If Then How The Simulmatics Corporation Invented The Future
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If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
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.
If Then
Author: Jill Lepore
language: en
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Release Date: 2020-09-15
The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to 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 with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the 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 to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, 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 it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.
The Routledge Handbook of Political Risk
Author: Cecilia Emma Sottilotta
language: en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date: 2025-03-24
The Routledge Handbook of Political Risk explores the context, analysis, and management of political risk arising from recent tectonic geopolitical challenges to the world order posed by pandemics, nationalist policy interventions, changing supply chains, technological transformation, and the climate crisis. Seasoned and emerging academics from the Global North and South, alongside risk practitioners and business professionals from multiple continents and industries, reconsider and address policy-oriented questions in relation to social, political, democratic, environmental, economic, security, technological, and geopolitical challenges. Across five distinctive parts, this Handbook considers ethical risks, populism, weaponised interdependence, protectionism, the disruptive effects of AI, company case studies, industries, and political risk management, while also reconsidering the future of political risk. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of international business and management studies, political science, area studies, security studies, geography, history, and sociology. In the absence of functioning global governance to mitigate such risks, it will also be of great use to a range of consultants, investors, business practitioners, and corporations.