It was Christopher Wylie’s insight about fashion: how your tastes change according to how your chosen leaders change what they’re wearing. And then he thought, what if we applied that to politics? We could change people’s tastes, provoke disgust and really strong emotions in exactly the same way it’s done in the fashion industry.
Source: Sympathetic Magic · Podcast: Touching on Contagion in Disinfolklore (Nov 2025)
Christopher Wylie’s origin insight for Cambridge Analytica was pure Sympathetic Magic: fashion taste-contagion applied to politics. If exposure to fashion leaders changes what people wear (Law of Contagion + Law of Similarity), then exposure to political content should change what people believe. Wylie met Steve Bannon, they founded Cambridge Analytica, and MAGA was born. The Mana in MAGA is literally contagion energy engineered through the same Laws that govern consumer behaviour.
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