Guardian approves of Dark Arts for Remain*

No real surprises there, of course. Today's edition features a dubiously self-promoting piece by a Dark Artist; 'Ian Warren is director of the consultancy Election Data' Iif it were  Cambridge Analytica, the shock and horror would be clear, but this Artist supports Remain so it goes uncriticized. Much of it agrees with standard Graun writers' views of the poor dim emotional herd that voted for Leave and the need for more emotional appeals because that is all they can understand -- but this breaks some new ground The subheading says it all really:

Messages from on high are useless – we need simple emotional messages that move people and can be easily shared 

It illustrates perfectly the cultural politics of the petit-bourgeois by rebuking the elite first:

People get on with their lives without the Today programme. They’re not reading that 124-page report on no deal. They’re not watching when you take to the stage to deliver a speech to a packed room at a thinktank in Whitehall. Nobody’s watching except those you don’t need to persuade and who won’t be affected by the catastrophe your report outlines. So don’t be surprised when the majority of the electorate either don’t know what no deal means or, worse, think it’s going to be OK.... Delivering vertical messages from an elite source direct to individuals is no longer effective

But the usual contempt for popular politics is not far behind:

we are going to need to employ techniques that identify the target audiences we need to reach. More importantly, the message we carry needs to be less about clever debating points and more about identifying the emotional triggers that inspire people to carry the message for us. Words of two syllables at most. Messages of 10 words or fewer.

Then it gets downright manipulative:

I found that it is possible to identify the base emotional triggers that invoke and dictate our subsequent behaviours, including whether we vote and whom we vote for. Such emotions are often hardwired unconscious traits over which we have limited control. The next stage was to deploy techniques that sought to convert whatever progressive messages I could find into consumable chunks aimed specifically at exploiting those unconscious traits. 

I think we might know one example of his work, although he doesn't claim authorship:

“Bollocks to Brexit” from the Liberal Democrats was a promising retort, ironically called out as crude populism by some progressives. Actually, it was ruthlessly effective.

As usual, no evidence is provided for its ruthless effectiveness -- exposure? Number of posts on FB? Whatever their external political differences, the Dark Artists are united in their cultural targets and  ridiculous claims.