If Then

May 1, 2020

Harvard professor, New Yorker staff writer, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of international best sellers like This America, Lepore shows how Silicon's success--and our current obsession with data--is rooted in the work of the Simulmatics Corporation. Founded in 1959, Simulmatics sought to predict and even control human behavior via computer, mining data, and manipulating news and voters.

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Starred review from May 15, 2020
An in-depth history of "Cold War America's Cambridge Analytica." A staff writer for the New Yorker and Harvard professor, Lepore knows how to spin out a winning historical study. Here, she dives deep into matters that have seldom attracted scholarly attention, delivering a story that hinges on the discovery, in the late 1950s, that computers and languages such as FORTRAN, based on an endless series of "IF/THEN" statements, "an infinity of outcomes," could be used to gauge and influence voter preferences. The Simulmatics Corporation melded the worlds of Mad Men advertising and high-tech geekery of the UNIVAC set, leveraging what would eventually be called artificial intelligence to sway campaigns and elections. Among other achievements, the company "claimed credit for having gotten John F. Kennedy elected president." Lepore's narrative features some unlikely players, such as the novelist Eugene Burdick of The Ugly American fame, who began his professional life as a political scientist--though one who really wanted to be James Bond. The other principals of Simulmatics were cynical, hard-drinking men whose marriages dissolved with distressing regularity but who believed in the unerring power of numbers. Founded in 1959, Simulmatics went bankrupt just a decade later, as Lepore deftly shows, its faith in numbers led it to plot bombing runs and body counts in Vietnam, "waging a war by way of computer-run data analysis and modeling." The company even attempted to do probabilistic forecasts of when and where race riots would occur. That was all heady stuff back in the age of Robert McNamara and the RAND Corporation, but it didn't play well toward the end. Still, as Lepore also convincingly demonstrates, the work of Simulmatics paved the way for later manipulators of psychology and public opinion such as Facebook. As she writes of those heirs, the founders of Simulmatics "would have understood, even if they could only dream about its gargantuan quantity of data or the ability to run simulations in real time, dynamically." A fascinating, expertly guided exploration of a little-known corner of the recent past.

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June 1, 2020
In this colorful yet disjointed history, New Yorker writer Lepore (These Truths) traces present-day obsessions with data mining and predictive analytics to a Cold War–era market research firm. Founded by advertising executive Edward Greenfield and MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1959, the Simulmatics Corporation aimed to “estimat probable human behavior by the use of human technology.” After initially struggling to compete with Madison Avenue agencies and their large, in-house data sets, Simulmatics focused on emerging computer technologies and tapped Pool’s government connections to land Defense Department contracts during the Vietnam War. By 1965, the company had an office in Saigon and growing influence within the U.S. government, despite how overpriced and sloppy some officials found its work to be. (At one point, Simulmatics inaccurately forecast that a riot would break out at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night—a prediction that would be impossible to make even with today’s technology.) Though the company shuttered in 1970, Lepore contends, its influence can still be felt in the impact of Silicon Valley on consumer trends and partisan politics. Though Lepore vividly describes Simulmatics’s key players and the politics of the era, she doesn’t fully distinguish between the company’s self-produced hype and its actual accomplishments, and the book’s chronology is confusing. This sporadically entertaining chronicle doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

Starred review from July 1, 2020
The rise and fall of a mostly forgotten early mover in the predictive analytics industry makes for a tale thick with hubris and junk social science, and a grim foreshadowing of our present reality. Founded in 1959 by social scientists and ad men enthralled by the possibility that computerized simulations of human behavior might be used to predict the future, the Simulmatics Corporation held meetings in a geodesic dome and used punch-card mainframes to help the Democratic Party target crucial segments of the electorate. Despite landing lucrative government contracts to deploy behavioral science in Vietnam and combat race riots at home, the company by 1970 would be bankrupt, its goodwill dissipated by underwhelming deliverables and unhelpful associations with the military-industrial complex. Best-selling Lepore (This America, 2019; These Truths, 2018) does not demonize the company's exuberant but flawed founders, among them Ithiel de Sola Pool, the MIT scholar whose theories would later be heartily embraced by Silicon Valley. But she pulls no punches in criticizing the folly of trying to understand human behavior via algorithm, and the corrosive consequences of trying to hack democracy. The result is not so much a cautionary tale for today's Big Data companies, for which the allure of knowing the future may be hopelessly irresistible, but rather a perceptive work of historically informed dissent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)