People Machines

"These are additional notes on Simulmatics I prepared for my Prediction Machine essay that didn't make the final cut, but I think it is a fun bit of history worth sharing. It is all sourced from If Then by Jill Lepore."

The first ambitious attempt to pioneer data-driven prediction machines was The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959 in the wake of Dwight D. Eisenhower's back-to-back defeats of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. To Eisenhower's benefit, Adlai Stevenson felt that mass-marketing his campaign was an insult to the American voter. In his 1956 acceptance address, Stevenson said "The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process." For two election cycles, Stevenson limited himself to half-hour television speeches and other old-fashioned dreary-yet-intellectual material. Stevenson's 1956 campaign marketing spend amounted to $77,000. Eisenhower's was $1,500,000.

Researchers and the marketing "Mad Men" of the late '50s recognized Eisenhower's "I Like Ike" campaign as the coming-of-age of TV and radio adverts - the first campaign where a candidate effectively bought votes by plastering their name and likeness across every TV and radio spot they could find, akin to a toothpaste or cereal brand. Meanwhile, Simulmatics recognized the presidential elections as giant social experiments the United States ran on its citizens every four years with data ripe to study and people in power willing to pay for it. The JFK campaign hired Simulmatics as the nation's first "social scientists," then the administration quietly kept them employed through the LBJ administration through election campaigns to counterinsurgency in Vietnam to predicting urban race riots until the company collapsed. Ithiel de Sola Pool attempted to pitch both the Humphrey and Nixon 1968 campaigns but was rejected by both.

Simulmatics' work cut deep into the interests of power. They promised a machine that could effectively tell you what to say, to whom, and to what effect. How would swing state voters respond to a Catholic candidate? How would bus desegregation move the southern vote? For the JFK election - tightly defined criteria, target markets - Simulmatics delivered. The DNC was riding high on their first presidential victory in 12 years and Simulmatics was their secret weapon. Simulmatics' prediction machine could segment the American electorate into 480 voter types by demographic, run simulations on an IBM 704 computer using punch cards, and predict how each segment would respond to a candidate's position on civil rights or religion. The localized knowledge Hayek argued could never be fully aggregated seemed like it was cracking open. Simulmatics had a machine that could process dispersed local data at scale, and use it to poke and prod at the hearts and minds of the American voters. Then Simulmatics were sent to Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the weaknesses of rudimentary data collection were revealed. Simulmatics sent researchers in American suits to Vietnamese villages to learn about their attitudes on the war and the Viet Cong. Nobody in a hamlet shares honest feelings with men who move like central intelligence officers. Simulmatics modeled Vietnamese sentiment as more favorable than it was. Some of their native Vietnamese researchers caught wind that the Viet Cong would not honor the planned Tet ceasefire. The Simulmatics higher-ups did not process the signal. They missed the Tet Offensive entirely - a devastating surprise attack by the Viet Cong that became a turning point of the war in North Vietnamese favor and eroded the little remaining American public support. Simulmatics' work in urban development - predicting when race riots would occur - more closely resembled the Vietnamese endeavor rather than the successful JFK campaign.

Simulmatics eventually collapsed, but Ithiel de Sola Pool continued ARPA-funded research on digital networks and data collection. His 1983 book "Technologies of Freedom" heavily influenced ARPANET and early data privacy policy and is cited as the precursor to the legal architecture governing online speech today. The social science frameworks and collection methods Simulmatics pioneered served as the foundations of Cambridge Analytica's "Big Data" and Facebook's targeted advertising. Their social science frameworks have been adopted and iterated upon, and are among the first frameworks for social science data collection and modeling using computers.