Abstract
“Sordid Genealogies: A Conjectural History of Cambridge Analytica’s Eugenic Roots” explores the history of the methods employed by Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the history of psychometric analysis, trait psychology, the lexical hypothesis and multivariate factor analysis, and how they developed in close conjunction with the history of eugenics. More particularly, it will analyze how the work of Francis Galton, Ludwig Klages, Charles Spearman, and Raymond Cattell (among others) contributed to the manifold translations between statistics, the pseudoscience of eugenics, the politics of Trumpism, and the data driven psychology of the personality championed by Cambridge Analytica.
Highlights
“Sordid Genealogies: A Conjectural History of Cambridge Analytica’s Eugenic Roots” explores the history of the methods employed by Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US presidential election
For the computer, meaning is irrelevant to the act of translation; rather, translation is governed by statistical algorithms based on probable location i.e., the likelihood of a correspondence between where a word in a cluster of words in one language stands in relation to a word in a cluster of words in another
Like its UK parent company, Cambridge Analytica specialized in mass manipulation, psy-ops, and the perversion of democratic process; what differentiated it was its unprecedented breach of digital privacy through massive data theft and its innovative crunching of this stolen data through algorithms supposedly based in psychometrics and personality trait theory
Summary
This image (Fig. 1), illustrating the roots of Eugenics, is wellknown. We could, imagine others: e.g., modernization, immigration, urbanization, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, colonialism, the rise of new professional classes, the fear of degeneration, and class conflict. Despite the commonplace dismissal of eugenics as a racist pseudoscience, we can point both to the continued vitality of its serpentine roots and their surreptitious evolution into new branches carrying such labels as data science, psychometry, marketing, and mass manipulation. We can, in this sense, complicate this illustration’s assumed teleology of statistics, mental testing, psychology, Fig. 1 The Eugenic tree. Like its UK parent company, Cambridge Analytica specialized in mass manipulation, psy-ops, and the perversion of democratic process; what differentiated it was its unprecedented breach of digital privacy through massive data theft and its innovative crunching of this stolen data through algorithms supposedly based in psychometrics and personality trait theory
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