If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore, reviewed

Review of  If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore, shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

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.

Review of  If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future reviewed

On the front cover of the version of the book that we received it included a quote with the first word that said ‘hilarious’. This was a poorly chosen and tone deaf word to use on the front page as, much as we like a joke, there was nothing funny or even remotely chucklesome in this book at all. The author is a good writer, and you could imagine this book being the basis of a future movie. However, as an American Studies History major, this book was kinda all over the place.

Was it about Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon? Well yes sort of, but was it also about Simulmatics Corporation? Well yes, and was it a heavy handed attempt to link to Cambridge Analytica? Yes, but which was the focus? It was hard to tell. Does it tap into the current malaise that the US find’s itself in? Yes absolutely, but Simulmatics Corporation went bust, the people failed and they did not become Facebook, Google or any of the other ethically challenged behemoths that stride the landscape today. The parallels are clear for sure, but the links feel shoehorned and over worked.

There is a lot of great subject matter in this book, but equally, it almost seemed like it was trying to be the next great American novel, not dissimilar to Tree of Smoke or Infinite Jest perhaps, and not in a completely successful way for any of those books either. We would read other books by this author for sure, but we’re not convinced that this book really hangs together or delivers an overall coherent and collected story this time around.

Short listed for The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company  2020 Business Book of the Year Award. Now in its sixteenth year, the Award is an essential calendar fixture for authors, publishers and the global business community. Each year it recognises a work which provides the ‘most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues’.

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