If Then

How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

by Jill Lepore

hardcover, 432 pages

Published Sept. 15, 2020 by Liveright.

(4 reviews)

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, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.

The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.

3 editions

loppear reviewed If Then by Jill Lepore

Perhaps too mundane and oblique, but smartly done

4 stars

Subtle - a history of early computer use in politics, following a mostly uninteresting and overconfident marketing company - Simulmatics - from '50s campaign analytics and simulation to Vietnam War psychological surveys and counterinsurgency to domestic riot prediction. Wherever she can, LePore tells this history from the perspective of the wives and secretaries of these blustering ad-and-war men, and with an eye to the parallel shadows and overpromises of current technology companies.

Darius Kazemi reviewed If Then by Jill Lepore

Lots of potential but less than the sum of its parts

2 stars

I am a total sucker for learning anything and everything I can about the mid 20th century think tanks and defense contractors that helped invent American technocracy. And yet I find myself lukewarm on this book at best.

The weakest part of the book is its core thesis: it attempts to make Simulmatics, a short-lived company that was far more bark than bite, into a harbinger of the modern data-driven, democracy-destroying privacy nightmare we live in today. The author fails to do this. Oh, she makes the claim that it is a harbinger, many times, but she doesn't show the work, seemingly expecting the reader to go "oh, that sounds similar enough that it must be the same thing."

Simulmatics was a shambles of a company run by a bright-burning PR hack and staffed by scientists who did not seem to be very good at their jobs. They never owned …

Simulmatics was a shambles of a company run by a bright-burning PR hack and staffed by scientists who did not seem to be very good at their jobs. They never owned any computer equipment, instead renting time on university machines. Among other disasters, the scientists who worked there had a contract with The New York Times for the 1962 midterm election which culminated in them installing a giant, expensive IBM mainframe at the Times offices and then... not knowing how to use the thing. Simulmatics existed during a time that I have spent significant time researching on my own, and I had never heard of them. There is no reference to them in any of my extensive notes on ARPA records from the late 60s and early 70s (granted this was in the twilight of the company). It's pretty clear they were small fries. Interesting small fries but I think a book about the Rand Corporation or SDC would be much, much more suited to the thesis of "this was the harbinger of the Facebook adtech privacy nightmare."

I'll admit, I am coming at this from the perspective of an amateur computer historian. What I see here, mostly, is an author who ran across a really genuinely interesting company called Simulmatics when she was going through the papers of Ithiel de Sola Pool. She says as much that she "began to think there might be a book in those boxes", which is something I've thought many times sitting in archives. Most of the time, there is not a book in those boxes. I think this is one of those times where it should not have been a book. Maybe this is cynical of me, but I think this is a case where Lepore, who friends assure me is usually a much, much better writer than this, was able to convince a publisher based on her sterling reputation and the exquisite timeliness of the subject matter, that there was a book there.

The best thing about the book is its insistence on not erasing women in the narrative of Simulmatics. This includes the detailed stories of several women employed by the company, as well as the wives of the company's founding members. "They treat their wives like dirt" is a refrain in the book, and one Lepore never lets you forget, with good reason. I love her willingness to paint hucksters and abusers and exactly what they are, and the pains she takes to show that a lot of the scientists involved in Simulmatics were blustery fools who literally could not operate a computer unless a highly trained woman was there to run the machinery for them.

One of my favorite things about the book was its portrayal of Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the Simulmatics founders, who was one of the few people there who seemed to be genuinely good at what he did (unless you count the company founder Greenfield, who was genuinely good at being a huckster). Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, knew him very well as they were both in Vietnam at the same time doing overlapping working for the Department of Defense. According to Ellsberg, when Pool learned of the leak he was shocked because Ellsberg would surely lose his security clearance.

"I was expecting to go to prison for the rest of my life," Ellsberg wryly said later, "and Ithiel wanted to know whether I understood that I'd never get another dollar from the federal government."

Oddly, there is a diversion in the middle of the book about Eugene Burdick, an author of political thrillers who had some connection to Simulmatics, and whose last novel was heavily based on their business. Lepore needles him for rushing out half-baked books in the name of timeliness. Ironic, considering I just finished a prime example of that exact phenomenon.

outofrange reviewed If Then by Jill Lepore

Review of 'If Then' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It's very interesting to compare the history I've witnessed as the growth of social media to this strange, bold, spooky precusor in the world my parents witnessed.

randomcha

rated it

Feb 3