If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future
Publisher : John Murray
Language : English
Hardcover : 432 pages
ISBN-10 : 1529386152
ISBN-13 : 978-1529386158
Dimensions : 15 x 4 x 23.8 cm
Description :-
If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defence.