In 1958, a team of American researchers and ad men built a machine they claimed could both predict and influence voting behaviour. That was the clean little prototype for a much larger project: turning politics into something that could be sorted, simulated and managed from above, with ordinary people reduced to data points and targets.
The Machine Learns to Govern
The article traces how computers got smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful between the 1950s and the 1980s, while computer languages became more sophisticated and electronic data grew from a molehill into a mountain. As data processing and general-purpose computers moved from the military to industry, business and medicine, sizeable chunks of public life became automated. Computers, calculations, networks and algorithms did political work in rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents and crafting policy, especially in the world’s wealthiest nations.
That shift was never just technical. In 1958, at a landmark conference on the “mechanisation of thought processes” at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, near London, speakers from France, Israel, Russia and Hungary discussed a future in which computers would one day compose music, resolve legal disputes, control air traffic, conduct surgery and, in government, replace not only clerks but executives. The fantasy was efficiency. The reality was hierarchy with a keyboard.
In New York, Edward L Greenfield, head of a Madison Avenue advertising firm, drafted a proposal for what became known as a People Machine. He proposed compiling hundreds of thousands of punch cards — election returns, public opinion surveys and census data — to build an “information bank” that could sort voters by types and their opinions by issues. “There is nothing mysterious about this on the surface, the input to the machine being the information about real individuals obtained in surveys”, Greenfield and the MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote in 1958. But “once this information is inside the high speed storage facilities of the machine, it is a different world”. The machine would operate as a “macroscope” that could simulate the whole of the US electorate.
The next year, Greenfield and Pool and IBM’s Alex Bernstein formed the Simulmatics Corporation. By “simulmatics”, they meant the automated simulation of human intelligence. They believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences”. Their first client was the Democratic National Committee. In 1959, the DNC hired Simulmatics to run simulations on an artificial electorate and tell the party’s nominee what to say, to whom, and when. Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “I shudder at the implication for public leadership of the notion … that a man shouldn’t say something until it is cleared with the machine.”
From Public Life to Private Control
After John F Kennedy won the nomination, his campaign hired Simulmatics to run predictions on an IBM 704. When Kennedy won, many in the press attributed the victory to Simulmatics’ People Machine. The New York Herald Tribune called it “a big, bulky monster called a ‘Simulmatics’” and Kennedy’s “secret weapon”. Simulmatics later went bankrupt in 1970, unable to find enough paying clients. The article says the problem wasn’t the computers or the model, but an insufficiency of data. Bernstein later found there was no way to build a model for book sales, magazine subscribers or ticket sales, the kind of microtargeting later done by companies such as Amazon and Netflix.
Simulmatics’ only real successes were in politics, where it could rely on censuses, election returns and public opinion surveys. Even there, the work raised alarm and inspired dystopian fiction, including Eugene Burdick’s 1964 novel The 480, in which a barely disguised “Simulations Enterprises” meddles with a US presidential election. Burdick had been asked to join the company but declined. In 1966, Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine, lamented the rise of “cybernetic intelligence” and warned that under its “automatic operation … man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations”.
The article says no one really paused to get that grip. Data collection became crucial to industries that accumulated, as stored computer files, everything from credit card transactions to car rentals to library checkout records, making possible predictions Simulmatics had only dreamed of. With so much data, computers — increasingly linked together — were poised to become far more than simple question-and-answer devices.
In 1965, JCR Licklider, described as the man most appropriately credited with inventing the internet, wrote Libraries of the Future and considered the disadvantages of books. He argued that if books were converted into data readable by a computer, data could move from storage to the user, and to any number of users, much more easily. Using the contents of all the books held in the Library of Congress as a proxy for the sum total of human knowledge, Licklider calculated its size in 1960 and estimated that it was doubling every year. A proposal in the US to establish a National Data Center, meant to provide for electronic data what the Library of Congress provided for books and the National Archives for manuscripts, was abandoned because of privacy concerns. Critics dubbed it the “snooping machine”.
The Net, the Market, the State
Licklider proved an excellent futurist. In 1963, he sent a memo to colleagues at the Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing “to develop a capability for integrated network operation”, which became first Arpanet and eventually the internet. In April 1968, Licklider and the psychologist Robert W Taylor predicted that “in a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face”. They also predicted “online interactive communities” that would change how people engaged with each other. Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote in that issue that personalised newspapers would lead to hyperindividualism and that the political problem of gathering support behind a particular rational issue or candidate would become “very much more difficult”.
The 1960s and 1970s also produced visions of computer-driven socialist revolution or democratic liberation. In Chile between 1971 and 1973, during the rule of the democratically elected Salvador Allende, cyberneticists developed Project Cybersyn, a network meant to manage Chile’s socialist economy. The project was abandoned after Augusto Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973. Stewart Brand wrote in Rolling Stone in December 1972, “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” and said the personal computer would bring “power to the people”. In 1975, Amitai Etzioni and his co-authors predicted the computer revolution would bring back “the form of democracy found in the ancient Greek city-state, the kibbutz and the New England town meeting”. In 1978, Daniel Boorstin, the librarian of Congress, predicted that new ties of communication would create new ties of community, calling it the “republic of technology”.
Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT engineer who in 1966 developed Eliza, the first of what would come to be called a chatbot, objected to artificial intelligence as a path to automating the functions of the state. In 1976, he described as “obscene” any project that proposed “to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love”. He also warned against research that would one day result in “a fully automated battlefield” and said, months after the US evacuation from Saigon, “I see no reason to advise my students to lend their talents to that aim.” Licklider, by contrast, predicted in 1969 that by the year 2000 “an international network of digital computer communication networks” would serve “as the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations and individuals”, replacing everything from the telephone and the postal system to shops and banks.
He also warned of “new vistas for dirty tricks”, including “clandestine artificial intelligence programs, searching through the databases, altering files, fabricating records and erasing their own audit trails”. That warning reads less like prophecy than a user manual for the age that followed.
The 1970s ended with consultants working for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign inventing their own People Machine, a computerised political information system. A reporter described it as a massive chessboard on which the Reagan campaign could test scenarios. In 1980, it helped carry Reagan to victory. The language of an “information society” gave way to the language of an “information revolution”. In 1982, Time named “the computer” man (machine) of the year. In 1984, one forecaster promised that “The computer will smash the pyramid” of wealth and render all people equal.
Langdon Winner argued that the metaphor of revolution was ill-considered because revolutionaries have answers to questions about freedom, democratic rule and open elections, while “the computer revolution is conspicuously silent about its own ends”. He said current developments in the information age suggested “an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power, an enhanced centralisation of control by those already prepared for control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy.” He said he was shouting into a void.
Apple’s 1984 television advert for the Macintosh made the same sales pitch in a different costume. A thunderous voice described “the first glorious anniversary of the information purification … a garden of pure ideology,” while masses of hairless humans marched in lockstep and watched Big Brother on a giant computer monitor. Apple was suggesting that only its personal computer could prevent the rise of a totalitarian state machine. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
The article says networking computers were already showing signs of social decay. Usenet, an online bulletin board, opened in 1980 on what was sometimes called the “poor man’s Arpanet”, a dial-up network linking universities and research centres. It let users join newsgroups, reply, and use anonymous usernames. Jason Hannan of the University of Winnipeg wrote that “Together immateriality and anonymity were an invitation to test social limits and boundaries,” and that some users discovered “a sordid pleasure in transgression for its own sake.” Sometime in the 1980s, this became known as “trolling”.
Viral hate also dates to the 1980s. George Dietz, an American neo-Nazi who opened a bookstore in West Virginia in 1974 and published a small subscription magazine called Liberty Bell, said in 1983 that he had been “working, for the past two weeks, until four to five o’clock in the morning, trying to learn ‘computerese’ so that Yours Truly may talk to that monster in ITS language and on ITS own terms.” He then launched the first white supremacy bulletin board, Liberty Bell Network, on an Apple IIe personal computer. In 1984, more bulletin boards followed, including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, Aryan Nations/Ku Klux Klan Computer Net and White Aryan Resistance.
Newcomers often broke early internet conventions by trolling, instigating and joining flame wars and being obnoxious. Carmen Hermosillo, known as “humdog”, wrote in 1994 that when she went into cyberspace she thought it would be “a place like any other place” and “a human interaction like any other human interaction”, but “i was wrong when i thought that … it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.” In 1995, Sally Hambridge of Intel wrote netiquette guidelines, including: “A good rule of thumb: be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these ‘flames’) even if you are provoked.”
In the 1990s, Democrats promised that “thanks to the near-miraculous capabilities of microelectronics, we are vanquishing scarcity”. Wired reported in 1993 that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity and community.” In 1994, Bryant Gumbel asked on the Today show, “What is internet, anyway?” In 1995, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen launched Netscape Navigator and earned $58m on the first day its stock was publicly traded. Overnight, Andreessen became, as the New York Times reported, “the newest member of Silicon Valley’s instant millionaires club”. That sale set off the dotcom boom.
By then, the techno-libertarians had already won. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the bipartisan Telecommunications Act, which delivered an almost entirely unregulated internet. Four years later, Wired said, “We are as a nation, better educated, more tolerant and better connected because of – not in spite of – the convergence of the internet and public life.” The article says no such era of tolerance arrived. Across the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy made possible the rise of the artificial state, but did not make it inevitable. It failed to limit corporate power over politics and government and failed to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state. The result was not freedom with better wiring. It was power, centralised and polished for sale.