If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk--or so argues Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, in this "hilarious, scathing, and sobering" (David Runciman) account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published: 09/14/2021
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.23h x 5.55w x 1.03d
ISBN: 9781324091127

About the Author
Lepore, Jill: - 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.