Zuck: The Real Life Screenslaver — Cambridge Analytica and the Information War
Incredibles 2 is so much fun. There are so many details. When Jack Jack bites the electric villain, these little sparks come off his leg. Elastic girl’s motorcycle has lens flares. The Incredibleel snaps frantic faces of the Parr kids when they log in. You could spend hours rewatching just to appreciate the craft of it.
I mean. I did….I have done that.
But the movie is also dripping with themes. From the modernization of gender relations in the home, to civil disobedience and the morality of breaking unjust laws, to the American fascination with heroes, and even to the subtle commentary that calamity is acceptable, if it’s calamity within the power structure.
But as best I can tell no one has analyzed this movie directly asking how realistic a villain is Screenslaver is. To what degree are villains like this already here? And why does it matter that there are people who in the real world doing similar things to this character
Normally, I would keep every bit of the conclusion until the end, but I value your time so. TLDR: Yes. There are real life Screenslavers in the world AND they are partly responsible for the social chaos and political division we’ve been living through. That feeling that the people on the other side of politics must be crazy, inconvincible, misinformed, fools.
Perhaps they are. But more likely, their beliefs are the psychological collateral damage of the culture war. We need more truth in society and to do that we need to learn how to fight the real life Screenslaver’s of the world — it’s not necessarily the people you’d expect.
Eagle eyed fans of this movie in particular or the video essay format on YouTube are probably going to guess that will examine that classic seriously memorable deliciously uncomfortable monologue. And we could, but there’s actually a subtler more human scene that does just as much work or more. I’m calling the scene “The runaway train and the view from the couch.”
If you haven’t seen this movie in awhile, here’s where we are. Elastagirl is out on a mission. She wants to change public perception so that superheroes can be legal again. And Mr. Incredible? He’s back at home keeping the family in order so she can be out focusing on her career. Now I don’t want to get too much into the gender dynamics, but for context, he is under the belief that he’s the sole breadwinner and watching his wife like get outside and kick ass in the outside world is probably making him feel a little bit insecure.
Plus that insecurity is mounted by the fact that it’s not going super well at home. So he’s already like not feeling super good and right before she starts celebrating her accomplishments, she questions his competence as a father. So he’s feeling… he’s not in the best headspace.
She calls and is telling him about her superheroism. Probably the right husband thing to do would be to listen to her story, validate her excitement, and be happy for her. But… instead of doing that… while she’s talking he clicks on the television. She is, by all accounts, the most authoritative witness of what happened. She was there. She did the thing. She saved the people. And yet, because he is feeling insecure about himself he no longer cares about the truth of the story.
In a word, Screenslaver’s philosophy has won the minute he turns on the TV. He’s less concerned with the reality and he’s more concerned with the on screen perception.
I even think the creators of the movie want to emphasize this. He lowers the phone away from his ears and the dialogue changes from meaningful to her saying “blah blah blah.” Which is his perspective of what’s happening.
So to put it in no uncertain terms the minute that our heroes subscribe to the philosophy that eyewitness testimony is of less value than public perception we have entered the post truth-era that characterizes the current political climate.
Part 2:
That was an abstract way of saying that, so let’s look at an example.
Now, disclaimer, I am not British and I am not writing this to tell you my opinion on British Politics, but if we look at Carole Cadwalladr’s reporting about Brexit we can actually see this acting in real life.
This Ted talk is worth your time for a lot of reasons. I definitely encourage you to check it out (after you read this 😉). I won’t try to summarize the whole thing here but one of the points that she makes is that many of the votes for Brexit came from towns where there were basically no immigrants at all and where funding from the EU had actually been used to publicly make things for the town. Millions of pounds were spent on new bridges and community centers. It had been good for the town. But the towns were detached from reality.
They were fearful of immigrants but there were no immigrants anywhere to be found in their town. The believed that the EU had done nothing to help them even though the signs on the new highways and the new buildings clearly indicated EU funding had paid for them.
So how the heck did they get these opinions? How was their perception so different from the reality?
The simple answer is Facebook. The slightly less simple answer is Facebook’s specific ability to achieve something AI ethics researchers call “political microtargeting.” Some examples:
Facebook knows a frightening amount about you. Even if you don’t have a profile they have ghost profiles of people.
And even creepier things like the ability to detect your emotions, determine when you’re feeling “insecure” and forward this information to advertisers who might want to sell you things to boost your confidence.
They also have the ability to predict private things about you based on your likes. How old you were when your parents separated. How conscientious. How neurotic.
They don’t have supervillain hypnosis goggles that they can put on you to control how you’re thinking. But they know what you are thinking, how you’re feeling, who you are.
And this ability to manipulate insecurity — when combined with money and political will can fundamentally undermine the democratic processes.
Democracy cannot function in a post-truth world. George Orwell is over-cited and under-understood, but this is part of what he meant in the book 1984 when he said “Who controls the past control the future: who controls the present controls the past.” We can emend it for the digital age.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls perception of the present controls the past.
It’s part of why this Ted talk is worth your time
Carol Cadwalladr exposes this. Not in the abstract but via a particular institution that does this kind of manipulating for a living and a profit. You may have heard of, it is called Cambridge Analytica. Their entire job was to sell pieces of the election based on this fine data that they have about people. Or as it is called — political microtargeting in strategic, specific places to sway public perception to change a vote.
I’ll leave this section with one of her many famous quotes. (“You,” here is Zuckerberg.)
“Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it. This is not democracy. Spreading lies in darkness paid for with illegal cash from God knows where. It’s subversion and you are accessories to it.
She follows this up with photographs from when Zuckerberg refused to to appear before nine European parliaments.
“You are literally beyond the reach of British law.”
Sounds pretty supervillain to me.
Part 3:
It would be great if we could stop here and sort of say wow it sucks that Mark Zuckerberg is pressing buttons and selling democracies all around the world, but it is unfortunately more complicated than that.
The second technology emerging is not just political microtargeting but automation, bots, trolls.
YouTuber and all around good person Destin from Smarter Every Day did a brilliant piece in four parts about internet this. In particular he examines bots on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. It was one of only videos of his I found genuinely frightening.
There’s an international AI arms race happening. Technology regulators are attempting to stop mass scale misinformation while disinformation campaigns are attempting to find ways to skirt around their requirements. Why bother with guns targeting flesh when algorithmically generated content can target minds?
Again, that’s abstract, so let me just play a clip from Destin’s Smarter Everyday.
If you click through, you’ll hear a four separate creepy AI voices read the exact same disinformation script in slightly different ways. Several copies of this video were uploaded multiple times in the same day. Destin goes on to explain that the story is of course fake. But not only is the story fake, each of these videos has a particular tweak to it to get around YouTube content moderation algorithms.
YouTube has tools to fight against uploading repeat videos like this, but they can’t act fast enough to stop all of it. There an AI arms race, yes, but even in the context of that arms race, this kind of mass upload is a brute force attack on shared reality.
Destin’s video has many other examples. It’s a four part series and… literally all of them are worth your time. Every single citizen of the digital age needs to understand these things.
I will leave you with a quote from Jeremy Blackburn, a researcher Destin interviews who works on an international team of scientists studying disinformation:
“Nobody really has a map of the battlefield, a full map of the battlefield. Yes, Facebook has their map of Facebook land, and Twitter has their map of Twitter land. But nobody knows what’s going on on other parts of the internet. And it’s hard to win a war without a map.” — Jeremy Blackburn
This shook me and changed my perception. Scholars are now starting to study not just how individual groups of people are building armies of bots to work on one platform, but how bad actors can use sets of bots on multiple platforms to have strategic multi-platform effects. Like a coordinated assault lies can be amplified by land, air, TikTok and Instagram.
Destin goes on to explain that these campaigns are “coordinated attacks that span the whole interent.” He says Reddit in particular is being used as a mechanism to “scale” disinformation from small platforms to large ones. Enough bots in a subreddit liked by enough humans can turn a contrived lie into a “real” story.
We don’t we don’t have a vocabulary for this yet. Short of calling it a sort of strategic online multi-platform internet culture information war. “Troll” is too weak a word for digital soldiers on a postmodern battlefield where shared reality is at stake.
We must, also, unfortunately confront the fact that it’s not just bad guys attacking Britain. The threat, like the founder foresaw is foreign and domestic.
In Mr. Incredible’s momentary fall into the Screenslaver philosophy he his giving up the reliability of eyewitness testimony, giving up the reliability of what he sees with his eyes, giving up shared reality. He chooses to trust a screen mediated narrative instead of listening to the real authority, in this case his wife, who was there and is the expert.
In our daily scrolling, all of us can fell prey to the same thing. And not just because Mark Zuckerberg is the bad guy. The Russians are the bad guys.
I’ve been on Twitter. I know that people who consume some media outlets won’t want to hear me say this. That I can’t tear off their goggles and crunch them on the ground. They won’t want to believe in political microtargeting in automated bot-armies of misinformation, in algorithmic radicalization. (more details about that here)
I’ve written and rewritten a lot of versions of this conclusion to try and reach them. I want to try and make an argument. To explain that that Conservative and Liberal media outlets are not equivalent. It is not “very fine people on many media sides.”
QAnon, One American News Network, The Epoch Times, and yes Fox News are functioning as sources of misinformation.
I don’t.. I don’t know that I’m going to convince anyone of that who doesn’t believe that already. I don’t think I can make a YouTube video and Medium post says here we go — misinformation, twitter bots, Destin — now let me just casually break your entire worldview because I made a video with Mr. Incredible!
I don’t think I have that kind of power and I’m not going to pretend that I do.
So, with that said, I’ll not water down these three concluding points.
#1: When we are scared and feel insecure, we are easier to manipulate. Authoritarianism therefore thrives in spreading fear and taking power. “The caravan is coming.” Or more recently, “Critical race theory is coming to brainwash your children into hating your whiteness.”
#2 — Those Cambridge Analytica people? Trump knows them and has worked with them. If we take anything away from Carole Cadwalladr’s reporting, it is the Brexit was the dress rehearsal and the 2016 election was opening night.
The Mueller report came out in April 2019. Carols reporting happened before. Muller report wasn’t a bombshell that hit us by surprise it was it was an exhausting methodical careful examination of the wreckage. A confirmation of what we already suspected. Russia helped elect Trump. They used the mechanisms that we discussed political microtargeting, automated bot misinformation campaigns (and also straight up hacking.)
They didn’t need to breakdown truth everywhere, just in enough counties.
#3 — When Mr. Incredible sat down on the couch and lowered the phone he stopped trusting the legitimate authorities and worried about how it looked for him. In a movie, a character caring more about his ego than reality and relationship… well that’s bad. In reality, when a person in power cares too much about the public perception of how well something is being handled there can be dire consequences.
I’ve written elsewhere about COVID. About how Mr. Rogers would’ve reacted compared to Trump. About how hundreds of thousands could have been saved if this hadn’t been politicized. We’re seeing the evidence that unnecessary COVID deaths happened becuase intentional misinformation that was spread by the very news outlets that I mentioned before. One American News, QAnon, Fox, the president’s desk. (I have some in video citations in the accompanying video.)
The takeaway is that people died as a result of this domestic misinformation and health experts are confirming this as time is passing.
So how real is Screenslaver?
Real enough.
The character may be a fictional super villain but the philosophies– the tools–the techniques are real enough to take real lives in the real world
Chidi asks in The Good Place “What do we owe each other?” We owe it to each other to fight the real world media villains. Postmodern generals in the international information wars.
Before it’s too late.
I’m Charlie, this is a slightly edited written transcript from the That Makes Sense to Me YouTube channel. Subscribe or follow or Patreon if you can. Thanks for reading. ✌🏻