Commentary on Eugene Burdick's 1964 Novel The 480Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Burdick, Eugene ----- The 480 Morality, integrity and politics in the age of the computer. Designed to show what can happen to the democratic process in a Presidential Campaign through the use of automation. - - - - http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/16.14.html ... just find out what everybody's hot issues are and make them all whatever promises you need to make, ... And so (once again) fact follows fiction ... Eugene Burdick (Co-Author of THE UGLY AMERICAN) wrote this script in his futurist novel THE 480. I thought this was also the same computer-assisted campaign process used for the last presidential campaign! http://www1.ics.uci.edu/~kling/postintr.html However, instead of marketing services or commodities to the public, Butcher-Ford marketed political products--their client candidates--in a way that was foreshadowed in Eugene Burdick's The 480. Butcher-Ford was criticized by some for running "dirty tricks" campaigns in which they faked endorsements for their candidates and dressed their unofficial mailings to make them appear to come from government agencies. But they were seldom criticized for transforming political elections into mundane marketing campaigns. http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/mcdow24.htm Legal Studies Forum Volume 24, Number 1 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum FROM "PERRY MASON" TO PRIMARY COLORS: USING FICTION TO UNDERSTAND LEGAL AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS JAMES L. MCDOWELL Equally tantalizing but perhaps even more thought-provoking was the theme of The 480. Nearly a decade earlier, in The Ninth Wave (1956), Burdick had detailed the abilities of a political manipulator to combine his Machiavellian approach to life ("fear plus hate equal power") with scientific polling methods and analysis to elect a governor of California. In The 480, Burdick introduced the general public to the use of computers in politics-not to count votes and assess trends-but actually to prepackage a presidential candidate the public "wishes" to support. The "480" referred to the number of groups into which the electorate was divided, then analyzed, in order to predict their political attitudes. Once these attitudes were determined, a candidate appealing to these voters could, literally, be created. In Burdick's novel, just such maneuvers took place. Dr. Devlin, a behavioral scientist, 62 used polls to discern what "image" the voters desired in a candidate. She then employed the data to tailor a newly-emerged public hero into a candidate voters would support. But the reader never learns if the process is successful: the candidate learns he has been manipulated and withdraws his name from consideration. Whether such methods would work in the real world of politics was then, and still is, subject to considerable debate; but accounts of recent presidential campaigns would suggest that efforts such as these-targeted mailing and selective television advertising, for example-have been successful. In 1964, this concept was stunning, even appalling, to an electorate which thought it actually elected the President. |