The rise and fall of a pre-Internet computer simulation company that was during the approximate time of Mad Men. The plot felt a bit thin and Lepore had to fill in some gaps with general American history, but it also provided context. It is hard not to think about Simulmatics in conjunction with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. I learned about electoral politics in the 1950s and 1960s as well.

If Then is the third book I’ve read by historian Jill Lepore. What I’ve come to know about her books is that she tends to write about the most unusual and revealing parts of our history.
Her titles are typically intriguing enough to entice me. However, the book’s description was the compelling reason I wanted to read it. It seemed so apropos for the times we live in, the age of social media and its influencers and the sway it can hold over our lives: “a revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century.”

The decision to start Simulmatics, headed by a number of the nation’s leading social scientists, coincided with escalating Cold War tensions. What they were proposing seemed rather “other-worldly” as they planned to use their “People Machine” to predict (and manipulate) human behavior – whether it was deciding what car to buy or what candidate to cast a vote for.

After the Democratic Party hired them for the 1960 presidential election, they laid claim to having helped Kennedy win. If so, how did they do it?

According to the book’s description, they “mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge” – long before the Internet and social influencers like Facebook and Google.

I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy this book, but found it totally fascinating. It’s both history and a cautionary tale and Jill Lepore strikes just the right balance.

Jill Lepore’s IF/THEN is a deep-dive on the Simulmatics Corporation—lost to the history books, but important because it paved the way for companies like Cambridge Analytica and all the algorithmic manipulation that slithers invisibly through modern life. Lepore takes something that should, by all rights, be boring (it’s about math!!!) and spins it into a tale that is as fascinating as it is maddening, populated with colorful characters and quirky historical oddities.

on par with EMPIRE OF PAIN in terms of journalistic complexity and compelling narration, i’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more press (tho i had an arc so am obviously part of the problem). if contemplating the ways The Machine dominates your life sounds too depressing, i’d reassure you that this story is far enough removed from the present moment to feel almost quaint. it’s like the moonshot, but for large-scale data manipulation! nevertheless, the potential of what it will become burbles throughout the entire book, and as the curtain was pulled back on the invisible hands pressing levers and twisting knobs, morbid curiosity kept me flipping pages to the end.

I don't really have words for how excellent this book is--it works on so many levels. On one, it's a history of how mid-twentieth-century politics was forever changed by learning to harness psychology, advertising, and most importantly, computing. It's also an engaging, almost-movie-like portrayal of how the strong personalities of the Simulmatics Corp. came together--think Ocean's Eleven but with more professors and Mad Men. But it's also just darn pretty, poetic storytelling of the many elements that make history, well, history. The latter may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found myself highlighting passages I thought were appealing, as well as those that were important to understanding vintage computing. E.g.:

"The sun rises, the sun sets, and still no one ever really knows what will happen next. In a world of endless uncertainty, the forecasting of the future began with the very oldest human societies. The Greeks built a shrine to the Oracle of Delphi; the Incas built a temple to the Oracle at Pachacamac. Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, every religion, every culture: all have had their prophets and their temples, their diviners, their readers of omens, their seers. Time passed, centuries, millennia. And then, beginning in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Americans began building machines meant to serve as their oracles, new seers, electronic prophets, diviners of data."

If that makes you roll your eyes, then you may want to skip the first third of the book, if not the whole thing. But I am very grateful to the publishers and NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC of this book, and will buy a few copies as gifts for friends as well as myself.

This is the incredible story of Simulmatics Corporation, an American data analytics firm established in 1959, a
a forerunner to Facebook, Google and other high tech companies of today. The story of its existence was unearthed by Jill Lepore , a renowned historian, writer for New Yorker magazine and host of "The Last Archive" podcast.

An unbelievably good read which will appeal to the history buff and high tech aficionado alike.
If data analytics firms must avoid repeating mistakes of the past, we should know the origin story of data science
in the US first. And it goes back 60 years.

Really fascinating book, which I'm glad I read. (May appear in my summer column.) The story of Simulmatics touches on so many important figures and events and institutions--Cold War liberalism, the origin of the phone line between the White House and the Kremlin, the creepy alliance between the Pentagon and social science during the '60s, etc. I was frustrated in a few places by small ambiguities of wording (was Thomas Morgan on Simulmatics's payroll at the time he wrote the 1960 Harper's story that Lepore talks at length about, or not?), but it's a readable and important book.