What's the New Weapon of Mass Misinformation?

The 2016 election win of Trump, in the USA. The 2016 vote for Brexit, in the UK, and the 2015 elections, in Nigeria.

What is common to all three?

It is ‘Cambridge Analytica’, the company that is alleged to have influenced voting in all these places.

By collecting data on personality profiles of people, using various methods - including a software application that garnered data from Facebook profiles - this organization is said to have enabled governments and political parties to specifically target millions of voters --- with advertisements and promotional material that might have swayed their thinking.

Whether this gets proven or not, in the near future, we can be sure of one thing. Our personal data is not ‘secure’ anywhere. And it is being used against us.

If our pictures from iCloud can be stolen, if our personal data in government data centres can be hacked, if our telephone calls can be spied on and tapped, if our website-visits and our actual physical locations’ visits can all be recorded, if our emails can be read by Artificial Intelligence bots (in the guise of targeted marketing software), I think we are moving into a dangerous new world; where nothing will remain private.

It will be a world where, using our personality traits, biased and distorted information is fed to us, through various social media vehicles, by political parties, with the ulterior motive of manipulating our minds.

Just look at what SCL group promises. This is the same group which owns ‘SCL Elections’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica’.

“SCL Group provides data, analytics, and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide. For over 25 years, we have conducted behavioral change programs in over 60 countries & have been formally recognized for our work in defense & social change”.

I picked the above lines from SCL group’s website. And, as we can see, they make it clear that their aim is behavioural change -- using our data.

And now, look at what ‘Cambridge Analytica’ itself promises, on its website.

“We have up to 5,000 data points on over 230 million individual American consumers. By combining these data assets with your own customer data as well as a proprietary research instrument, we build custom target audiences, which enable us to engage, persuade, and motivate individuals to act”.

They can build custom audiences, they say. And to build them, if they obtain data through unscrupulous means, like it was allegedly done though companies like Facebook, whom should we blame?

This organization? Or Facebook? Or both? Or ourselves? Who betrayed our trust?

We may not know the answer, yet.

However, it is clear that data companies today are built and maintained to help the world. But they can also harm the world.

While Customer Relationship Management is a great thing, the spread of propaganda material, distorted information, and lies is a dangerous trend in politics.

In fact, ‘propaganda’ has become a good example of weaponized information today. Misleading or biased information of political nature is being spread by parties which are actually paying data-companies for their services.

Governments and organizations are on the one hand using data, of our behavioural patterns, to attack our minds. And on the other hand, promising us that our data is completely secure, in their servers.

“Edward Snowden steals data and he is called a criminal. Mark Zuckerberg allows data to be sold, and he is declared the ‘Man of the Year’”. That’s one of the Internet memes crisscrossing the cyberspace now.

Despite all the big things companies are promising us, like end-to-end encryption, we are really not sure if our communication and our data are really, genuinely, protected.

If George Orwell were alive today, I am sure he would not have said: “Big Brother is watching you”.

He would have re-written it saying, “Big data is manipulating you”.

My Brief History with Stephen Hawking's Books

A mathematics professor at the US University of Wisconsin-Madison did something interesting.

Using the highlights feature of Amazon Kindle, Jordan Ellenberg compiled a list of the most popular e-books that people buy but never finish.

And, Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ is right there, among the top-books, which are celebrated by many, but read by hardly any.

On Wall Street Journal’s website, as I read Ellenberg’s analysis, I immediately thought of the time I had purchased this book myself; an Indian paperback edition.

It was in 1990 I think, when I embarked on this ambitious project of reading Hawking’s book.

Ambitious, because I was barely 23 then.

For a graduate in mathematics and physics – which I was, by then – and for someone who had read books of over 1100 pages – like Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, which I’d read, by then - this non-fiction bestseller of just 250 pages seemed like an easy task. Just a brief, well, a matter of time.

But, try as I might, despite all that which our over-passionate Physics professor at the university had pumped into our heads - including the Theory of Relativity with its ‘length contraction’ and ‘time dilation’ concepts - I must confess, I had to abandon the book midway.

This book even had lots of beautiful pictures and diagrams explaining concepts like time-warp, uncertainty principle and string theory.

It is, however, another matter that the images had lacked the power to penetrate the thick skull I was blessed with.

Therefore, I soon gravitated, into my own universe. Against the book. And, today, I am completely unaware of my book's current physical coordinates.

The book, we can infer, was simply unable to escape the pull of a black hole, somewhere.

But, as an Indian, I particularly remember from the book, Stephen Hawking’s appreciation for the work done by the Indian-American Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

As far back as in 1930s, Chandrasekhar had studied what would happen if Einstein's special theory of relativity was applied to the processes that occur inside stars; and eventually proved that a star really could collapse, and fall into a black hole.

Chandrashekar had won the shared Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. The very year Hawking's book was released.

So, we can say that Hawking’s appreciation of Chandrashekar’s path-breaking work had come much before that of the Swedish Academy.

It was in 2008, in the Awali Library, here in Bahrain, that I had stumbled on ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’ by Stephen Hawking.

Published in 2001, this book - which is generally considered a sequel to the multi-million-copy bestseller ‘A Brief History of Time’ – was standing seductively in the bookshelf. Staring at me.

I took it out. I leafed through its pages, which were rich with colourful photos and illustrations. And falling to its charms, brought it home.

But unable to make sense of many concepts, I must admit, I returned the book without reading most of it.

However, my troubled relationships with two of Hawking’s books did not deter me; from making a third attempt.

In 2016, I purchased Stephen Hawking’s ‘The Grand Design’ (2010) co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow.

I had doubted myself, but the book was so well-written, targeting those with even basic knowledge of science, that I was able to complete it.

From Viking stories of Skoll and Hati, the wolves which cause eclipses (like Rahu and Ketu, in the Hindu Mythology) to the latest analysis of the Theory of Everything and M-theory, it explains the growth of scientific knowledge, and asks if God is really needed in the creation of ‘multiverse’, or many universes.

Whether we read Hawking's books or not, and whether we agree with him or not, we know one thing for sure.

In our lifetime, we will never see another 'Superstar of Science', like him.
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Some related weblinks.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-a-brief-history-of-time-book-theoretical-physics-why-good-a8255251.html