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Synopses & 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.
Review
"[Lepore]
pulls no punches in criticizing the folly of trying to understand human
behavior via algorithm, and the corrosive consequences of trying to hack
democracy. The result is...a perceptive work of historically
informed dissent." Brendan Driscoll, Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"A person can't help but feel
inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill
Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a
hope-inducing thing." George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Review
"Data science, Jill Lepore
reminds us in this brilliant book, has a past, and she tells it through
the engrossing story of Simulmatics, the tiny, long-forgotten company
that helped invent our data-obsessed world, in which prediction is
seemingly the only knowledge that matters. A captivating, deeply
incisive work. Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam
Synopsis
Best Books of Fall 2020: O, The Oprah Magazine, The Observer, Boston.com
Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2020: TIME
Longlisted - Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year
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.
About the Author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at
The New Yorker. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller
These Truths and
This America.