If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Historian Jill Lepore tells the story of the Simulmatics Corporation as a case study in the Cold War origins of data science and of the technological, market, and political debates that shape our “data-mad” times. This company’s efforts throughout the 1960s to build a business on the power of prediction raises important questions about how its work affected democratic institutions, personal behavior, and conceptions of privacy.