If Then
“[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.”
Booklist (starred review)
Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
#1 Amazon bestseller in Computer Simulation
Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
An O Magazine Pick of Best Books of Fall
A London Observer Pick of Fall's Best Books
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.
Praise