The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the rapid development of computers sparked a debate about the future of governance, ricocheting between dreams of a technological “Computopia” and fears of an “Automated State,” the two possible futures later described by Japanese sociologist Yoneji Masuda. In 1958, Edward L. Greenfield drafted a proposal he called Project Macroscope—later renamed the People Machine—to compile punch cards of election returns, surveys, and census data to simulate the entire American electorate. The following year, Greenfield, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Alex Bernstein formed the Simulmatics Corporation. The Democratic National Committee and John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign hired the company, and after Kennedy’s 1960 victory, the New York Herald Tribune hailed “a big, bulky monster called a ‘Simulmatics’” as his “secret weapon” (54). The project, however, was ahead of its time; the company went bankrupt in 1970 after struggling to find paying clients because most industries lacked the extensive audience data needed for its simulations. Politics was an exception because Simulmatics could draw on censuses, election returns, and public opinion surveys. Film distributors and book publishers, for instance, had no data on their own audiences, as Bernstein reported from Hollywood.

The idea of a machine that could predict and influence political behavior caused significant alarm, inspiring dystopian novels like Simulacron-3 and The 480, whose author, Eugene Burdick, warned of a new political “underworld” of data technicians.