If Then : : how the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Locations
Call Number: 006.312 Le, Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / United States / 20th Century / Lepore, Jill
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	006.312 Le	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	006.312 Le	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	006.312 Le	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / United States / 20th Century / Lepore, Jill	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / United States / 20th Century / Lepore, Jill	4-week checkout	Due 05-10-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / United States / 20th Century / Lepore, Jill	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

"A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller, These Truths. 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 Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed 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"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Informative read submitted by tcramer318 on July 9, 2022, 7:29pm Jill Lepore's analysis of history, politics and technology always lands for me. Additionally, this book finally got me to try reading The Ninth Wave by Eugene Burdick.