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.
