I well remember the sense of
anticipation in seeing in the New Year at the end of 1983. As I had grown up,
the year 1984 had stood as a symbol of a feared future in which, as the author
of that book puts it, ‘Big Brother is Watching You’. The book also contains the
lines: ‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the
present controls the past.’ George Orwell wrote his book in 1949, when the year
1984 seemed a long way off. It was a work of fiction, yet a serious comment on
the way society was going and a warning about a future in which our society could
be under constant surveillance and public manipulation. Lots of interesting
things happened in 1984, but in other ways life in 1984 was not unlike 1983. At
the time, there was much commentary as to whether anything Orwell had predicted
has actually come true. Fifteen years
later, in 1999, the Wachowski Brothers released the highly original film The
Matrix. It won four Academy Awards and the story was continued by two further
films, which completed the planned trilogy. The story line is confusing at
first, which puts us in the same place as the hero, Thomas Anderson, who
operates as a computer hacker under the name Neo. What Neo comes to realise
(and too so we, the audience) is that the life people are experiencing is a
computer generated fantasy. In reality, the biological human life forms are
each contained in a water filled pod with their actual bodies plumbed into life
support tubes. This is the Matrix, a fantasy world controlled by others, which isolates
them from the realities of life. Neo is hailed as ‘The One’ who will lead the
way out of this vision of hell. But the system fights back to protect itself,
in the form of the many agents called ‘Smith’. The story is the battle for
freedom from the Matrix.
Of course (as far as we know),
the Matrix is a fantasy, yet it too comments on the society in which we live.
It uses a vivid story to question just how real are the things that seem to
make up the stuff of our lives and to what extent we are under the control of unseen
powers and forces. I have found myself reflecting on these things in the light
of the revelations about Cambridge Analytica and their use of some 50 million profiles
harvested from Facebook. The interviews with senior executives, secretly filmed
by Chanel 4 News, certainly suggest that some deeply worrying things have been
going on and that the company (or associated companies) was deeply involved in
Trump’s election success in America and (almost certainly) in the UK referendum
vote on Brexit. There is a lot of political posturing going on at the moment.
For those who dislike Brexit, here is evidence that there was cheating involved
and the vote cannot be seen to be valid. For those on the other side, this is
all a complete nonsense and the use of such data cannot possibly have had
anything to do with the result. I am somewhat bemused by those who think the analysis
of data and the resulting custom-building of advertising has no effect. Such
companies would not attract such high fees if this were the case. It is
estimated that at least 40% of the Leave Campaign’s was spent with these
companies. It was the way to win the vote.
It has been suggested that you
cannot win elections by putting adverts on Facebook. Yet this is not the point.
We are not consumers of Facebook, we are the product, and how the operation
worked was not to send us information through Facebook, but to harvest our
profiles. This allowed the kind of advertising (immigration, NHS, etc) that
would play to our deepest hopes and fears. It was not about winning arguments,
but playing emotions. It was also about identifying the half-million or so
people, who could swing the vote one way or the other, and feeding them what it
would take to vote in the right way. We were certainly played and manipulated.
Yet I wonder whether this is really any different to the kind of data-analysis
that has been practiced for a long time and by both side in any given contest.
Perhaps we are shocked by the scale of the operation and brought to the realisation
that we all live out our lives with our hearts on our electronic sleeves. The
personal information we put online is wide open to manipulation by individuals
and groups. who have the money, power and expertise to do so. My concern is not
to suggest that the Brexit vote was a fix, nor to point a finger of blame at
one side or the other, but to suggest that something is deeply wrong here. I
wanted to remain in Europe, but I came to accept that there could be an
argument for reclaiming our sovereignty and our sense of democracy by withdrawing
from an increasingly controlling bureaucracy, led by unelected officials at the
heart of the EU. Yet I am left with a question. To what extent are we taking
back control of our country, if major decisions about our future can be
controlled by shadowy figures of power who, it seems, can determine the course
of democracy? Maybe what Cambridge Analytica did was not against the law, but
after a year-on-year pushing of boundaries of what is possible we are waking up
to a chilling world in which others, not we ourselves, seem to be making the
decisions that will affect our lives and our future. There are huge questions
here as to how we might better build human communities and societies. We might
start by asking again what it might mean for the Kingdom of Heaven to be
established here on earth, as it is in heaven.
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