Notes: Force of Numbers

A FEW DAYS after George Bush’s celebrated encounter with a supermarket check-out scanner, when he displayed wonder and surprise at a technology that to most Americans is as familiar as the telephone, I happened upon Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons on television, and watched it for the fifth or sixth time.

The Magnificent Ambersons is set in the Midwest at the turn of this century, and one of its most famous scenes is a dinner-table discussion at the Amberson mansion about the virtues and drawbacks of a new piece of technology called the automobile. One of the dinner guests, Eugene Morgan, is a maker of automobiles, and when another guest, George Amberson Minafer, calls automobiles a nuisance, Morgan delivers a prophetic soliloquy. “I’m not sure George is wrong about automobiles,” he says.

“With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls. I’m not sure. But automobiles have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war, and they’re going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles.”

The Magnificent Ambersons was made in 1942, when some of the unintended consequences of the automobile’s ascendancy were already apparent. Orson Welles—or Booth Tarkington, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based—was not as fully prescient as Eugene Morgan seems to be. But many of the automobile’s consequences remained as yet unknown. Still to come were the destruction of America’s downtowns, the predominance of suburbia, the dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the proliferation of air pollution, the invention of the shopping mall, the strangulation of the national parks. Eugene Morgan’s cautionary speech has an authentic, haunting quality, and whenever I have come upon that scene, it has brought to mind this question: Is there a technology existing now that, unsuspected by us all, will one day be seen to have changed the country as profoundly and unpredictably as the automobile has?

When the question came up this last time, I thought of George Bush at the check-out counter.

IT IS HARDLY a secret that the science of demographics is rapidly becoming more sophisticated. The laser scanner used by retail outlets of all kinds to read product codes and compile a data base about what people buy is one of the tools that lies at its heart. So is the list of questions that sales clerks everywhere now seem to ask—“Length of time at current address?”—before even modest transactions can be concluded. So are the 800 numbers for various things which keep a record, eventually to be sold, of the origin of every call. A demographic infrastructure is being put into place in which government data, retail data, mail-order data, credit-card data, banking data, medical data, and data of various other kinds are continually cross-tabulated, creating a parallel universe in which all of us exist incorporeally; in which our every attribute, our every wish, habit, and inclination, is known and accessible.

No shrouded committee of manipulators is directing this activity. It is a campaign with countless generals and as many motivations. The advantages of having a demographic infrastructure of this kind in place, harnessed to phone, fax, computer, cable, and mail, do not need belaboring: it makes marketing easier, raising money easier, building loyalty easier, finding criminals easier, doing research easier. Perhaps just as important, it makes avoiding trouble easier—trouble from deadbeats, trouble from those who may detest what is being sold or said.

What are the consequences of this marriage of computers and data collection besides the straightforward ones that a salesman might point to? One that already gets attention is invasion of privacy: for a price, perfect strangers can learn intimate details about the life of almost any American. People in the demographics industry were confronted with this issue very quickly, just as those who made the first automobiles quickly realized that by enabling people to go places faster, cars would also cause accidents and fatalities. But the sort of consequences I wonder about are the ones whose specific tilt we simply can’t predict, the ones that fifty or a hundred years from now people will realize crept up quietly. And in this case, the consequences may affect something as basic as the country’s personality.

WE TAKE for granted the degree to which the United States is unified by mass marketing and mass communication. In his book The American Commonwealth (1888) the British historian and diplomat James Bryce, who visited the United States many times, gave one chapter the title “The Uniformity of American Life.” Bryce acknowledged the existence in America of stubborn regionalism and local variation and, too, the exotic elements introduced by wave after wave of immigration, but he went on to observe that, nonetheless, the “ideas of men and women, their fundamental beliefs and their superficial tastes, their methods of thinking and fashions of talking” were far more alike in the United States than they were in European countries. There were a number of reasons for this, including a common political culture and the nation’s very newness. But it was also true that mass communication, at the time conducted primarily by means of national magazines and mailorder catalogues, and eventually to be conducted by radio and television, had become a force in the shaping of an American culture. Mass communication creates a continuum of small talk, gossip, news, jokes, celebrities, commercials. It makes us aware of life-styles and concerns that are not our own, exposes us to advertising meant for others. Without it, Walter Mondale’s “Where’s the beef?” would have been impossible. Mass communication, and the industries that came into being in tandem with it, can be irritating, distasteful, and worse, but they account for the sense we all have that “America” is a nationwide phenomenon.

Modern demographic technologies are a counterforce. They communicate not with whole populations but with components—environmentalists, chess players, Republicans, accountants who golf, suburban Chinese, drinkers of scotch. Quite apart from their effectiveness at accomplishing a stated task— selling a product or service, changing a mind—they act to fracture and isolate. We inhabit a world in which, increasingly, the messages sent by businesses and politicians and organizations of various kinds get sent only to certain people, and can be individually tailored for greatest impact. Looking at it from the other direction, we inhabit a world in which, increasingly, households will receive only those messages in which someone at home can be assumed to be interested. If the aim is to be universally persuasive, messages from a single source to many different destinations can even be in conflict, and no one will necessarily notice the discrepancies.

Now imagine demographic technology raised to the nth power, and imagine a world in which it has been employed for five or six decades. Will the manipulation of people’s decisions have become unimaginably sophisticated? Will the membranes that divide individuals from one another have become impassable and calcified? What are the implications for communal feeling and public life? Will people feel linked to others mainly through narrow pathways of similarity or proximity? Will our minds be altered in subtle ways? I have asked these questions of dozens of people who use demographic technologies in their work and found no one who has given such matters much thought.

TOWARD THE END of The Magnificent Ambersons, when Isabel Amberson Minafer rides home to the family mansion after a long absence, she looks out the window at the town where she grew up, and sighs and says: “Changed. So changed.” When the courteous person taking my phone order at L. L. Bean asks me to read the number above my name on the mailing label, I can’t help cooperating. But I know I’m contributing to a phenomenon whose consequences will surprise us; and I know it can’t be stopped.

—Cullen Murphy