In her new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, Jill Lepore recovers the forgotten story of Simulmatics, which she describes as “Cold War America’s Cambridge Analytica.” Founded in the late 1950s, Simulmatics was gone by the early 1970s. During its brief life it sought to combine the collection of personal data with the then-new field of the behavioral science as well as the then-just invented new device of the computer in order to predict what humans would do. Hoping to profit through prophesy and failing at it, Simulmatics itself turned out to predict the future: Lepore Read more