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3.0 

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

By Jill Lepore
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

From the best-selling author of These Truths, an “exhilarating” (New York Times Book Review) account of the Cold War origins of our data-mad era.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—or so argues Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, in this “hilarious, scathing, and sobering” (David Runciman) account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

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56 Reviews

3.0
“Much more readable than How Not to Network a Nation (which it nevertheless served as an interesting companion to)—Lepore is charming as always. Unlike with the Soviet example, there’s no wistful “what if” here; she suggests that our current algorithmic hell was an inevitability. Some fascinating insights into why the internet got to be the way it is.”

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