One of their companies is i360, a data analytics business founded in 2009 which the Kochs invested in from 2012.

On its website i360 says it “sits on the bleeding edge of technology”, which immediately has me thinking of draconian Silicon Valley hot-desking arrangements with razor blades on the chairs to enhance creative mobility. Probably not what a marketing team intended when “bleeding” was thrown into the mix, but imagery is like that. You never know where it might lead.

Anyway, back to i360, what it does and why we should pay attention.

Last weekend the South Australian Labor Government of Jay Weatherill was punted and the Liberals under new Premier Steven Marshall took over. During the campaign Marshall vowed to repeal the state’s renewable energy target, build infrastructure to import coal-fired power from NSW and cancel Labor’s deal with Tesla to build a virtual power plant connecting 50,000 home battery storage systems.

There were media reports of South Australian Liberals using i360’s services to deliver personalised messages to voters, and particularly swinging voters in hotly-contested seats. The process of collecting information on voters to target media campaigns is not new. Both major parties already use the services of a data analysis company which offers voter profiling.

But news this week that 50 million Americans’ Facebook data was harvested and improperly shared with political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which used the data while working for the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, shows we should care about not only how these things occur, but why, and who is behind it. Which brings us back to the Kochs.

Their father Fred made his fortune refining oil, selling the technology and expertise to Stalin’s Soviet Union and building a refinery in Nazi Germany in 1935 that produced high-octane fuel for fighter planes used during World War II.

Fred Koch was the kind of father who favoured beating his sons – an account by an anonymous family member describes him whipping his boys “like dogs” – and the kind of husband whose wife Mary was scared of him, according to Fred’s fourth and youngest son, Bill.

Charles and David grew up rich but challenging authority under a father who railed against taxes and government, while supporting politicians who pushed for racial segregation.

Fred died in 1967. Charles and David took over and expanded Koch Industries and its oil, coal, gas, timber, paper, chemicals and manufacturing interests.

Between 1980 and 2005 Koch companies lost some of the most significant environmental and workplace safety prosecutions and civil suits in America, after they were found responsible for mercury spills, gas explosions and carcinogenic air emissions, and of falsifying documents to government regulators.

It was during this period that Charles and David Koch started reaching out to other like-minded American billionaires and a movement grew, of largely super rich white guys, many born to wealth, who decided to throw hundreds of millions of dollars towards changing America into their own image – free-market, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulation libertarians.

They established think tanks, funded university centres, mounted legal challenges, secretly funded and established grassroots campaigns and by 2014 were using ordinary Americans’ data to not only challenge and beat Democrat politicians, but trample moderate Republican politicians as well.

In her 2016 book, Dark Money, author Jane Mayer describes how the Koch network used i360 to assemble detailed portraits of 250 million American consumers. Using handheld devices they could determine which voters were “persuadable” and “bombard them with personalised communications”.

Think about your own social media profile and what you reveal about yourself in the kinds of things you read, access, watch, “like” and respond to. Now think about how that could be used in a political context, and without you knowing.

By 2015 chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, Katie Walsh, issued an extraordinary public critique of the Kochs, their rich network and methods, saying: “I think it’s very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data, when, why and how.”

It’s no surprise to find that the Kochs and their Americans for Prosperity group featured heavily, but for a time secretly, in the campaign against a proposed cap-and-trade plan that would have hit the profits of coal, oil and gas producers by placing a price on carbon pollution.

Mayer recounts how they supported the “scientific doubt” in climate change campaign using a template designed by the tobacco industry when it challenged the links between smoking and cancer.

On its website i360 says it was established to “fill the innovation gap between campaigns and organisations that promote free market candidates and causes and their opponents” – the kind of “free market candidates” championed by the Koch brothers.

Many Australians feel disconnected from politics and politicians, and disgusted by monotonously regular “snouts in the trough” scandals. If you’re inclined to roll your eyes about data collection and its misuse by political parties, maybe think about it this way. You risk being seen as a clueless single-interest commodity in this brave new world of data targeting, which is offensive.

Last time I checked we were still a democracy.