Mindf*ck

Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

Christopher Wylie, the pink-haired data scientist who helped build Cambridge Analytica before becoming its most prominent whistleblower, delivers a firsthand account of how a data harvesting operation weaponised psychological profiling to influence elections across the world, including the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. Wylie is a compelling and self-aware narrator who grapples seriously with his own complicity in what he helped create. The book reads like a thriller but its implications — for democracy, privacy, and the architecture of social media — are entirely non-fiction. A vital document of how information warfare actually works.