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.
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