![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party. “Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted-every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. His new company’s offices were threadbare his ambition could hardly have been grander. “Ed Greenfield,” he’d say, flashing a Dean Martin grin, slapping a back, offering a vodka-and-tonic, palming a business card. ![]() Greenfield, an adman, political consultant, and all-around huckster, pulled people in like a “Looney Tunes” magnet. The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L. Greenfield, the company’s thirty-one-year-old president, on an upper floor of a building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, five blocks south of I.B.M.’s glittering World Headquarters. ![]()
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