Blog week 17

Blog Week 17

In Katherine Behar’s lecture Personalities Without People, she points out the intersectional parallels between object-oriented feminism and the psychometrics we’ve seen used in the past few years by right wing data firms such as Cambridge Analytica.

She points out that the way personality attributes measured by psychometrics are treated is very closely related to the idea of secondary qualities, which Behar says are treated as objects in the framework of object-oriented feminism, objects independent of the person they were attached to.

Cambridge Analytica was a British data firm responsible for swaying multiple political elections. The company was part of the SCL group, which offered private intelligence services in the political and military industries.

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison reported on Cambridge Analytica’s roles in both the Trump campaign and Brexit campaign, both of which they were contracted to work for. The group used data harvested from Facebook users to create personality profiles for millions of people. Behar explains that Cambridge Analytica used the “OCEAN” personality model — “openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism”. From these OCEAN personality profiles, the company was able to identify swing voters, who they targeted with automated, tailored political advertisements which aimed to pick up on themes that especially resonated with their constructed personality. Bahar goes on to criticise Cambridge Analytica’s personality models as pure abstractions from the people they represent — “personalities without people — shells or placeholders for a self”.

Bahar points out that interestingly intersectionality is being used both by right-wing and left-wing groups, to the ends of further isolationism.

Following the attention to the data scandal, Cambridge Analytica was forced to close, however many staff moved to a new company called Auspex International, which aims to offer the same services as the former company did, aiming at African and Middle Eastern markets of data surveillance.

Carole Cadwalladr (2017) The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison (2018) Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

Katherine Behar (2018) Personalities without People https://www.theocculture.net/ts5-katherine-behars-personalities-without-people/