Mindf*ck

When the obligatory British small talk concluded, one of them said, “So tell us about the Voter Activation Network.”

After Obama’s 2008 victory, parties all over the world were becoming interested in this new “American-style campaign,” powered by national targeting databases and big digital operations. Behind the campaign was the emerging practice of microtargeting, where machine-learning algorithms ingest large amounts of voter data to divide the electorate into narrow segments and predict which individual voters are the best targets to persuade or turn out in an election.

Soon we were sharing personal information without the slightest hesitation. This was encouraged, in part, by a new vocabulary. What were in effect privately owned surveillance networks became “communities,” the people these networks used for profit were “users,” and addictive design was promoted as “user experience” or “engagement.” People’s identities began to be profiled from their “data exhaust” or “digital breadcrumbs.”

More data led to more profits, and so design patterns were implemented to encourage users to share more and more about themselves. Platforms started to mimic casinos, with innovations like the infinite scroll and addictive features aimed at the brain’s reward systems. Services such as Gmail began trawling through our correspondence in a way that would land a traditional postal courier in jail. Live geo-tracking, once reserved for convicts’ ankle bracelets, was added to our phones, and what would have been called wiretapping in years past became a standard feature of countless applications.