Radio 4's Book of the Week A Financial Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times / McKinsey Business Book
of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award 'The story of
the original data science hucksters of the 1960s is hilarious,
scathing and sobering - what you might get if you crossed Mad Men
with Theranos' David Runciman The Simulmatics Corporation, founded
in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated
consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades
before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon
Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of
Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and
Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used
computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their
"People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients
that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York
Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the
Department of Defence. In If Then, distinguished Harvard historian
and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, unearths from the
archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished
corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and
1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building
the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and
tormented, algorithm by algorithm. 'A person can't help but feel
inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill
Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a
hope-inducing thing' George Saunders, Man Booker Prize-winning
author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'An authoritative account of the
origins of data science, a compelling political narrative of
America in the Sixties, a poignant collective biography of a
generation of flawed men' David Kynaston 'If Then is simultaneously
gripping and absolutely terrifying' Amanda Foreman
General
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