In 2012, for the first time, the electoral campaign of the world’s leading democracy became a software war23.01.26

The operation was codenamed Project Narwhal, in tribute to the long-horned cetacean that surges up monstrously from the depths to shock its rivals. The Republicans wouldn’t see it coming. For months, six days a week and fourteen hours a day, dozens of engineers lent to the campaign by Google—but also by Twitter, Facebook and several other Silicon Valley companies—worked to create this powerful beast of the sea. Thanks to Project Narwhal, Obama began his re-election year with the certainty that he knew the name of all 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had carried him to the White House. Of course, these votes had been cast secretly, but Narwhal’s data was so detailed that the analysts were able to identify the Obama supporters in every district. Each elector was given a probability rating between zero and a hundred. Zero meant they would vote for Romney. 
A hundred meant they were a guaranteed Obama supporter. The trick was to ignore those voters and focus all the campaign’s resources on voters in swing states with scores between forty-five and fifty-five.
Throughout the campaign, Narwhal tracked these ‘useful’ voters house by house, sending each a message adapted to their ideas and interests. Having seen the grand vision of 2008 crash into the wall of reality, Obama’s strategists reversed course. From a mobilization tool, the internet was transformed into a segmentation tool. This was child’s play for Schmidt, as the leader of the biggest advertising company on the planet, but it constituted a revolution in American and global politics. In 2012, for the first time, the electoral campaign of the world’s leading democracy became a software war. And, thanks to the cardinal of tech, the Democrats’ machine proved effortlessly superior.

Giuliano da Empoli The Hour of the Predator

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Anonymous

In 2012, for the first time, the electoral campaign of the world’s leading democracy became a software war23.01.26

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