Sep 28, 2020 08:19 PM
THE HISTORY OF EC COMICS
https://www.starburstmagazine.com/review...-ec-comics
PUBLISHER: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalog...comics.htm
REVIEW (excerpt): . . . EC, which originally stood for Educational Comics published as their first titles comic book adaptations of Biblical tales, but in the 1950s took to startling stories of crime, suspense, war, sci-fi and most memorably - unflinching horror which were introduced by a trio of quirky characters, the Old Witch, the Vault-Keeper and, of course, the Crypt-Keeper. The distinctive EC style of short and punchy graphic stories still resonates to this day, as streaming shows like Creepshow demonstrate. Taschen has produced another exhaustively researched book that is fully immersive and absorbs the reader with lively prose and lavish illustrations from the first page... (MORE)
Simulating democracy
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10...democracy/
Review of "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future", by Jill Lepore
EXCERPTS (James Gleick): 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.
In the 1950s and 1960s this seemed like science fiction. [...] Simulmatics was founded in 1959 and lasted eleven years. ... It began with grand ambitions to invent a new kind of predictive behavioral science, in a research environment increasingly tied to a rising defense establishment amid the anxiety of the cold war. It ended ignominiously, in embarrassment and bankruptcy.
Irving Kristol, the future architect of neoconservativism, dismissed Simulmatics in 1964 as “a struggling little company which, despite the fact that it worked on a few problems for the Kennedy organization in 1960, has since had a difficult time making ends meet,” and he wasn’t wrong. Today it is almost completely forgotten. Yet Lepore finds in it a plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behavior—including, most insidiously, our behavior as voters.
The name “Simulmatics”—a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic”—was the kind of faux-sophisticated compound that tech startups favored (Teledyne, Biotronik, Microsoft), before a 1990s countertrend led to names like Yahoo, Google, and Twitter. Simulmatics’s creator and president was a former Madison Avenue advertising and public relations executive, Edward L. Greenfield—a glad-handing, scotch-drinking, Pall Mall–smoking huckster, as Lepore describes him. Greenfield saw national politics as virgin territory for a scientifically minded advertising business.
[...] Computers at the time were house-sized machines built from thousands of vacuum tubes, with tanks of liquid mercury serving as “memory.” ... The pioneers of computing had a dream application for a machine capable of performing rapid calculations on large amounts of data: weather forecasting. Atmospheric behavior is just physics, and the relevant equations were well known. ... Computers predict the weather by simulating it: by creating models and letting them run.
Ed Greenfield, the ad man, saw no reason not to try the same approach with the behavior of people. He created a Social Science Division in his company, with the idea of simulating the entire electorate and selling voting predictions to campaigns. He hired a computer guy and a social scientist, Bill McPhee and Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Eugene Burdick, then a political scientist. All of them grew obsessed in one way or another with the possibility of mathematizing human behavior. McPhee was ebullient about programming: “The computers (Univac, Manniac + ‘Johnniac’—I work on Johnniac) are just like big electric trains for grown-up boys.” Pool was working on a theory of “social networks.” He had a notion that “any two Americans, of any sort, can be linked by a chain of six acquaintanceships or less”—six degrees of separation, one might say.
Who were these people? “They were midcentury white liberals in an era when white liberals were not expected to understand people who weren’t white or liberal,” Lepore says. She calls them—they sometimes called themselves—the What-If Men. Deeply researched, written with elegance and passion, If Then gives a vivid picture of their lives, including their often miserable wives, suffering “the bad bargains of the middle-class marriages of the 1950s.” In The 480, Burdick describes the Simulmatics men as a “new underworld”... (MORE - details)
https://www.starburstmagazine.com/review...-ec-comics
PUBLISHER: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalog...comics.htm
REVIEW (excerpt): . . . EC, which originally stood for Educational Comics published as their first titles comic book adaptations of Biblical tales, but in the 1950s took to startling stories of crime, suspense, war, sci-fi and most memorably - unflinching horror which were introduced by a trio of quirky characters, the Old Witch, the Vault-Keeper and, of course, the Crypt-Keeper. The distinctive EC style of short and punchy graphic stories still resonates to this day, as streaming shows like Creepshow demonstrate. Taschen has produced another exhaustively researched book that is fully immersive and absorbs the reader with lively prose and lavish illustrations from the first page... (MORE)
Simulating democracy
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10...democracy/
Review of "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future", by Jill Lepore
EXCERPTS (James Gleick): 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.
In the 1950s and 1960s this seemed like science fiction. [...] Simulmatics was founded in 1959 and lasted eleven years. ... It began with grand ambitions to invent a new kind of predictive behavioral science, in a research environment increasingly tied to a rising defense establishment amid the anxiety of the cold war. It ended ignominiously, in embarrassment and bankruptcy.
Irving Kristol, the future architect of neoconservativism, dismissed Simulmatics in 1964 as “a struggling little company which, despite the fact that it worked on a few problems for the Kennedy organization in 1960, has since had a difficult time making ends meet,” and he wasn’t wrong. Today it is almost completely forgotten. Yet Lepore finds in it a plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behavior—including, most insidiously, our behavior as voters.
The name “Simulmatics”—a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic”—was the kind of faux-sophisticated compound that tech startups favored (Teledyne, Biotronik, Microsoft), before a 1990s countertrend led to names like Yahoo, Google, and Twitter. Simulmatics’s creator and president was a former Madison Avenue advertising and public relations executive, Edward L. Greenfield—a glad-handing, scotch-drinking, Pall Mall–smoking huckster, as Lepore describes him. Greenfield saw national politics as virgin territory for a scientifically minded advertising business.
[...] Computers at the time were house-sized machines built from thousands of vacuum tubes, with tanks of liquid mercury serving as “memory.” ... The pioneers of computing had a dream application for a machine capable of performing rapid calculations on large amounts of data: weather forecasting. Atmospheric behavior is just physics, and the relevant equations were well known. ... Computers predict the weather by simulating it: by creating models and letting them run.
Ed Greenfield, the ad man, saw no reason not to try the same approach with the behavior of people. He created a Social Science Division in his company, with the idea of simulating the entire electorate and selling voting predictions to campaigns. He hired a computer guy and a social scientist, Bill McPhee and Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Eugene Burdick, then a political scientist. All of them grew obsessed in one way or another with the possibility of mathematizing human behavior. McPhee was ebullient about programming: “The computers (Univac, Manniac + ‘Johnniac’—I work on Johnniac) are just like big electric trains for grown-up boys.” Pool was working on a theory of “social networks.” He had a notion that “any two Americans, of any sort, can be linked by a chain of six acquaintanceships or less”—six degrees of separation, one might say.
Who were these people? “They were midcentury white liberals in an era when white liberals were not expected to understand people who weren’t white or liberal,” Lepore says. She calls them—they sometimes called themselves—the What-If Men. Deeply researched, written with elegance and passion, If Then gives a vivid picture of their lives, including their often miserable wives, suffering “the bad bargains of the middle-class marriages of the 1950s.” In The 480, Burdick describes the Simulmatics men as a “new underworld”... (MORE - details)