If Then

How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

English language

Published May 2, 2020

ISBN:
978-1-63149-610-3
Copied ISBN!

View on Inventaire

3 stars (4 reviews)

A revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller These Truths.

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge―decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists―“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”―Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, …

1 edition

Review of 'If Then : How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

The men who founded and ran the Simulmatics corporation were no only remarkably bad at coming up with a name for a company, they also did a lousy job of running it. They were complete shits to their wives, and were bereft of a moral compass. The work they did in Vietnam was shameful.