If Then

Summary

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilizedpolitics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author ofThese Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstoryto the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses withwings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computersimulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in LongIsland under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying adishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote.Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients includedthe John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers:Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt topredict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspiciousdeath, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished.Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that itwould take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb diddetonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary ofdecisions, leaving people across the planet, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has apast; If Then is its cautionary tale