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If then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future / Jill Lepore.
Van Pelt Library QA76.9.D343 L47 2020
By Request
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Lepore, Jill, 1966- author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Data mining.
- Simulmatics Corporation.
- Physical Description:
- xii, 415 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Other Title:
- How the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future
- Place of Publication:
- New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2020]
- Summary:
- "A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller, These Truths. 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 Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm"-- Provided by publisher.
- Contents:
- Machine generated contents note: pt. ONE The Social Network
- ch. 1 Madly For Adlai
- ch. 2 Impossible Man
- ch. 3 The Quiet American
- ch. 4 Artificial Intelligence
- ch. 5 Project Macroscope
- pt. TWO The People Machine
- ch. 6 The Ibm President
- ch. 7 Billion-Dollar Brain
- ch. 8 Fail-Safe
- ch. 9 The Four-Eighty
- pt. THREE Hearts and Minds
- ch. 10 Armies Of The Night
- ch. 11 The Things They Carried
- ch. 12 The Fire Next Time
- ch. 13 An Octoputer
- ch. 14 The Mood Corporation.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 337-390) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9781631496103
- 1631496107
- OCLC:
- 1156414851
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