In 1959, a company called Simulmatics opened its doors. Founded by Ed Greenfield, a back-slapping Madison Avenue Mad Man, Simulmatics did political consulting and data analytics. In 1960 it claimed credit for getting John F. Kennedy elected president. Eleven years later, it went bankrupt. In her new book, If Then, Jill Lepore argues that the Simulmatics story is our reality: We are trapped in “a machine that applies the science of psychological warfare to the affairs of ordinary life, a machine that manipulates opinion, exploits attention, commodifies information, divides voters, fractures communities, alienates individuals, and undermines democracy.” As Lepore puts it in her subtitle, Simulmatics “invented the future.”
The future that Simulmatics built — and the data-drenched way of thinking it championed — was largely the brainchild of academics. Greenfield hired leaders in the then-new field of behavioral science, and the company became a magnet for brilliant, idealistic, and opportunistic scholars besotted by the idea that data, computers, and predictive algorithms could change minds, influence behavior, and forecast the future. This belief reached a tragic crescendo during the war in Vietnam — Simulmatics had a branch office in Saigon — but the ambition lives on in Silicon Valley, our politics, and our universities.
I recently spoke with Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, about how algorithms and data came to supersede art and philosophy, why higher ed has a Silicon Valley problem, and how a midcentury political theorist at Berkeley became the face of Ballantine Ale.
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