Day: December 16, 2019

 Mindf*ck.
Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

Author: Christopher Wylie

The perfect partner to our No. 7 book of the year, Mindf*ck unpacks the story of Cambridge Analytica and its role in the 2016 US-presidential election and the UK Brexit vote. In 250 tight and entertaining pages Wylie, who was at the centre of events, explains how data accessed from facebook was ‘weaponised’ to swing an election and reshape the European Union forever. 

“Mindf*ck demonstrates how digital influence operations, when they converged with the nasty business of politics, managed to hollow out democracies. . . . [Wylie’s] personal story, woven into the book’s narrative, illustrates the confusion of our current political era … [while making] clear how important the virtual world is to personal identity for his generation and those that follow.”—The Washington Post

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Zuboff’s message is simple – our freedom is at stake – as the lords of Silicon Valley use our personal data to control what we see and do and the position that we are afforded in society. No longer ‘cogs’ in the machine we have been rendered as bytes in algorithms of code, with the future of democratic society under direct threat.  

“Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: unmissable… As we grope around in the darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society – and lives.”―John Thornhill, FINANCIAL TIMES