all those clunky sounds.

Sally Grissom, ‘I wonder what would happen if I...’, Mad scientist.

This show has the most complex, humanistic portrayal of aromanticism I’ve ever experienced

I appreciate the aP creators’ dedication to nuanced portrayal of and discussion about violence

All of Curses, of fucking course

Keeping the humanity of people who do bad thing while not trying to justify them

Their commitment to “all killer, no filler”

Reminding me that science is cool, dammit!

Petra is a lovely and nuanced, complex character that I adore with my whole heart and soul.

[BLUE BLUE 09 13 18 15 26 08 04 12 20 24 05 18 14 09 17 04 05 12 01 05 The weather in Tulsa today is: Drought. At the tone, the time will be: 5400 hours]

The creators are so so fantastic and fun! I love that they interact with fans.

Sally is the disaster stoner physicist we all need in our lives. also she’s relatable as hell

The show is not afraid to tackle issues like race, gender, or sexuality and it doesn’t overstep its bounds.

The codes are so fun (even if I don’t understand all of them)!

I love how excited scientists get when they’ve discovered something-it feels like real scientists I know

How Bridget criticizes Sally for making puns under pressure even though she does exactly the same thing

The way characters interact with one another, and grow, and learn, and develop is so fascinating and beautiful.

Plasticity might have been the first podcast episode to make me cry.

I love Sally “I only know anecdotal biology and chemistry” Grissom and how her science knowledge actually makes sense??

As a huge huge physics nerd and aspiring computer scientist, I love love love the way Sally talks about science! It’s like Kristen DiMercurio is narrating my inner monologue!

The thrill of trying to keep up with the diverging timelines

☭S̶͜͞ ̀͜҉̀͢Í͠ ̸̸͟҉X̵͘͢ ̢T̷̶͞ ̢̨͟Y̧̛͘ ̨͟͢ ̴̨͜҉S̷̶͢ ̴͝I͢��́ ҉̢̛͝X̕͝͝☭

The consideration and dedication shown in not only writing an aro-spec ace character, but addressing issues and worries often faced by people in that community.

The mind-boggling task of trying to piece together everything that’s happening when for all we know every scene could be from a different, rewritten version of the timeline.

Anthony Partridge, the most melodramatic math nerd to ever play Tetris in a bubble outside of time.

The optimism of the show and ultimate faith it shows in both science and humanity, despite all the characters’ failings.

Sally giggling over meeting her future self both times that it happens

Sally’s book (and her attempts at pronouncing NaNoWriMo).

Maggie Elbourne, because as much as I love all my the more morally ambiguous scientists it’s nice to see one who actually stood up to ODAR’s shenanigans almost as soon as she figured out what was up.

Everything about the road trip.

TimeSwimmers was already mentioned but specifically TIME DOLPHIN RYAN LOCHTE

Characters that grow and change and learn

The 77s getting name dropped in Plasticity, way before we knew who they were

Sally calling out the English language for being problematic (“oh, you mean like morally upstanding?”)

“The weather in Tulsa today is: uhh I dunno”.

It has been quite possibly the most human exploration of time travel I’ve ever seen/heard.

Reaching a happy ending I couldn't even imagine

The weather in Tulsa is: sppoookyyy

The ever changing ways the codes were presented in season 3. Giving the feeling that the anchorites were both on the run and broadcasting these messages from different points in time.

Sally’s ace representation is the best I’ve ever seen and it makes me feel so #valid.

The sound design and detail in the writing make me feel like I’m truly immersed in the story, and it feels so authentic. Are you sure you don’t secretly have a timepiece?

The characters are people I CARE about and wanted to cry over during work all the time because they’re all wonderful and I love them.

The integration of the different storylines into Sally’s, especially Petra’s, is amazing.

Petra’s characterization was really well done, and it made me really care about her, even as she was trying to more or less destroy the world.

Out-of-date pop culture references that fit seamlessly into the dialogue despite being from literally a different time period and most of the characters having no idea what it meant. They just added an extra level of hilarious.

You may not actually know a single thing about tachyon fields and gluon walls (are they even real?) but you could definitely convince me that you know exactly what you’re talking about (or at least that Sally Grissom does).

The enDING WAS JUST REALLY WELL DONE AND I LOVE A GOOD CIRCULAR ENDING AND IT MADE ME GENUINELY GO TO THE BATHROOM DURING WORK TO CRY BECAUSE IT WAS JUST BEAUTIFUL.

The fact that the whole show is wrapped up by the revelation that the entire show is actually Nikhil and Mateo curling up with board games and snacks trying to form a story out of these tapes, patching together timelines to make it all cohesive, it just feels very right.

This story fits the medium so well, and so the fact that we don’t learn that Whickman has an EYEPATCH is absolutely wild but also wonderful because as soon as I heard that I knew that that was how it belonged, like of course he has an eyepatch, that’s a very Chet thing to have.

The ending was so perfectly, painfully beautiful. It was the ending we needed but never would have imagined.

Petra’s and Sally’s relationship being so complex and real.

Nikhil and Mateo using the archive to create the framing device for the whole podcast.

The sound the timepiece makes.

The final destruction of the timepiece.

Putting time travel in a Cold War setting makes perfect sense, and they go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Did anyone mention Helen Partridge as a character? How beautifully she was set up and the fact that she pursued her own her life, and also, how BEAUTIFULLY Susanna Kavee can sing? Because damn.

I just. Really love this show. And everyone involved. So much.

The child characters were really well done-both the actors and the writing felt real.

To me, the show feels a bit like one of those camp friendship bracelets everyone used to make, with all these colors and threads--all of the timelines, woven together, messy but beautiful.

TEETRIS

Grissom’s Gizmo Gals!

Mateo’s non-stop flirting, even in the worst of situations

Sally “It’s Dr Grissom”ed HERSELF.

The way both the story and the characters reflect a complex view on the world with people making horrible decisions and horrible things happening to them, and yet always maintaining a positive outlook, offering the possibility of change and improvement.

The top-notch voice acting from everyone involved, helping to create the wonderful characters we all love.

Sally finger-gunning her way out of a conversation with a pun about a friend almost killing her.

All the minisodes!!

Any time Bridget, Nikhil or Lou acts like they want to adopt Petra

The series ending with two characters who had been at odds coming together

The characterization of the different Petras, because they all seem like different people even though in fact they are not (and Sylvia deciding she doesn't want to follow the legacy of Petras)

How Kristen can play 2 of the same character and make them sound different (how does she do that???)

Anthony’s will to save everyone, sacrificing himself, when the world didn't do anything good for him…

... and the constant struggle to save his friends (like when he was literally the only one aware of the Anchorites and the way their plan could have ended)

The way the show can go from time travel shenanigans to heartfelt character moments is a real testament to the talent of the writing team.

The Vegas episode, which I listened to after the finale and cried, because they were so happy and naive and everything wasn’t messy and bad and complicated.

The way gun violence is handled by the creators with respect and care

The way PTSD and mental health is handled (through Sally) is beautiful and respectful.

Partridge being named after a bird and living out his life in a cage. YOU GUYS ARE MEAN

Susanna Kavee’s absolutely amazing singing and Tau Zaman’s lyrics are an absolutely combination.

The ceaseless, unwavering commitment to puns

I love how important their friendships are to the characters (well, most of them anyways).

Sally’s conversation with Nikhil in season 3 reflects a lot of common anxieties of aromantic people, and his understanding responses

The entirety of the trial episode, which just really sort of showed the full extent of how terrible the Red Scare was by putting Esther, a Jewish woman, through it, and just shows you how defamed people in that time were.

In so many of the fictional and non-fictional representations of history, marginalized people have diminished, distorted, and stereotypical roles-but not in ars PARADOXICA. Thank you for making so many people feel seen.

All the amazing writers who started it all. 💜

Here are the signatures of some of the fans who contributed:

Signatures

Lindsay (ioniluna/drsallygrissom)

Khanan Abayev

SJ (your friendly neighborhood slauthor)

Dave (mondas-mania)

Noah (kindadisappointed)

Sana (i-am-delta-s)

Tina (espressonist)

Meaghan (lafgl)

Katherine (Rubywolfsbane)

Artimis (jp-blindperson/ap-blindperson)

Luke (martianboyy)

Ellie (joan-and-jane-and-esther-roberts/shewrites)

Bridge (cornerandchair)

Lem (aceparadoxica)

Esme (starsparadoxica)

Glory (mercutiglo)

Carly (guardianbob)

Emese (mse)

Ben (Q)

Special thanks to the ars PARADOXICA discord for being so helpful! From the time it was just a dozen people with a spork in a shoebox, this community was a shining star that helped me through tough times. Thank you for your silliness, cleverness, and support.

Brought to you by the internet: It’s weird! It’s fun! It loves you very, very much!

#ars paradoxica #aP creators #surprise!

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callmemoprah · 6 years ago

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Choosing Good How Hard Is Discrete Math

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 7 years ago

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I made Steve Bannons psychological warfare tool: meet the data war whistleblower

Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didnt yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle. By the time I met him in person, Id already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd. Play Video 13:04 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: ‘We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles’ video Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (hes 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britains EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trumps election campaign. Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating Steve Bannons psychological warfare mindfuck tool. In 2014, Steve Bannon then executive chairman of the alt-right news network Breitbart was Wylies boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analyticas investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology information operations then turn it on the US electorate. It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined The great British Brexit robbery, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. I havent talked about this to anyone, he said at the time. And then he couldnt stop talking. Explainer embed By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trumps chief strategist. Cambridge Analyticas parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. Its insane, he told me one night. The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? Its like Nixon on steroids. He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May,it was revealed that the company had reached out to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clintons stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election. The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was information warfare. But Wylie offers a unique, worms-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the USs democratic process. Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. We broke Facebook, he says. And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon. Is it fair to say you hacked Facebook? I ask him one night. He hesitates. Ill point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board. Last month, Facebooks UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads: Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies? Simon Milner: No. Matheson: But they do hold a large chunk of Facebooks user data, dont they? Milner: No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided. Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analyticas CEO, Alexander Nix: Does any of the data come from Facebook? Nix replied: We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data. And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that at least in 2014 that certainly wasnt the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebooks own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately. Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Its taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where its possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic Robert Muellers in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioners Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after the Observers first article in this investigation. It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioners Office and the National Crime Agencys cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold. There are many points where this story could begin. One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible. Profile Cambridge Analytica: the key players Show Hide Alexander Nix, CEO An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the companys elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from RobertMercer. Aleksandr Kogan, data miner Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CAs data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan. Steve Bannon, former board member A former investment banker turned alt-right media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016 he became Donald Trumps campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the populist, economic nationalist agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out. Robert Mercer, investor Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax. Rebekah Mercer, investor Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her fathers billions. The fortysomething, the second of Mercers three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative megadonors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trumps presidential campaign. Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback. Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obamas national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics. Politics is like the mob, though, he says. You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree. Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition. Hes one of the brightest people you will ever meet, a senior politician whos known Wylie since he was 20 told me. Sometimes thats a blessing and sometimes a curse. Meanwhile, at Cambridge Universitys Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, were experimenting with a way of studying personality by quantifying it. Starting in 2007,Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz called myPersonality, had gone viral. Users were scored on big five personality traits Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook likes across millions of people. Examples, above and below, of the visual messages trialled by GSRs online profiling test. Respondents were asked: How important should this message be to all Americans? The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. They had a lot of approaches from the security services, a member of the centre told me. There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked I hate Israel on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats. There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat. The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US defence contractor, funded Kosinskis PhD and Darpa, the US governments secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinskis work. But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair to say that he didnt have a clue what he was walking into. I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century, Wylie explains. And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands its weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems theyre absent-minded professors and hippies. Theyre the early adopters theyre highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden. Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems werent interested. I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: Why are you so pessimistic? They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI. Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same. Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldnt resist. He said: Well give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas. Another example of the visual messages trialled by GSRs online profiling test. In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations. Its defence arm was a contractor to the UKs Ministry of Defence and the USs Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in psychological operations or psyops changing peoples minds not through persuasion but through informational dominance, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news. SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves. Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCLs offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defence and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge cyberweaponry. The thing I think about all the time is, what if Id taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if Id taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldnt exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this. A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union. What was he like? Smart, says Wylie. Interesting. Really interested in ideas. Hes the only straight man Ive ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel. Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He speaks 19 to the dozen for hours at a time. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon. [Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking Ugh. Totally ugly to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for. But Wylie wasnt just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: information operations, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US militarys doctrine of the five-dimensional battle space. His brief ranged across the SCL Group the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan. I tell him that another former employee described the firm as MI6 for hire, and Id never quite understood it. Its like dirty MI6 because youre not constrained. Theres no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. Its normal for a market research company to amass data on domestic populations. And if youre working in some country and theres an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well thats just a bonus. When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though its one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. And the cyberwarfare guy is like, Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections. Steve Bannon: He loved the gays, says Wylie. He saw us as early adopters. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters It was Bannon who took this idea to the Mercers: Robert Mercer the co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who used his billions to pursue a rightwing agenda, donating to Republican causes and supporting Republican candidates and his daughter Rebekah. Nix and Wylie flew to New York to meet the Mercers in Rebekahs Manhattan apartment. She loved me. She was like, Oh we need more of your type on our side! Your type? The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. Its why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing. Robert Mercer was a pioneer in AI and machine translation. He helped invent algorithmic trading which replaced hedge fund managers with computer programs and he listened to Wylies pitch. It was for a new kind of political message-targeting based on an influential and groundbreaking 2014 paper researched at Cambridges Psychometrics Centre, called: Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas its the opposite way around with Mercer, says Wylie. He said very little, but he really listened. He wanted to understand the science. And he wanted proof that it worked. And to do that, Wylie needed data. How Cambridge Analytica acquired the data has been the subject of internal reviews at Cambridge University, of many news articles and much speculation and rumour. When Nix was interviewed by MPs last month, Damian Collins asked him: Does any of your data come from Global Science Research company? Nix: GSR? Collins: Yes. Nix: We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no. Collins: They have not supplied you with data or information? Nix: No. Collins: Your datasets are not based on information you have received from them? Nix: No. Collins: At all? Nix: At all. The problem with Nixs response to Collins is that Wylie has a copy of an executed contract, dated 4 June 2014, which confirms that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls. He has receipts showing that Cambridge Analytica spent $7m to amass this data, about $1m of it with GSR. He has the bank records and wire transfers. Emails reveal Wylie first negotiated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper, to use the myPersonality database. But when negotiations broke down, another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical. He offered to replicate Kosinski and Stilwells research and cut them out of the deal. For Wylie it seemed a perfect solution. Kosinski was asking for $500,000 for the IP but Kogan said he could replicate it and just harvest his own set of data. (Kosinski says the fee was to fund further research.) An unethical solution? Dr Aleksandr Kogan Photograph: alex kogan Kogan then set up GSR to do the work, and proposed to Wylie they use the data to set up an interdisciplinary institute working across the social sciences. What happened to that idea, I ask Wylie. It never happened. I dont know why. Thats one of the things that upsets me the most. It was Bannons interest in culture as war that ignited Wylies intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercers millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazons Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogans app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends too. On average, each seeder the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other peoples profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect. What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasnt authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. Whats more, under British data protection laws, its illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent. Facebook could see it was happening, says Wylie. Their security protocols were triggered because Kogans apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, Fine. Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a close working relationship with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps. Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next how it extracted psychological insights from the seeders and then built an algorithm to profile millions more. For more than a year, the reporting around what Cambridge Analytica did or didnt do for Trump has revolved around the question of psychographics, but Wylie points out: Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldnt you use it in your biggest campaign ever? In December 2015, the Guardians Harry Davies published the first report about Cambridge Analytica acquiring Facebook data and using it to support Ted Cruz in his campaign to be the US Republican candidate. But it wasnt until many months later that Facebook took action. And then, all they did was write a letter. In August 2016, shortly before the US election, and two years after the breach took place, Facebooks lawyers wrote to Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and told him the data had been illicitly obtained and that GSR was not authorised to share or sell it. They said it must be deleted immediately. Christopher Wylie: Its like Nixon on steroids I already had. But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it, says Wylie. Facebook made zero effort to get the data back. There were multiple copies of it. It had been emailed in unencrypted files. Cambridge Analytica rejected all allegations the Observer put to them. Dr Kogan who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didnt know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that hes received grants from the Russian government to research Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said. There are other dramatic documents in Wylies stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russias second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections but that they were failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers. The work, he said, would be shared with the CEO of the business, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov. It didnt make any sense to me, says Wylie. I didnt understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters? Muellers investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of Americas social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with consumers. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a rumour campaign spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election in which the company worked by spreading the idea that the election would be rigged. The final slide, branded with Lukoils logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its deliverables: psychographic messaging. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/09/i-made-steve-bannons-psychological-warfare-tool-meet-the-data-war-whistleblower/

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