Men Who Stare At Goats
For the last hundred years or more, there has been more than a few people who're desperate to believe that magical mind control can be moved from myth and fiction onto some sort of scientific basis. See the book The Men Who Stare At Goats to see how deep the belief goes.
It's true that you can understand the people in ever greater detail with big data, but you only have to see the political upset on both sides when Brexit/Trump won to realise that there's no uber conspiracy here, just the normal fallible humans finding new and interesting ways to screw things up. Not that the changes being ushered in are necessarily bad for our deeply embedded political systems, but no-one could really claim that there is any evidence of a mastermind at work...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
