If Then: How One Data Company Invented The Future

Beskrivelse

If Then tells the fascinating story of the Simulmatics Corporation, a pioneering data company from the late 1950s that shaped the future of technology and politics. This gripping account reveals how data science was born and how it influenced everything from elections to warfare long before today's tech giants emerged.

A groundbreaking look at how early data science transformed politics, technology, and society.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award, this book offers an authoritative history of data science's origins. It also provides a vivid political narrative of America during the 1960s and a moving collective biography of the flawed men behind the scenes.

The Simulmatics Corporation, established in 1959, mined data to target voters, manipulate consumers, and disrupt politics decades ahead of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Often forgotten, these early data scientists were the predecessors of today's tech icons like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Drawing inspiration from psychological warfare, Simulmatics used computers to predict and influence human behavior. Their "People Machine" operated from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon, serving clients such as John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, The New York Times, advertising agency Young & Rubicam, and the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War.

In If Then, Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, uncovers the astonishing story of this vanished company and highlights the women who played crucial roles behind the scenes.

Lepore argues that during the 1950s and 1960s, Simulmatics effectively invented the future by creating the very machine that now entraps and challenges us through algorithms.

This book sheds new light on the intertwined history of technology, politics, the Cold War, and the hidden contributions of women, while also confronting the pressing issues our society faces today. It reveals how the digital world we navigate now stems from the first weaponization of data.

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