If then: how one data company invented the future

By:

Lepore, Jill

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: John Murray Publishers London 2021Description: xii, 415 pISBN:

9781529386172

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

303.483409 LEP

Summary: 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.

List(s) this item appears in: IT & Decision Sciences | Finance & Accounting

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Indian Institute of Management LRC General Stacks	IT & Decisions Sciences	303.483409 LEP (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		003715

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Previous	No cover image available							Next
Previous	303.4833 BEY Data and society	303.4833 NEG Being digital	303.4834 MUL Your computer is on fire	303.483409 LEP If then:	303.49 SIE Predictive analytics: the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die	320.02855133 POL An R companion to political analysis	330.015195 CAR Statistical analysis of financial data in R	Next

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.

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