WASN'T THE FUTURE WONDERFUL?

My theory of the Internet is that humanity reached its ideal level of connectivity in 2005 when blogs were a thing but Facebook and Twitter weren't. It's been downhill since then. https://t.co/LzPGllZz8R

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) March 18, 2018

I assume every thinking person was purged of techno-utopian hopes a long time ago, but if any of that thinking still persisted, I imagine it's gone now. We've known for a long time that every major website and app is just a machine for collecting monetizable personal data, but the story of Cambridge Analytica's unauthorized leveraging of information obtained via Facebook really brings that home. And now we learn that using Big Data, even the purloined kind, to stimulate voters' emotions in order to motivate them to vote for CA's preferred candidate isn't the company's slickest trick:

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers....

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, [Cambride Analytica CEO Alexander] Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

...An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.

Mr Nix told our reporter: “...we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”

Data manipulation is what these guys put in the shop window, but if want the real goods, you have to slip into a back room and get ... the same kinds of dirty tricks that political operatives and other unsavory creatures have used for generations. If we're to believe their sales pitch, these guys are basically Roger Stone or more adroit versions of Jared Kushner's dad:

... Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. The last charge involved a particularly nasty incident where Charles Kushner send his sister Esther a tape showing her husband William Schulder with a prostitute hired by Kushner to discredit his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities.

Everything sucks the same way it always did, except for the stuff that sucks more.