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Mercer left IBM in 1993 to join a hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, and later became its CEO. Here, with others, some of whom had previously worked with him on language processing at IBM, he developed elaborate algorithms to detect market fluctuations. Renaissance became one of the most profitable of all investment funds.¹⁵⁵ A third of the 200 employees had Ph.D.s, but “PhDs in finance need not apply,” nor “anyone with even the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides.”¹⁵⁶

At 1.07 on April 23, 2013 the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the AP News Agency in Washington with the tweet, “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.” Within minutes, the computers scanning the news for events relevant to autotrading on Wall Street brought the Dow Jones index down 140 points, wiping out $200 billion in capital.¹⁵⁷ Renaissance’s edge is its algorithms, tracking the psychology of markets, not human understanding of companies or their productive work.

Then, the 2016 US presidential election. Mercer decided to devote some of his enormous fortune and prodigious talents to getting a Republican elected. First, he supported Ted Cruz, who did surprisingly well in the primaries despite his extreme right-wing views. Then, when Cruz dropped out, Mercer switched his support to Donald Trump.

“Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”¹⁵⁸ This is how Christopher Wylie, a programmer at the company Cambridge Analytica, described the work they did for the Trump campaign. Bannon was the director of Breitbart.com, an alt-right news channel, then vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and after that Trump’s campaign manager. Mercer had bought shares in Breitbart and was a founding investor in Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie, a self-described “gay Canadian vegan,” said of Bannon, “He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel.” And of Mercer, “In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas it’s the opposite way around with Mercer … He really listened. He wanted to understand the science.”¹⁵⁹

The science was “differential psychology” based on a “lexical hypothesis.” People’s personalities are different, and their psychological makeup can be determined by analysis of the words they use.¹⁶⁰ The immediate science and the “Cambridge” of Cambridge Analytica came from the work of researchers in the Psychometrics Centre in the Judge Business School at Cambridge University.

A 2013 paper by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel showed how “Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior.” Some 58,000 research subjects had “volunteered” their Facebook profiles by signing up to an app, myPersonality. It was possible to “predict individual psychodemographic profiles,” not just in terms of self-classified profile characteristics, but in terms of the personality profile captured in the myPersonality survey, including such dimensions as agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and other psychometrically-defined “traits.”¹⁶¹

Then, in a 2015 paper using an even bigger dataset, Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell announced that “computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.” This was in the fine print: “Conflict of interest statement: D.S. received revenue as the owner of the myPersonality Facebook application.”¹⁶² David Stillwell was deputy director of the Psychometric Center and co-author of another article, “Money Buys Happiness When Spending Fits Our Personality.”¹⁶³ His page on the Cambridge Judge Business School website says, “Today myPersonality has collected data from more than 6 million people, and the resulting database has become a priceless academic resource used by numerous researchers all over the world.”¹⁶⁴

Stillwell, along with a lecturer in psychology at Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan, were approached by Chris Wylie. They came together in what they called in their diaries the “Panopticon Meeting,” a reference to Michel Foucault’s theory of modern social surveillance and Jeremy Bentham’s incarcereal practice.^§AS2.5a Kogan went on to create his own Facebook app on the same principles, thisisyourdigitallife. 270,000 people offered their personality data there, which when linked to Facebook profiles yielded 57 billion friendships. Born in the USSR, Kogan also worked at St Petersburg University and had been granted Russian research funds.¹⁶⁵

Priceless indeed, because associated companies, including Cambridge Analytica, were soon pitching, for a price, the data and its associated analytics – to the State Department, the Pentagon, Steve Bannon, and then Robert Mercer.¹⁶⁶

The history of this particular science – where differential psychology meets statistical text-mining – takes us back to Mercer’s intellectual roots. While Mercer was studying for his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois, one of the University’s most famous scholars, Raymond B. Cattell, was undertaking foundational work on personality traits using computational, lexically-oriented psychometrics. Catell had moved from Harvard to Illinois in 1945 because the Illinois Automatic Computer was being built there, the first such machine in a US University,^§MS1.3.2c and heavy-duty computation work was going to be a key to his work in the area of psychological testing.

In a discipline where this kind of thing seems particularly to matter, Cattell is the seventh most cited psychologist of the past century.¹⁶⁷ If Cattell and Mercer did not work together (and we may never know, because Mercer is notoriously secretive), the intellectual direction of both their work must at the very least have been in the air within the statistical text analytics circles at the University of Illinois.

In 1997, the American Psychological Association withdrew its nomination of Cattell for a lifetime achievement award after a flurry of protests. Dr. Barry Mehler, director of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism at Ferris State University, was one of the protesters. Mehler had also earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois. He posted a statement to the web saying “the potential awardee has a lifetime commitment to fascist and eugenics causes.”¹⁶⁸ In a lengthy scholarly analysis, Mehler noted that Cattell had been a Nazi supporter before the Second World War, and that he had not substantially changed his views after the war. Cattell’s writing, Mehler concluded, was “striking for its extremism, racism, and virulent bias against the poor.” Opposed both to immigration and foreign aid, Catell said in 1972, “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of phasing out of such peoples.”¹⁶⁹

In any event, Cambridge Analytica became an inheritor of the Facebook app data and a purveyor of Cattell’s science. Director Alexander Nix said, “Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions. We call this behavioral microtargeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.”¹⁷⁰ And not long after, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.”¹⁷¹

As Cambridge Analytica employees Harris MacLeod and Tim Gilster explain, “if you are an ‘Individualistic and Imaginative Type,’ and we were marketing Ted Cruz to you, we would emphasize the fact that he’s in a new generation of Republican leaders … He’s got new ideas, fresh ideas, innovative ideas – you’ll be able to file your taxes on a postcard, whatever, abolish the IRS … [I]f you are low-conscientiousness … it’s about being the Washington outsider, blowing through the received way of doing things … It would be ‘everything is bigger in Texas’ – it would be bold visuals, bold statements.”

The word Cambridge Analytica began to use for its approach was “psychographics.” Until now, Nix explained, election campaigns had differentiated their targets with old-school demographics. “A really ridiculous idea,” he said. “The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender – or all African Americans because of their race.”¹⁷² Messages needed to be much more finely tuned to differentials, and now social media technologies made this possible. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.” In the “little Haiti” district of Miami, the Trump campaign sent a message about Clinton Foundation failures after the Haiti earthquake, doubtless not enough to get Haitians to vote Republican, but enough at least to discourage them from voting for Hillary Clinton.¹⁷³

Trump campaign’s Digital Director explained the process in a television interview:

Brad Parscale: I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won …

Lesley Stahl: And Facebook IS how he won.

Brad Parscale: … Facebook was the method – it was the highway … which his car drove on … Yeah. Facebook now lets you get to places and places possibly that you would never go with TV ads … We took opportunities that I think the other side didn’t.

Lesley Stahl: Like what?

Brad Parscale: Well, we had our – their staff embedded inside our offices.

Lesley Stahl: What?

Brad Parscale: Yeah, Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices [in the Trump Tower, to make ads]. We were making hundreds of thousands of ’em.

Lesley Stahl: You make 100,000 ads.

Brad Parscale: Programmatically. In one day. In one day.

Lesley Stahl: So 100,000 different ads every day?

Brad Parscale: Average day 50–60 thousand ads … This was all automated.

Brad Parscale: Changing language, words, colors, changing things because certain people like a green button better than a blue button. Some people like the word “donate” or “contribute.”

Lesley Stahl: This one is tax, this one is childcare, this one is energy.

Brad Parscale: They were all targeted to different users … Sent out to different people. And it could be each other’s next-door neighbors … all in Ohio.

Lesley Stahl: This one person at 11 Elm Street gets this one and 13 Elm Street gets that one.

Brad Parscale: Yup, yup.¹⁷⁴

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¹⁵⁵ Scott Patterson, 2010, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Quizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, New York: Crown Business, pp. 106–17.

¹⁵⁶ James Owen Weatherall, 2013, The Physics of Finance: How Science Has Taken over Wall Street, New York: Houghton Mifflin, p. xii.

¹⁵⁷ www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/10188335/Quants-the-maths-geniuses-running-Wall-Street.html

¹⁵⁸ www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

¹⁵⁹ Ibid.

¹⁶⁰ Gerald Matthews, Ian Deary, and Martha Whiteman, 2003, Personality Traits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

¹⁶¹ Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, 2013, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(15):5802–05.

¹⁶² Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell, 2015, “Computer-Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate Than Those Made by Humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(2):1036–40.

¹⁶³ Sandra C. Matz, Joe J. Gladstone, and David Stillwell, 2016, “Money Buys Happiness When Spending Fits Our Personality,” Psychological Science 27(5):715–25.

¹⁶⁴ www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/david-stillwell

¹⁶⁵ www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/cloak-and-data-cambridge-analytica-robert-mercer

¹⁶⁶ Tamsin Shaw, 2018, “The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops,” New York Review of Books.

¹⁶⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Cattell

¹⁶⁸ www.nytimes.com/1997/08/15/us/racism-accusations-and-award-is-delayed.html

¹⁶⁹ Barry Mehler, 1997, “Beyondism: Raymond B. Cattell and the New Eugenics,” Genetica 99:153–63, pp. 154, 155.

¹⁷⁰ www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-

¹⁷¹ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

¹⁷² Ibid.

¹⁷³ Ibid.

¹⁷⁴ www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-embeds-russia-and-the-trump-campaigns-secret-weapon

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 235–240. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Robert Mercer’s “Psychographics” §AS2.2.2a