If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future [Hardcover]

Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and this one is a remarkable saga, sometimes comical, sometimes ominous: a shadow history of the 1960s, as she writes.... Lepore finds in it a plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behaviorincluding, most insidiously, our behavior as voters.... It didnt have to be this way. That is Lepores final message: history is not inevitable. Fascinating.... Over the last decade, Lepore, a Harvard history professor and Timely.... Lepore weaves her narrative across continents and through time with engaging, conversational prose. Her characters' personalities, families, affairs, fights and constant gossiping come alive, thanks to extensive troves of family papers and interviews with those closest to them. [A] rich account. . . . Lepores exceptional skill as storyteller and her sharp eye for seemingly quotidian details and small coincidences lend the Simulmatics world an intimateand at times deliciously gossipyfeeling. . . . As Lepore notes, after the 1960 Kennedy election, the idea that politicians might use advertising, psychological tricks, or even new technology in order to sway elections in their favor was still shocking to the public. But 60 years later, its such an accepted part of American political life that it takes a historian to excavate the moment in time where such notions began to cohere. A beautifully written and intellectually rigorous account of the origins of the science of predictive analytics and behavioral data science in the cold war era. In [Lepore] 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 . . . a perceptive work of historically informed dissent. A staff writer for the Alã6