The speaker, Alexander Nix, an Eton man, was very much among his own kind—global elites with names like Buffett, Soros, Brokaw, Pickens, Petraeus and Blair. Trouble was indeed on the way for some of the attendees at the annual summit of policymakers and philanthropists whose world order was about to be wrecked by the American election. But for Nix, chief executive officer of a company working for the Trump campaign, that mayhem was a very good thing.
He didn’t mention it that day, but his company, Cambridge Analytica, had been selling its services to the Trump campaign, which was building a massive database of information on Americans. The company’s capabilities included, among other things, “psychographic profiling” of the electorate. And while Trump’s win was in no way assured on that afternoon, Nix was there to give a cocky sales pitch for his cool new product.
“It’s my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process,” he began. As he clicked through slides, he explained how Cambridge Analytica can appeal directly to people’s emotions, bypassing cognitive roadblocks, thanks to the oceans of data it can access on every man and woman in the country.
After describing Big Data, Nix talked about how Cambridge was mining it for political purposes, to identify “mean personality” and then segment personality types into yet more specific subgroups, using other variables, to create ever smaller groups susceptible to precisely targeted messages.
This is not a new topic: see Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.