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
• | Publication Date: 14-Sep-21
• | Number of Pages: 432 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1324091126
• | ISBN-13: 9781324091127