If then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future

The Resource If then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future
Label
If then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future
Title remainder
how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future
Statement of responsibility
Jill Lepore
Title variation
How the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future
Creator
Author
Subject
Language
eng
Summary
"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"--
Assigning source
Provided by publisher
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
  • 303.4834/09
  • 006.3/12
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
QA76.9.D343
LC item number
L47 2020
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography

Context

Context of If then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future

Work of

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