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.