Reviewed by:

• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore
• Will Mari (bio)

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future By Jill Lepore. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Pp. 432.

Other scholars, such as Charlton McIlwain, have explored the history of the mysterious and doomed Simulmatics Corporation: the ahead-of-its-moment, even prophetic, "people machine" company that helped JFK get elected in 1960. Founded in 1959, the data science firm was a path-breaker in using algorithms to target voters and consumers. Yet noted Harvard historian Jill Lepore is the first to delve into its origins holistically, even exhaustively.

Lepore's history of Simulmatics covers the many eccentric personalities (of mainly white men) behind the company, founded by the Willy Lomanesque ad man Ed Greenfield and famed MIT political scientist and futurist Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1959. It simultaneously covers the events and context of its time: the Vietnam War, the rise of the minicomputer, Fortran and other programming "languages," political intrigue, and protests.

Lepore's project began as a 2015 New Yorker story and evolved into a sprawling project with extensive, coast-to-coast archival research, including interviews with surviving members of the Simulmatics enterprise. It is a sweeping, stylistic story. It contains a long, lingering look at the tired-out narratives of the Cold War, including the idea that the past does not matter; in a powerful conclusion, Lepore takes aim at the ahistorical, "cockeyed idea" that history is somehow useless. In contrast, she reminds us that "the invention of the future has a history." She is right.

She includes such characters as the swashbuckling Eugene Burdick, a World War II hero-turned-political-scientist-turned-novelist who at first supported the idea of programming a computer to predict possible political and consumer choices, which was at the beating heart of the idea of Simulmatics. Burdick would later write The 480, a damning novel that warned against the corrosive effects of the computerization of representative democracy.

But the power of Lepore's history lies in her confident world-building and storytelling. She wonderfully evokes Vietnam-War-era Saigon, for example, where Simulmatics had an office as it worked to foretell and thwart communism in Southeast Asia in the service of the RAND Corporation and the Department of Defense. Young Simulmatics staffer Maureen Shea was assigned to this steamy, chaotic satellite office in the summer of 1966, just as American ground forces began to pour into the country. Lepore's account of this angle is based off interviews with Shea, along with Shea's letters—it is riveting, almost exquisite, in its detail.

Lepore also evokes the painful family lives of the Simulmatics scientists back in the United States, empathetically and in ways that help explain the [End Page 655] impact of an unbridled pursuit of quantitative research at the expense of all else. And yet Lepore does not create strawmen or self-righteously condemn figures such as Pool, who she takes pains to point out was a decent, thoughtful person who genuinely thought he was doing good.

Simulmatics' fate was to be eclipsed by numerous rivals and criticized by students and statesmen alike for its cavalier attitude toward what today we call data privacy. But its history provides the tortured background of many of our moment's "data science" initiatives. It is the sad, forgotten grandfather of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica.

While McIlwain's Black Software (Oxford University Press, 2019) admirably focused on the racial aspect of Simulmatics' work (it attempted to predict racial unrest for the U.S. government during the late 1960s), few other scholars have explored its history. Lepore's book, then, is a first—and needed—deep dive into the company's shadowy impact. While it would be a stretch to say that it alone is the source of our misinformation woes, its efforts were indeed a missed opportunity to regulate "big tech" and its all-pervasive influence before it really got started. Instead, contemporaries were more worried about...