The decade coming to an end was the best of the worst of times. For the Caribbean and its diaspora, this decade has seen its own stunning revelations of duplicity and mendacity.
One revelation is evident in the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, where a case study in Trinidad and Tobago for the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica yielded valuable ground data on strategic, personalised online voter persuasion. The success of the scheme, later refined by its originators, was later deployed across the globe, notably in the US and UK, with dire consequences that we will be taking into the upcoming decade.
In its specific implementation, Peter Bradshaw, reviewing TGH in The Guardian, notes how CA designed, machine-tooled, and deployed the ‘Do-So’ campaign in T&T that incited “a certain strand of the population – assessed as liable to support the clients’ opponents – not to vote”. It was “a bogus grassroots anti-establishment campaign with the ironic slogan ‘Do So!’”, the targeted outcome being “not to ‘do so’ or do anything at all, not to vote, in fact: an insidious argument for apathy”.
As TGH notes, CA claims success through personalised, online targeting that duplicitously incentivised the six percent “persuadables” in T&T’s electorate. It helped push over the tipping point among undecided, young voters, so non-participation prevailed; the People’s Partnership won the 2010 elections.
We may never discover how CA unethically accessed the online personal data of hundreds of thousands of T&T nationals. However, what we can guess at is the nuggets from its dark ‘Do-So’ windfall yielded valuable implementation and outcome data. The later years of this troubling decade, particularly in 2016, saw CA deeply mining, weaponising, and deploying even more digital assets across the globe.
As Bradshaw writes, in 2016 both Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Brexit were beneficiaries from CA’s duplicity and mendacity, in its targeting and tipping voters off the edge – “the wobblers, the undecideds, the could-go-either-wayers in the middle”. The fallout for the US and UK, aided by CA’s duplicitous meta-practices, has helped to seed partisanship, extreme nationalism, divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric, the national good subsumed into leaderships projecting boorishness, egotism, and impeachable agendas.
It has been a distressful latter half to this decade, with the one ahead breeding more uncertainties into structural, foundational pillars as truth, credibility, and non-partisan commitment to nation-building. As 2019 ends, each day “post truth” and “alternate facts” add new gashes to many wounded nations. This decade ends with solicitude, and the one ahead is emerging with the keys to a nuclear arsenal still in the hands of an erratic, unpredictable US leader.
It has been no different in the Caribbean, with “post truth” and “alternative facts” evident in Guyana. On December 21, 2018, a successful no-confidence vote was passed in the nation’s parliament bringing the sitting government to an end. When this happens, Guyana’s Constitution triggers general elections. Yet elections did not take place three months later.
Instead, it took intervention by the Caribbean Court of Justice, its judges doing simple arithmetic to determine what number constitutes a majority vote. In its deployment of “alternate math”, along with other obfuscations, the Guyana government ran out the clock, duplicitously holding on to power to consolidate its electable position by delaying elections until March, 2020.
Similar manipulations with “post truth” and “alternate facts” are notable in Trinidad and Tobago, the mendacity and duplicity imitating the models employed by global leaders. Allegations of a sex scandal and cover-up with the former Sports Minister, with its Prime Minister deploying obscuring clouds of ink when questioned, reveal a government unable to rise above partisanship, steeped in misogyny, and wanton in its willingness to obfuscate.
The decade started off with lilacs emerging in an Arab Spring, mixing memory with desire for freedom; sadly, it did not blossom. We live in duplicitous times. Hopefully, the decade ahead would not become the cruellest yet.