Big Data and the Prequel to Technocracy

Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Madison Avenue publicity maven Ed Greenfield had a vision: what if we could predict the future? Using the newest IBM mainframe computers and the rising principles of Cold War social science, Greenfield believed paying customers could anticipate upcoming human behaviors. He didn’t consider himself a technical genius or a manipulator. He truly believed we could optimize outcomes and make humanity better using improved technology and more data.

Harvard University political historian Jill Lepore stumbled upon the history of Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation accidentally, while researching other issues. What she found, however, seemed chillingly familiar, in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and controversies surrounding digital data collection. These attempts to quantify and exploit human behaviors seem new; but, Lepore realized, they have a tumultuous history going back over sixty years.

Greenfield, a staunch Democrat, originally had political aspirations for his advertising skills. Adlai Stevenson, a Northern moderate, failed to capture the presidency twice, maybe because he maintained a distant, scholarly posture. Or maybe, Greenfield realized, because his opponent, Dwight Eisenhower, embraced TV ads and 30-second sound bites. Greenfield originally wanted to create a better political ad, and deploy it to bring liberalism back into political relevance.

However, Greenfield’s ambitions coincided with rises in American social science. Where poli-sci professors had previously remained satisfied describing what happened in the past, the Cold War created incentives to control the future. What, academics and bureaucrats wondered, would it take to ensure the Communists didn’t take world control? Social scientists moved into new worlds of speculation and public relations, to ensure Communism didn’t gain an international toehold.

This confluence of sociology and advertising, with recent advancements in computer technology, gave Greenfield an insight: we could combine the newest social science theories, the slickest advertising practices, and the hottest computer technology, to predict the best possible outcome. To that end, Greenfield collected a brain trust of Democratic-leaning scholars in sociology, math, computers, pollsters, and even novelists, to write a program automatically simulating voter outcomes.

Dr. Jill Lepore

Simulation. Automatic. Why, Greenfield realized, we could call it…Simulmatics!

From the beginning, Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation made high-minded promises, but chronically underdelivered. They charged Jack Kennedy’s 1960 campaign beaucoups of bucks for a report basically advising them to keep doing what they were already doing. Nevertheless, they claimed triumph, boasting that their advice pushed Kennedy into his razor-thin plurality. This despite Robert Kennedy’s angry disavowal, based on his instinctive distrust of computers.

Simulmatics began looking for further clients. But politicians found their oracular promises specious, while advertisers had begun their own in-house focus testing experiments. Newspapers paid handsomely for Simulmatics’ promises to accurately forecast election outcomes faster than ever before, but as always, Simulmatics underperformed. Despite their technocratic optimism, Simulmatics never gained mainstream acceptance. Soon they found the only client able to support their increasingly grandiose budgets: the Defense Department.

Lepore, as an Americanist, specializes in finding evidence missing from historical documents. This book delivers on that reputation. Despite having its fingers in numerous pies, Simulmatics left a remarkably small footprint. She reconstructs its history from personal letters, government documents, and counter-information provided by its opponents. This last source proves abundant: even as Simulmatics collapsed into a grave of empty promises, the hippie Left charged its corpse with “War Crimes.”

Even better, Lepore finds the personalities which motivated Simulmatics’ hasty rise and lingering disintegration. Besides Greenfield, she identifies “Wild Bill” McPhee, a mathematician whose insights into algorithms was matched only by his struggles with madness; Eugene Burdick, political theorist and novelist, who turned against Simulmatics and wrote bestsellers about the coming technocratic dystopia; and Ithiel de Sola Pool, once disgraced by Simulmatics, who reinvented himself as prophet of the Internet.

Fast as Simulmatics arose, it shattered equally quickly. Its Manhattan and Boston offices began feuding, and its leftist inventors found themselves trapped in the increasingly right-wing quagmire of Vietnam. Everyone from Norman Mailer to Jerry Rubin denounced Simulmatics by name. But when the company collapsed, everyone forgot it instantly; it disappeared from America’s collective memory. So when Google and Facebook began repeating Simulmatics’ business model, it seemed brand new.

This is history as literature. By casting one almost-forgotten corporation against the larger scope of the 1960s, Lepore makes this book about the forces which attempt to control us, today, with varying success. History, Lepore asserts, isn’t the dead past; ultimately, it’s about us. The forces which once ignited violence so bad, it threatened to destroy America, have become so banal, we’ve forgotten about them. But Jill Lepore hasn’t, and neither should we.