Coming across two posts in quick succession, one on twitter, and the other on the attitude blog somehow focused my mind on data nerds and their outsized? influence on politics. I don’t purport to know what the politics of the two persons with the posts are above are but would hazard a guess that they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
The notion that the Starmer Government “had a unique ability to salami slice small segments of the population into vehemently and permanently despising them” immediately suggested to me that an operator (skilled or otherwise) had ingested the data, worked the focus groups and arrived at that as a strategy. Morgan McSweeney was ostensibly that canny operator for Labour, as was Dominic Cummings from yesteryear. Such micro-targeting is not new of course, Obama famously reaped its benefits, as did Trump through Cambridge Analytica. How much influence they had on Brexit is open to interpretation.
It is not only in politics that micro-targeting has become the norm – our social media feeds, our shopping baskets, and what we watch amongst others have all been captured and subsumed by the Big Brother Industrial Complex. What we do, and how we do it has very much become the building block of the digital us, one which can be probed and prodded by A/B tests and whatever black arts are deployed.
Whilst the benefits in all other domains are dubious at best, they are very much a net negative in the political space. Each one of us, ensconced as we are in the bubble of our salami-slice are consumed by our pet peeves, our virtues and our grievances, the things which divide being far more in our faces than the things which might unite.
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