The Atom and the Amoeba: The Aesthetics of the Research Report and the Cold War Think Tank

In 1953, when Walt Disney was looking to construct his first amusement park, he turned to a leading think tank to find him a suitable site for his venture, the Stanford Research Institute, whose “An Analysis of Location Factors for Disneyland” exemplified a distinctly Cold War aesthetic for how information was purposed, presented, and operationalized. The postwar think tank was tasked with communicating a complex host of research findings to aid the managerial class in their decision making, serving as a productive antagonist. The details of how this worked are of significance today because Disneyland was conceived alongside a new regime that continues to shape our present—a regime where our world, both physical and virtual, is operationalized through projections, trends, simulations, and feasibility studies aimed at optimizing returns, consumption, and the manufacture of happiness. During the early 1950s, the United States government had promoted the principle of industrial dispersion as a way of defending against atomic attack. By encouraging new, critical industries to avoid highly populated and highly industrialized areas, they sought to make these areas less attractive targets. In the Disneyland site report, the cartographic gestures of cutting, seaming, and overlaying that had been important to analysis in World War II were redeployed for commercial purposes. In identifying a site for Disneyland, Harrison “Buzz” Price at the Stanford Research Institute recalled that all the “data seemed to zero in on an area we called ‘the amoeba’ because of its irregular shape.” This “amoeba” was a methodological byproduct of the curvilinear forms produced by the dispersion surveys in outlining the boundaries of potential atom-bomb targets. In these curvilinear contours and visualization techniques, we see the emergence of an operationalized map that transformed Southern California into a landscape of numbers, trends, and statistics subject to tactical intervention. Disneyland's embrace of the think tank's methods speaks to the technocratic aspirations of a leisure industry seduced by the promises of the Cold War corporate apparatus. Between the atom and the amoeba, Disneyland would find its site in California's Orange County, where orange groves were razed to inaugurate the first site of leisure as a big business enterprise—a technological wonderland rooted on the principles of postwar automation, cybernetics, and operations research.