Jill Lepore on forgotten data firm Simulmatics Corporation

Sanjay Khurana

Advertisement

Imagine a computer programme predicting and manipulating all sorts of human behaviour — from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting votes.

The author, a Professor of American History at Harvard, writes about an American company, Simulmatics Corporation, which was founded by Edward L Greenfield in 1959. It mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilised politics, and disordered knowledge — deca-des before Facebook, Google, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica were born.

Borrowing methods of psychological warfare from New York, Massachusetts and the hamlets of Vietnam, Simulmatics deployed their ‘People Machine’ to predict and influence human behaviour for the presidential campaign of Eisenhower and Kennedy, the New York Times, Mad Men advertising agency, and most shockingly, the strategy of the Vietnam war.

Simulmatics scientists were known as the What-If Men. They believed that by simulating human behaviour, their ‘People Machine’ would help the human race avert each and every disaster. It could defeat Communism. It could counter insurgencies and it could win elections.

Simulmatics pioneered the use of computer simulation 60 years ago. It helped in pattern detection and prediction in American political campaigning, segmenting the electorate into voter types and issues into clusters in order to advise candidates about strategies for voter-targeted issues.

In the 1950s and 1960s, these lost pioneers invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented.

Hardly anyone remembers Simulmatics Corporation anymore. But the scientists of this long-vanished company helped build the machine through which humanity would, by the 21st century, find itself exploited, connected and even governed.

In 1961, the company introduced what-if simulation to the advertising industry, targeting segmented consumers with custom-fit messages. In 1962, it became the first data firm to provide real-time computing to an American newspaper for analysing election results.

Beginning in 1965, it conducted psychological research in Vietnam as part of a larger project of waging a war by way of computer-run data analysis and modelling. In 1967 and 1968, on the streets of American cities, Simulmatics attempted to build a race-riot prediction machine. In 1969, after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy, the ‘People Machine’ crashed, and Simulmatics filed for bankruptcy in 1970. The company died but the fantasy of predicting human behaviour by way of machines did not.

By the early 21st century, the mission of Simulmatics Corporation had become the mission of companies in practically every sector.

The book, divided into three parts, is an engrossing read about a group of young scientists who came together 60 years ago to work for a data company that invented the future.