...an invaluable primer on psychological warfare and behavior modification ... Given that Wylie was at the heart of this work, and that he displayed real sociological understanding of what the data was revealing, his account provides a useful, crystal-clear exposition of the power of psychographic profiling when it’s done right. And it suggests that electoral campaigning has now moved on to a different level.

Wylie...takes readers into some of the darkest corners of social media manipulation while at the same time showcasing one man’s journey as a self-styled whistleblower ... MindF*ck, it seems, is Wylie’s shot at redemption, his public alert to the dangers of loose data and the sinister spin artists of social media ... MindF*ck demonstrates how digital influence operations, when they converged with the nasty business of politics, managed to hollow out democracies—not to mention Wylie’s very soul ... He details in hundreds of pages his role in making social media a battlefield for political warfare ... His account of the charlatans of digital influence rings true to me. And his personal story, woven into the book’s narrative, illustrates the confusion of our current political era as well as the challenge to Wylie’s fellow members of the social media generation as they seek identities real and imagined, physical and virtual ... Wylie’s book offers invaluable lessons for any generation about how social media influencing works ... In addition to illustrating how social media manipulation works, Wylie offers insight into some of its chief characters, including those credited with elevating Trump ... To read MindF*ck, one might conclude that Cambridge Analytica alone engineered the entire global populist revolution we see today. But political strategists I’ve met in recent years refer to the company as digital snake oil, only one of many social media efforts pushing Trump.

...freewheeling and profane ... After reading Wylie’s memoir, you’ll have learned something ... Some of Wylie’s pronouncements sound schematic and jarring, especially when he talks about 'the rise of jihadism and the popularity of Crocs' as analogous 'products of information flows,' but there’s often insight in the unexpected connections he draws, and it’s not hard to see why he and Bannon initially bonded over their shared obsession with culture ... Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle 'neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,' propagating an outraged solidarity.

There are some perfunctory lines in his memoir that show regret and remorse for what his work would eventually lead to, but the real juice of the book comes whenever Wylie comes across a new toy to scrape data with ... You almost wish Wylie committed fully to the heel turn, and really opened up about the allure this very specific kind of power trip had on him. The mentions he makes here and there to earnestly believing that he was working on a tool for good are hard to take at face value considering: 1. he's a smart guy! and 2. even after leaving Cambridge Analytica, he was still helping a pro-Brexit campaign market itself ... he stops short of really coming clean with himself, and saves that vulnerability for the details he lets out about his relationship with his Cambridge Analytica Boss, Alexander Nix ... Mindf*ck is worth reading if you're interested in some of the bigger questions of the day: elections; data; Russia's involvement in all of this; Steve Bannon's power plays in global politics; the list of politicians who make an appearance at the Cambridge Analytica offices. Less so, if you're hoping to get a completely unsparing and honest mea culpa from a guy who seems to genuinely love people, albeit more as an abstract idea.