Cambridge Analytica: How do good companies turn bad?

*“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck”

•   — Paul Virilio
  

Like many people, I’ve been following the story of Cambridge Analytica, the data mining firm that collaborated with Facebook and various political parties around the world to help get Trump elected, get the UK to vote ‘Leave’ on Brexit, and other astronomically damaging events of the past few years.

What I didn’t know until now was that Cambridge Analytica began its life doing good: its aim was to tackle radicalisation online by creating a set of tools to identify and combat internet extremism. It’s just one of the fascinating things I learned in this excerpt from the aptly named book Mindf*ck, written by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie.

It reinforced to me, yet again, that for every new technology there is a potential downside – the shipwreck – and that even good people, over time, can get caught up in the nefarious without realising or wanting to. Wylie says: “The deeper I got into [the projects], the more the office culture seemed to be clouding my judgment. Like so many people in technology, I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to ‘move fast and break things’.”

For my first step, I’ll be asking myself: How can I make time to think about the potential downsides of what I’m working on? How might I spot a turn towards the negative happening before it’s too late to turn back?