NP: Secret Machines, Secret Machines

Okay, so I watched the debate on CNNHD the other night, so I got to watch the "squigglys" on the screen -- the focus group in Ohio with their little dials, broken out by male and female. There's been a lot of talk about this during the election, most recently with Nate Silver beseeching CNN to dump the graphic at least in the live broadcasts.

I'll admit I was fascinated by the lines on Wednesday night, but this has been part of a whole bunch of memory cues that bring me back to a book I read some fifteen years ago. It's called Interface, written by Stephen Bury. Actually, it's written by Neal Stephenson and another guy under a pen name, which I didn't know when I serendipitously picked it up in a bookstore.

The relevant details of the novel are these: The US is $10 trillion dollars in debt, and there's this one pollster who ultimately beams the physiological responses of focus group participants directly into the brain of a presidential candidate (from Illinois!) in real time.

I'm re-reading it now, and will post particularly salient and/or prescient passages as I come across them. The first is from pollster Cy Ogle, who I imagine looking more like the Texas Businessman on The Simpsons than Frank Luntz, but whatever:

"We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media," Ogle said. "The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish a candidate's fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations -- whether his hands are held open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws."

Keep in mind, this was published in 1994. More to come. There's a focus group scene where they calibrate the responses that's awesome, but might be too long to transcribe.