num_pages: 432
description: The Simulmatics Corporation launched during the Cold War mined data targeted voters manipulated consumers destabilized politics and disordered knowledgedecades before Facebook Google and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore best-selling author of These Truths came across the companys papers in MITs 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 nations leading social scientiststhe best and the brightest fatally brilliant Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax flying to the sunSimulmatics 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 companys 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 administrations ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The companys 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.
language: English
title: If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
publisher: Liveright