This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited.



In 2009, in what future generations may see as the high-water mark of the ideology known as “techno-utopianism”, which may at some point be rebranded as “techno-delusionism”, Gordon Brown stepped on to the TED stage. The Silicon Valley thinkfest had come to Britain and he was there to talk about politics, technology and what he called “the creation of a truly global society”.

He had a powerful message to deliver. “The power of our moral sense, allied to the power of communications,” he said, along with “our ability to organise internationally”, would enable us “to fundamentally change the world”. This was a politician telling a tech crowd what it wanted to hear and what he wanted to believe. What we all wanted to believe. Brown’s thesis was this: people are essentially good. We have feeling for our fellow man and technology would be the enabler of more goodness. It would harness the very best of us .

It’s not that Brown was particularly naive or deluded. We all believed it then, didn’t we? 2009 was the year of Iran’s “Facebook revolution” although it was sometimes called the “YouTube Revolution”, not to be confused with several later “Twitter revolutions”. He was talking about technologies created by the kind of liberal progressives who wore jeans and statement specs and were bold enough to give their companies jokey mission statements such as “Don’t be evil”.

There was another voice at that same TED conference, a young, then unknown, Belarusian academic – Evgeny Morozov. He had a different message. Authoritarian regimes, he said, can and did use technology for their purposes, too. Technology and freedom were not obliged to go together. And if you were born in Belarus, you’d smell the bullshit a mile off.

Cut to last week and the spectacle of the masters of the technoverse trooping into Donald Trump’s golden lift. Trump’s words at his “tech summit” were extensively reported, but you need to watch the C-Span video to see the introductions. “Chuck Robbins, Cisco. Excited to be here and want to help.” “Eric Schmidt, Alphabet and Google and completely agree with what’s been said.” “Jeff Bezos, Amazon, super-excited about the possibilities for innovations in this space.” “Larry Page, Alphabet and Google, the youngest company here. Really glad to be here.”

The most powerful companies on Earth are “super-excited” to be working or – as you might say, collaborating – with Trump. In Silicon Valley, companies talk about “pivoting”. But Silicon Valley isn’t pivoting. Its multibillion dollar corporations are doing what they’ve always done, what Trump has always done: making money. It’s we who are pivoting. We the people and our democratic systems and relationship to power.

This is what technology has done. Foreign policy, Gordon Brown noted, “can never be the same again”. That much is true. Because 2016 has taught us that technology has changed not just foreign policy forever, but politics forever, elections forever. Last week’s report by the CIA that the Russian government did subvert the American election has proved that.

America’s use of the CIA to subvert foreign elections has come back to bite it. But it goes far, far beyond that. Democracy itself has been “disrupted”. The question is what happens next, whether we take it, in a prone position, craven and beholden to our new kings: Google and Facebook. Because how can a free and fair election ever be possible again when anyone’s emails can be stolen and leaked, or taken down as evidence and used against them? “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man,” said Cardinal Richlieu a long time before Hillary Clinton was born. “And I will find something in them which will hang him.”

There is no privacy, no security. That era is over. Hackers can and will find a way. The German election could be next, its security chief warned last week. What about our own democratic process in this year’s referendum? Here’s what we know about what influenced it. What people saw and read online. How they may or not have been manipulated and controlled through lies and half-lies and not-quite truths: nothing.

We know that the Leave campaign used the same London-based data research firm as the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, where Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart news and chief strategist to Donald Trump, is a board member. But we have no record of the vast amount of data it vacuumed up – the 5,000 data points it said it gathers on millions of people, things like what you ate for dinner and where your friends live. Nor do we know what it did with that data, the political messaging it showed people, the 50,000 variants of adverts Cambridge Analytica showed to 50,000 people during the Leave campaign. That’s gone. There’s no record. It wasn’t – couldn’t be – captured. It can’t be studied. We’ll never know.



According to Martin Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College, London, our digital information ecosystem has enabled platforms to find a way “of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open”.

That’s gone, as are facts and universally agreed notions of truth. The Holocaust? It’s a matter of debate. Facebook’s fake news problem is just one facet of a vast ecosystem of false information. An ecosystem that resembles a living organism, that Jonathan Albright, assistant professor of communications at Elon University, North Caroline, says is growing vaster and stronger every day. Like cancer.

What we do next is down to us, of course. Last Monday, as Aleppo bled, the most read story on the Guardian’s website was a review of Apple’s new Macbook Pro. No one knows what happens next. Except perhaps this: we will have our devices with us when the darkness falls.

• This article was amended on 18 and 20 December 2016. A review of the Macbook Pro was the most viewed story on the Guardian website, rather than the top story. This article was further amended because Steve Bannon is a board member of Cambridge Analytica, not CEO as an earlier version said.