If Then, Jill Lepore

A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War a origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty first century, from the author of the acclaimed international best-seller These Trutis.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics,a and disordered knowledge - decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica. Borrowing methods of psychological warfare, from New York, Massachusetts, and the hamlets of Vietnam, Simulmatics deployed their 'People Machine' to predict and influence human behaviour for the presidential campaigns of Eir enhower and Kennedy, the New York Times, Mad Men ad firms and, most nockingly, the strategy of the Vietnam War. In the 1950s and 1960s these lost pioneers invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.