If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Lepore, Jill
Published: 09/14/2021
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9781324091127
Pages: 432
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.23h x 5.55w x 1.03d