 Thank you. I'll carry my phone as I have my notes. That's probably the most kind and difficult introduction to follow I think that I've ever ever had. I do know a bit about social media I've been in it for a long time I've in fact have been on the internet since the late 80s before The web was even there So I've become a bit of a social media expert as well as other things. I mean social media experts What people use to call themselves after the great dot-com bubble crash Lots of folks who were artists and all kinds of other things were that suddenly I do work for the House of Commons now, and I'm the special Advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on fake news, which has become the House of Commons Select Committee on disinformation and if you've heard headlines about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook over the past year or so that's been us and that's what we've been working on Quite diligently, but it is in the House of Commons. So I just like to start by saying I'm really really sorry And to Sort of I'd in fact if you haven't been looking at your phones And I doubt you have been because it looks like it's been a pretty interesting day I'll just update you on where we're at right this minute Donald Tusk has now said that and Less Parliament is going to vote for May's deal in the coming days Then the only Brexit option is no deal. So that's where we stand at the moment Or possibly no Brexit at all, but I think politically we all know that that's just not what's going to happen So that's where we stand to my American colleagues, and I'm told there's quite a few Americans here I'd like to say welcome to Europe It's really nice to have you here And I I would like to think that it's not the last time that we'll be able to say it But perhaps next year the conference will be in Berlin So we could run it like that I'd like to show you all my tie For just a minute. I think this is a really delightful tie And I like it quite a lot And I just got it And I'm very pleased about this tie I'm really really into clothes and and and I like them a great deal And part of that is because I come from a I do come from the circus But coming from the circus and the Americans will understand this better Is also means you come from the carnival coming from the carnival means that you lived in a trailer and Living in a trailer basically means your trash. So that's the kind of upbringing bringing that I had But I was fortunate enough to come to the UK to do my education because at that time It was accessible to me and some of the greatest universities in the world were accessible to me And I ultimately ended up getting to do my PhD at st. Martin's which British people will know And and I was I was very fortunate to be able to do that kind of thing Anyway, it's if st. Martin's gave me two things The first thing it gave me is an awareness that everything is a text to be read And this is probably the thing that pervades my entire life and my thinking about nearly everything that I look at It's always a text to be read and the other thing it's done is it's giving me a taste for clothes. I can't afford So with this taste for clothes. I can't afford what I've ended up doing is I've discovered eBay in eBay fashion And not only a long time ago, but like five days ago. It's ridiculous. It's become an obsession in the house so I got up this morning and I Haven't worn this tie before this my first day out with the tie And and I asked my fiance. I'm like what what do you think of the tie and she looks at it She goes, oh, I think that's a really nice tie. I really love it And I said I said you don't think it looks like a clown tie. Do you? Because I think it looks kind of like a clown tie and she said well Now that you've said it I Kind of can't unsee it, but I would prefer to think of it as a kind of artful homage To your history and your upbringing So this is my artful homage to my history and upbringing but once seen it can't be unseen and and this is how I Kind of think of data Right. I think the the data that has been collected by all of us which over the course of last year or so working with the select committee Specifically about Cambridge Analytica specifically about Facebook and have we ever been dogged about Facebook? is is to Understand that all of our data everybody in this room all of your data has been collected. I promise you I don't care how careful you've been If you've been online if you've been on social media Your data is being collected and it's available in very public places, too And while the big social media giants Have been saying to us that they've been deleting this data that if you ask for your data to be deleted It can be deleted that if you invoke your rights around GDPR which is the general data protection regulation, which I assume that most of us know here But I'll talk a little bit about it that if you ask that data will be deleted The trouble is is that once seen it can't be unseen and we come into this issue of inferred data of the kind of it it it's almost like There's a terrific book about the Mona Lisa by Darian leader Who's a Lacanian psychoanalyst? About when the Mona Lisa was stolen More people came to see the empty space Then actually we're coming on a day-to-day basis to see the Mona Lisa And that space became a placeholder for a thing and that thing even though it wasn't there In a leader's point was from a psychoanalytic perspective. It was in fact still there It is the space of the Mona Lisa and our data It becomes inferred data There is a shape of you that's derived from social media Definitely a shape of you this drive from Facebook There's a shape of you this drive from snapchat as well We took evidence from snapchat yesterday and goodness were they evasive They were just incredibly evasive about what was going on and and never once did anyone speak of the origins of snapchat And how it became so popular because your nude selfies would instantly disappear But that's the case. We'll come back to inferred data, but let's go let's go to the Cambridge Analytica scandal for a little bit So just in case It's not been on your mind, and I suspect everybody knows a bit about it There's a company called Cambridge Analytica that is a stratcoms company Creole agency is a stratcoms company by the way We're not in competition with Cambridge Analytica because we don't do the same kind of work We mostly do policy work and we do a lot of research and we happen to make film and video Cambridge Analytica does all kinds of other kinds of work a lot of it has to do with collecting data A lot of it has to do with what they then do with that data And then it has to do with impacting events at a national level around the world Here's I'll give you a narrative of the Cambridge Analytica story and perhaps it's not the narrative that you've heard in the past But it's a narrative that I've ended up developing in my mind, and I think will become very public at some point And the way that I developed this narrative is after having been the special advisor to the House Common Select Committee on disinformation I then became the special advisor to the joint national security Committee of Trinidad and Tobago Which is interesting is a very small country But it turns out the Cambridge Analytica story started there Now they existed as a company as SCL before that But really the kind of manipulations that we're seeing that we're all very Uncomfortable with and the huge role of Alexander Nix began in Trinidad and Tobago And to understand that I and I do have to refer to my notes on this unfortunately Because Trinidadian politics is complicated in Trinidad Political power falls across two different parties the people's national movement, which is quite huge and the United National Congress Most Afro Trinidadians support the people's national movement and most Indo Trinidadians Support the United National Congress or other related parties from an ethnic perspective So there's a whistleblower named let's not that's too much detail. Sorry a Whistleblower was told by Alexander Nix about the operation that Cambridge Analytica Put in place in Trinidad and what they did is they went in and they did lots and lots of data collection We haven't quite figured out how the data collection was done We haven't quite figured out who they were in cahoots with on this But the guess and it's a guess is that it was at the ISP level the internet service provider level At the level of everything that happens in your computer that the cloud might possibly touch and From that data they developed a strategy And this would have been in support of the United National Congress now The way I'll tell this story is the way that Alexander Nix told it to Brittany Kaiser That's Britain. That's the whistleblower He said that what they needed to do is they needed to keep people from turning out to vote For the people's national movement the Afro Trinidadian party because they were trying to get the Indo Trinidadian party in place So they began Astro turf street movement to oppose voting at all That if they can just get young people not to vote then the young people who convinced sort of middle-aged people Not to vote the middle-aged people who convinced the old people not to vote and then lots and lots of people will not turn out to vote but Nix believed that For a number of different reasons including them not being in power Including cultural traditions on the island and so on that the Indo Trinidadian Youth movement no matter what they did would still do what their parents wanted them to do And I really want to put these words in Nix's mouth not mine But that's that was their strategy and in fact indeed what they found was when they suppressed the entire vote Mostly what they did is they suppressed the vote for the people's national movement and the United National Congress Was then elected so this is a big operation. It had a lot to do with collection of data It had a lot to do with trying to draw up personality profiles on people It was a fake grassroots campaign and it was very much disinfor a disinformation driven campaign so from that disinformation driven campaign and a couple of other Disinformation campaigns in the Caribbean There's some lovely detail there that I'd like to go into but we'll all just glaze over if I start talking about it Their next move was to come and do Brexit and to come and work on Brexit That's what I believe now There's a lot of us who believe that and there's a lot of us who can't find a smoking gun in order to prove that It's absolutely the case Part of the reason that we can't find smoking guns is because there's not a police level Investigation that's happening around it and there are there's not a criminal level investigation that's happening around it It's very easy to say well you're the committee of Parliament surely if something happened You could find this out and my answer to that is We're a committee of Parliament. We're a bunch of politicians, you know, we don't have any power and we don't have any guns There's really not a lot that we can do in that case But I believe that it will come to pass that there was a role played by Cambridge Analytica because there are close Association with a Canadian company called aggregate IQ who definitely played a role in Brexit and I have a great deal of evidence for that but then that became a test run for the Trump election and Cambridge Analytica very clearly worked on The Ted Cruz campaign and after Ted Cruz very clearly worked on the Donald Trump campaign And we know that that's the case and what we also know is That at some point they ended up with a personality profile On 220 million Americans, that's every American voter. This is a personality a psychometric personality profile that was drawn up Based on about 500 different data points on average That's an enormous amount of power That's an incredible amount of power, but it's all power that revolves around an ability to target individuals with disinformation It's a diss it's a time of disinformation right now. It's a time of strategic Communications and in in in the UK we call strategic communications strat comps It's a little confused with American nomenclature because strat comps in America is strategic command and oh boy Is there a big difference? between those two But strat comps now Strat comps now it's behavioral economics priming All of the different tropes that you'll read about behavioral economics and as an ex game designer Contemporary game design is purely behavioral manipulation of players around around loop Boxes and motivating them to spend in compulsion loops and so on It's about personality profiling which is five-factor profiling which is also called ocean profiling And it's very much around targeted disinformation now I Didn't expect this to happen this massive Disinformation period that we happen to be living through I'm a good post structuralist. You know, I came up. I came up with what Khan I came up with Derrida I came up with with with all the all all the French philosophers that semiotext was willing to publish And that's what we read in art school in America What I didn't expect from our now going on 70-year critique of the institutions of the civil society and the institutions of Democracy was one day to wake up and go. Oh my god. What happened to our democracy and Yet that is the position that we find ourselves in It's good to self critique. It's good that we critique the civil society It's good that we read Foucault and we analyze Foucault and we critique Foucault even he is not allowed to be an institution either Any institution let's get in there and critique it unless let's bring it down a little bit But now where are we after all of that? Because what we're finding ourselves is we're finding ourselves in the middle of a stratcom century You know, it is it is the time for communications and for communications to be dominant a Good example of that is is Crimea why this is a stratcoms century Crimea was not taken with tanks Crimea was taken with stratcoms Hardly a bullet was fired You could almost say the same thing for the breakup of the EU or the beginnings of the breakup for the EU Except for the assassination of Cox so a bullet was in fact fired there but it's also largely been a stratcoms operation and Plus when you have so many players So many different players that are absolutely armed to the teeth and they are armed to the teeth to the point Where nobody dares shoot a bullet at anybody else anymore? What are you left with? Stratcoms, that's what you've got your left fighting disinformation wars Fighting wars of influence in order to change the field and to change the subject subject and there's Plenty of war real war happening out there because I go and I work in some of the zones, but There's even more stratcoms where it's specially at the very top levels That's a kind of depressing thought and I don't want to stay there too much So what I would like to do is say that what we really need to do to fight this now Is we have to rethink our relationships to our institutions that we have been critiquing for so very long And our critiques of them need to have the aim of making them stronger and making them more important and making them more vital in support of the civil society and in the port in support of democracy and So in that I would ask two big questions First of all who will be in a disinformation age the new arbiters of truth Where is the institution that I'm going to go to to find out? What is really true and I would propose that there is a significant role here for libraries and that this is Absolutely critical to the future of democracy You're practically on the front line of the disinformation wars and to take that on and to understand that and invest yourself in it Becomes really really very important and then there's an even more challenging question that I think it's that we need to have a look at And that's going back to this idea of inferred data that we talked about at the beginning The Republican National Committee holds 220 million Personality profiles on folks a lot of that's been leaked a lot of that's been stolen Facebook holds personality profiles on millions of people Their personality profile there there's data about all of us available to sell out on the dark web Right now your data has been sold already. So the question becomes Hmm Well that the what we should conclude from that is that the greatest record of humanity to ever exist exists right now and It's out there and it's on the web and it can be bought and it can be collected and it can be analyzed And it is being bought and it is being collected and it is being analyzed So there's an ethical debate to have that if the information is out there and if the information is being used by bad actors Can the information also be used by good actors? Can the information be used by people who are concerned with history by people who are concerned with research? Can we collect that data? We as Historians and we as storytellers in the face of this What is it that we should do in support of the civil society and in the support of democracy? And I think with that it's a good time to move off of my tie and off of my talk and Perhaps have a conversation with