There are at least a week’s worth of topics to discuss over the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story, and I will try to get to most of them, but for right now I just want to limit myself to the narrative arc of the story because its a great demonstration of how similar the structure of every scandal we see.
In school, we all learned the basics of story structure: meet protagonist, meet antagonist, protagonist confronts antagonist, resolution. What’s unique about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica narrative so far is the protagonist from every angle is a villain or at least severely morally compromised. There’s no white hat and no relatable figure for the audience, which is why it’s been such a struggle for anyone not paying close attention to understand it. As a default, Facebook is losing face because they are the most easily understood as being culpable, while, in fact, they might turn out to be victim as well as villain.
For those of you who haven’t been following the Facebook data breach story closely, here’s a good primer from Wired Magazine.
The Protagonist Painted Morally Gray
We’re all familiar with Act I of this play–a young Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and sharing a home and small office in Silicon Valley as Facebook scales up to its first million subscribers, largely on the back of colleges and university students. While not quite Horatio Alger, he is an American success story, just without the conscience and generous heart we’re so accustom to seeing in our heroes. He is, however, a model of American ingenuity so we overlook his personal flaws and take to his social platform by the millions every day.
Now, here’s where the plot gets complicated. Facebook is free to join, but as your parents probably told you at some point, there’s nothing in life that’s free. To grow, Zuckerberg has to hire hundreds, then thousands of coders, own data servers, and have places to house these employees and data servers: in short, Facebook needs to generate revenue to survive, but users don’t concern themselves with Facebook’s business plan; they just know they are now able to connect with long-lost friends and family members; post pictures of their vacations, graduations and weddings; and (too often as it turns out) share their political views.
What Zuckerberg realizes is no different from what the three major television networks in the U.S. discovered in the 1950’s–if they were going to give away their programming for free to their audience, they needed to sell advertising to those who were interested in speaking directly to potential customers, except in the 21st century, that advertising was based on very precise digital algorithms instead of broad-based analog airwaves. The public has agreed to this tradeoff for nearly 70 years. We watch shows for free, and then we complain about commercials so a smaller subset pays for subscription television which has no advertising. At the end, we all complain about big media and monopolistic cable companies controlling the airwaves while still feeding the beast.
Facebook’s initial ads in 2005 were simplistic and from the likes of PartyPoker.com, Cutco knives, summer camps and (interestingly enough) Apple. Lore has it, Zuckerberg, who was initially reluctant to sell advertising on Facebook, told his first ad sales chief in 2006, “I don’t hate all advertising; I just hate advertising that stinks.”
If you’re Zuckerberg, you’re thinking, “What could possibly go wrong? ”
This is where Act II begins: we have a quasi-protagonist facing a necessary judgment call, which will lead down the road to a monopoly, and hundreds of millions of happy (but blithely unaware) subscribers who are complicit in the scheme.
Enter Politics Stage Left
In 2007, a young (unnamed) Illinois Senator competing for the Democratic nomination for President knew that to win, he would have to encourage normally reluctant voters (read: young people from 18-30) to turn out to vote in large numbers. To do so, they needed to contact unregistered and uninspired voters in a place where they were spending time communicating with each other in order to engage them with a non-traditional politician with a unique life story which could resonate with their cohort. So this unnamed campaign built its own sophisticated algorithms to cross reference with voter data bases and other public information to create a first-of-its kind digital outreach operation built on more data points than anyone had ever assembled to identify and turn out potential supporters–and it worked! In 18 months he went from virtual unknown to President of the United States, and a new method of campaigning was born which political parties and candidates all over the country tried to replicate from Senators and Governors on down to candidates for City Council.
We’re In The Money
In part fueled by the success of the Obama campaign, private businesses rushed into participate into the digital advertising space. In 2004, Facebook sold a paltry $382,000 in ads. Within a decade (2013), that number had increased to $5 billion, part of an overall trend towards digital ad spending that will see more spent on digital media than on TV ad spends in 2018, with Facebook and Google capturing about 60 percent of the U.S. market spend. It’s estimated Facebook will generate $18 billion in ad revenue this year.
At some point during this period of phenomenal growth, Facebook crossed the rubicon; it’s brand was no longer a scrappy company that had a patina of cool because it gave teenagers and college kids their own lingua franca the adults couldn’t understand. It was losing its initial brand and was now a behemoth. Many observers would trace that interstellar crossing in 2012, when it became a public company valued at $60 billion and was forced to consider new ways of generating profits.
Facebook improved its algorithms and made it easier to promote posts and buy ads, and the adults signed up in droves (and don’t the adults always ruin everything) and before you know it, Facebook was Exhibit A in the new world of Big Data. It should be noted that to make anything sound nefarious in American society, all you have to do is insert the adjective “Big” in front of it’s noun–big banks, big government, big corporations…the list goes on. I’m not sure of another society where the phrase “too big to fail” would have the same resonance.
MIT Technology Review did a scathing review of Facebook’s business model here and here because Facebook didn’t realize the value of its data and how they were going to remedy it. Like with the Roman Empire, which technically wasn’t declared dead until 476 AD but was well on its way long before that, digital historians will likely pinpoint the decisions made at this juncture to a reevaluation of Facebook’s place in our society and the Cambridge Analytica revelations of 2018 a more blunt event to mark what had long been in the making.
Enter The Dragon
Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm which combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. Whether they are good at what they do is up for interpretation, the company is run by a cast of Voldemorth-like characters that no Hollywood scriptwriter could have dreamed up. First, there’s Steve Bannon, who Saturday Night Live satirized repeatedly as the Grim Reaper of the Trump administration. Then there’s secretive billionaire investor, Robert Mercer, underwriter of the right-wing, hate inciting Breitbart News, and his daughter, Rebekah, who holds the reins of the family foundation and is responsible for the family donating over $35 million to think tanks since 2009, including those that try to undermine climate science and defunding public schools. Then there’s Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, who could easily play the evil, duplicitous, upper crust British villain in any James Bond movie, and who siphoned off the profiles of over 50 million Facebook users under the guise of conducting a “research project” for the company. To square the circle, Nix and his firm worked for Ted Cruz and later Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential campaign where they used these stolen profiles to help Team Trump more accurately target voters to the tune of $6 million in fees and the glowing admiration of Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Easy as it is to make Trump into one of the villains, I suspect you will see the fallout cast him in a much more natural role–sideshow.
Usually, a drama doesn’t wait until the third act to introduce its hero, and in the Cambridge Analytica story, it turns out the reason is because the hero is really the anti-hero: the mad scientist, anti-establishment young man who set off the ticking time bomb in the first place, a now 28-year-old whistleblower named Christopher Wylie who was working for Bannon and Cambridge in 2014 when the data was breached. He was the brains behind using the app to mine data to learn more about American voters. To this day, he claims he believed what he was doing was legal and above board (wink, wink).
So, to sum up, we have as of March 2018, a group of morally compromised characters consumed with money, power and information, and a black hole where the hero is supposed to be.
Act III
Over the centuries, journalists have taken a great deal of flack, yet they are still still seen in most stories as crusaders for truth and justice. Thankfully, one finally came along in the name of Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian newspaper, who was able to get Wylie to open up and talk about his involvement with Cambridge Analytica, which led to the story being published. She will be heralded among other journalists, but I see her more like the good samaritan who gets killed before the end of the movie as supporting cast members typically do–heroic, but forgotten by the final credits.
Believe it or not, the winners of this tale of greed and immorality will be the least likely people you’d ever expect to be heroic…the members of Congress. If there’s one thing a politician knows how to do, it’s to gain favorable publicity in light of wrongdoing, and right now the lot of Zuckerberg, Nix, the Mercers and Bannon are looking to them like a piñata and they each own a Louisville Slugger.
When Congress gets back from it’s Easter recess, both House and Senate committees are going to establish investigations into this matter, and because of the juiciness of this story, cable news will be there to breathlessly cover every moment. While they might be shooting at different members of the cabal: Republicans will be gunning for Zuckerberg, while Democrats will be gunning for Bannon, the Mercers and Nix–everyone is going to have their poses and ripostes well practiced before the cameras get turned on because this is one of the few times when Congress knows the public will approve of the job it’s doing, and because hedge fund and technology billionaires have no constituencies.
Resolution
Here’s my take on the denouement: while the Mercers and Bannon will thumb their noses at Washington by hiding behind their lawyers or exercising the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination, and Nix will slink off to find another wealthy patron, Congress is going to place the first set of regulations (albeit largely toothless) on Facebook. While every user of Facebook is complicit in this tale, for better or worse, it’s Zuckerberg who is going to get the karmic kick in the ass because he’s the only part of the story that has a touch point with the public and it’s the only place where Congress can assert its jurisdiction. It’s also worth noting, something every politician learns in Politics 101: It’s nearly impossible to get re-elected after condemning two billion people for sharing pictures of their grandkids.
The alternate ending is an enlightened Zuckerberg realizes the error of his ways, shutters Facebook, donates all of his money to charity and teaches data ethics classes at Stanford, which would redeem his brand and make him the hero of the story, but only in fairytales do we all live happily ever after so count me as betting on Ending #1 with the moral of the story being, if you can’t figure out who’s the villain in your scandal, it’s probably going to end up being you.