[The Simulmatics Corporation] is a useful missing link in how we think about the distance between psychological propaganda -- psychologial warfare --- of the 2nd World War and the Cold War, and our modern era of election meddling from Russia and Cambridge Analytica, what data does the government have about you, the sort of NSA / Edward Snowden stuff, versus what information does Facebook have about you, should you let Google collect data about you, what are your privacy rights?
It's important to remember that Simulmatics explains in some ways and helps us to see the continuity between Cold-War era psychological warfare and modern Silicon Valley. That there was a moment when there was an attempt to run this as a commercial business by behavioral scientists who'd worked in psychological warfare in the 2nd World War and worked in psychological warfare projects during the Cold War and Vietnam. A lot of them worked both in the study of voting behaviour in the US and in the study of propaganda in third-world countries trying to prevent them from becomming Communist.
You can see how those things are closely related. They're both the study of how you get inside someone's head and change their mind? You have to know what they're thinking, what you want them to think, and then you have to figure out what message will move them from what they're thinking now to what you want them to think. This used to be called "psychological warfare", and after the 2nd World War people were like, we shouldn't call it that any more, we'll call it "the study of mass communications". The field of mass communications comes from that. That's what advertising is --- it's not all nefarious, I don't have some kooky idea that this is a bunch of sinister people.
For me the reason it was significant, and why it was compelling to page through box after box after box of archival material from this company's history, was that I do often have a feeling that maybe in the middle of the afternoon, where I go to do something on my phone and some message pops up at me and I'm kind of staggered by the uncanny feeling that someone knows exactly what I'm about to look for, and I almost shriek and leap back and drop my phone, and cry "Who is messing with my head!"
It's helpful to know that that is because that work comes out of psychological warfare: how to capture your attention and how to change your opinion about something. That's the work of psychological warfare, an advertising campaign, a political campaign. It's one thing when that is a fair fight. Think of all the media literacy efforts that existed when I grew up, we learned in school during the Ralph Nader era, how to resist television advertising to children, so you wouldn't buy that junky cereal, that you needed to be sophisticated about how television was trying to control your mind. There was a media literacy curriculum in many schools during the 1970s for that reason. We don't really have that now, especially for young people, but not even for voters. We know that people who got their news about the pandemic exclusively from Facebook had a large number of misconceptions about the etiology of the disease. But they don't necessarily know that. We've just swallowed this thing whole.
The quoted segment appears at about 24m40s into the recording.
