What was so shocking? What was implausible? The idea that a company might use computer technology and behavioral science to gather and crunch data on American citizens, with the nefarious goal of influencing a presidential election.
Having begun the 1960s with a storm of publicity, Simulmatics set out to expand its reach from campaign politics to consumer marketing. The company pitched projects to film studios and music labels, along with advertising agencies—anyone they thought might buy the notion of simulating the needs and wants of masses of consumers. It offered, Lepore writes, “a simulated population, a miniature United States, consisting of three thousand perfectly representative but entirely imaginary people.” Punch, the British satirical magazine, mocked this new approach to reading society’s mind: “Punch proposed that Simulmatics’ Media-Mix add a few more categories,” Lepore writes,
including “dog-lover, flat-earther, doughnut dunker, milk-in-firster,” so as to be able to determine, for instance, whether a new, seventy-five-cent pink ballpoint pen ink refill would be desired by consumers who shop on Wednesdays, have Republican sympathies, “fruit-juice breakfasts, bouts of depression, slight astigmatism, fitted carpets, thick eyebrows, and one or more cousins in the armed forces.”
Which is all very amusing, and exactly what Facebook, Amazon, and Google do today.
