Long Before Cambridge Analytica And Facebook, Simulmatics Linked Data And Politics
In If Then, author and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore unearths Simulmatics' story and makes the argument that the company paved the way for our 21st-century obsession with data and prediction.
It's a big election year, and one party's candidate is the successor to a popular two-term president. A little-known company offers the other party, which is in disarray, technology that uses vast amounts of data to profile voters. The election is incredibly close — and the longshot candidate wins.
This was 1960, not 2016, and the winning ticket was John F. Kennedy, not Donald Trump.
The little-known — and now nearly entirely forgotten — company was called Simulmatics, the subject of Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's timely new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.
Before Cambridge Analytica, before Facebook, before the Internet, there was Simulmatics'
