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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
If you read this book to the end, then you will shake your head wearily, muttering, “There really is nothing new under the sun...”
If you are interested in the history of tech and unintended consequences, highly recommend.
There is barely anything about the computers, the technology or even the business of the company.
It is a history book with some selected snippets of history very very very loosely tied to the Simulmatics corporation.
It is a history book with some selected snippets of history very very very loosely tied to the Simulmatics corporation.
the Audible freeness ran out before i could finish the book, which is just fine, as the whole thing felt like loosely edited podcast. (a medium in which Lepore also works, and with a great production team, excels.)
so, yes, the book was dnfed, but i didn't NEED to finish it to feel that i had read enough with my ears. and when Robert McNamara shows up at the party you know it's time to leave.
so, yes, the book was dnfed, but i didn't NEED to finish it to feel that i had read enough with my ears. and when Robert McNamara shows up at the party you know it's time to leave.
If Then is a fascinating and flawed account of how Simulmatics, a pioneering market research team, prefigured much of contemporary concerns around big data and surveillance capitalism, while failing in almost every venture it embarked on. Lepore bounces between her primary protagonists and the great events that they failed to substantially influence or capitalize on to paint a picture of the 60s as a decade when a utopian dream of technocratic moderation became a nightmare of simulated insanity.
Ed Greenfeld, the founder of Simulmatics, was a Madison Avenue ad man and backslapping hustlers, who frustrated at the perennial failure of his favored candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, teamed up with social scientists in the nascent fields of behavioral science to create an election in a box, a computerized data model that would give a cannier Democrat an oraclucular advantage. The first few reports went to the Kennedy campaign in the summer of 1960 suggested that he should embrace civil rights and Catholicism; that the votes of racists and anti-Catholics had already been lost, and he could shore up support among African-Americans and non-bigots. Kennedy famously won by a narrow margin. An article in Harper's Magazine by Thomas Morgan sold Simulmatics as a magic people machine that gave the Kennedy campaign strategic insights (Morgan would shortly join the company), but Simulmatics proved best at selling itself, and failed to land subsequent opportunities.
Madison Avenue was rightfully skeptical of the shoddy data bases and under theorized models of consumer behavior. An attempt to use computers to model the 1964 election in near real time for the New York Times collapsed under a tidal waves of bugs and lack of technical experience with actual IBM mainframes. The most successful project was an expansion to Saigon, to try and simulate how communist insurgencies could be defeated, but Simulmatics was never more than a tertiary player in McNamara's data-driven war. After failing to deliver on an expensive contract, their efforts were cancelled by ARPA.
Meanwhile, the personnelle of Simulmatics imploded in their own way. Ed Greenfeld sunk into alcoholism. Mathematician Bill McPhee was committed to an insane asylum for a time, and then mostly failed to deal with his bipolar disorder. Political scientist/novelist Eugene Burdick (The Ugly American, among other didactic 60s political thrillers) used his insider access to skewer the company in his 1964 novel The 480, a reference to the 480 identified categories of people in the Simulmatics database. Burdick died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Ithial de Sola Pool, a Trotskyite turned ardent cold warrior, pushed Simulmatics ever closer to the defense establishment, while fighting the rising peace movement in American universities. Everybody's marriage fell apart.
A last gasp at predicting urban race riots collapsed in 1968, and Simulmatics suffered an undignified bankruptcy in 1970. Ithiel de Sola Pool had the longest successful career, serving as a neoconservative prophet of the nascent internet until his death in 1984. Much like cybernetics, another trendy 1950s computerized synthesis, Simulmatics abilities never matched its ambitions. Yet, as Lepore shows, the concerns raised then are the same as our current concerns around Facebook, face news, information warfare, and all that postmodern jazz. Nothing is new under the sun, except in 2021 computers are fast enough and data models rich enough that it actually works.
Lepore ably blends the "Mad Men but real" flawed personalities with the great events of this time, but I wish she'd been a little more detailed as an intellectual and technical historian. I'm a lover of obsolete ideas and obsolete machines, and I'd have liked a little more detail on how it worked. Still, a fascinating book on a mostly forgotten group of visionaries.
Ed Greenfeld, the founder of Simulmatics, was a Madison Avenue ad man and backslapping hustlers, who frustrated at the perennial failure of his favored candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, teamed up with social scientists in the nascent fields of behavioral science to create an election in a box, a computerized data model that would give a cannier Democrat an oraclucular advantage. The first few reports went to the Kennedy campaign in the summer of 1960 suggested that he should embrace civil rights and Catholicism; that the votes of racists and anti-Catholics had already been lost, and he could shore up support among African-Americans and non-bigots. Kennedy famously won by a narrow margin. An article in Harper's Magazine by Thomas Morgan sold Simulmatics as a magic people machine that gave the Kennedy campaign strategic insights (Morgan would shortly join the company), but Simulmatics proved best at selling itself, and failed to land subsequent opportunities.
Madison Avenue was rightfully skeptical of the shoddy data bases and under theorized models of consumer behavior. An attempt to use computers to model the 1964 election in near real time for the New York Times collapsed under a tidal waves of bugs and lack of technical experience with actual IBM mainframes. The most successful project was an expansion to Saigon, to try and simulate how communist insurgencies could be defeated, but Simulmatics was never more than a tertiary player in McNamara's data-driven war. After failing to deliver on an expensive contract, their efforts were cancelled by ARPA.
Meanwhile, the personnelle of Simulmatics imploded in their own way. Ed Greenfeld sunk into alcoholism. Mathematician Bill McPhee was committed to an insane asylum for a time, and then mostly failed to deal with his bipolar disorder. Political scientist/novelist Eugene Burdick (The Ugly American, among other didactic 60s political thrillers) used his insider access to skewer the company in his 1964 novel The 480, a reference to the 480 identified categories of people in the Simulmatics database. Burdick died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Ithial de Sola Pool, a Trotskyite turned ardent cold warrior, pushed Simulmatics ever closer to the defense establishment, while fighting the rising peace movement in American universities. Everybody's marriage fell apart.
A last gasp at predicting urban race riots collapsed in 1968, and Simulmatics suffered an undignified bankruptcy in 1970. Ithiel de Sola Pool had the longest successful career, serving as a neoconservative prophet of the nascent internet until his death in 1984. Much like cybernetics, another trendy 1950s computerized synthesis, Simulmatics abilities never matched its ambitions. Yet, as Lepore shows, the concerns raised then are the same as our current concerns around Facebook, face news, information warfare, and all that postmodern jazz. Nothing is new under the sun, except in 2021 computers are fast enough and data models rich enough that it actually works.
Lepore ably blends the "Mad Men but real" flawed personalities with the great events of this time, but I wish she'd been a little more detailed as an intellectual and technical historian. I'm a lover of obsolete ideas and obsolete machines, and I'd have liked a little more detail on how it worked. Still, a fascinating book on a mostly forgotten group of visionaries.
Very interesting book. It was especially interesting to read this a few months after "Interface" by Neal Stephenson, which was just an over the top high tech fictionalized version of what Simulmatics tried to do. It was a very interesting context to pair with a lot of mid 20th century history. Can't believe what a fucking horrible person Lyndon Johnson was abroad.
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
oh my god. it genuinely might be one of, if not my absolute favorite books of all time. the way jill lepore writes makes you deeply invested, deeply emotional, and deeply impacted by everything she says. it’s such a human book, no one is intrinsically good or bad, everyone is just human. people who were trying their best in the midst of political chaos and financial struggles and failing marriages. it’s an excellent example of a cautionary tale, why it’s important to remember the past when looking towards the future. it’s so incredibly well written, it made me cry a lot..
Jill Lepore is a master of *almost* taking her thesis and ideas too far. She uses this very interesting story of a huckster computer company from the 50s/60s as a way to talk about the overall "big datafication" of society, and every now and then you think she's about to go off the deep end and say Cambridge Analytica is the reason Trump won - but then with the appropriate scholarly reluctance she pulls back from anything that declarative.
Away from all this, she's just a great storyteller. Worth your time.
Away from all this, she's just a great storyteller. Worth your time.
At first, didn't anticipate much from this book. Guys with computers, tallying election results....zzz. But no, Lepore traces this early effort at big data management in non-science applications, by a firm called Simulmatics, as a combination of hubris, snake -oil hucksterism, and ambition. This is what the nascent market analysis part of Sterling Cooper would have been, with support and encouragement from Jim Cutler.
What I did not know was that after playing a role in JFK's election, the firm attempted (unsuccessfully) to branch out into "war management" in Vietnam, and "urban unrest" of the 1960s. In addition, this very low profile firm played a role in the careers of such folks as Lawrence O'Brien, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert McNamara, Daniel Ellsberg, R. Buckminster Fuller and the sociology and polisci departments of MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago.
The only reason why I did not give this work five stars was that Lepore goes into a jeremiad when taking this to present day. In addition, she appears to ignore the true drivers of forecasting future behavior, whether it be casting a ballot, making a purchase, or committing a crime- previous behavior. Then again, she is a historian, not a specialist in consumer behavior. I do give her credit for revealing early the "special sauce" - the necessity for good, clean, and massive amounts of data. Without which, any forecast is worthless.
What I did not know was that after playing a role in JFK's election, the firm attempted (unsuccessfully) to branch out into "war management" in Vietnam, and "urban unrest" of the 1960s. In addition, this very low profile firm played a role in the careers of such folks as Lawrence O'Brien, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert McNamara, Daniel Ellsberg, R. Buckminster Fuller and the sociology and polisci departments of MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago.
The only reason why I did not give this work five stars was that Lepore goes into a jeremiad when taking this to present day. In addition, she appears to ignore the true drivers of forecasting future behavior, whether it be casting a ballot, making a purchase, or committing a crime- previous behavior. Then again, she is a historian, not a specialist in consumer behavior. I do give her credit for revealing early the "special sauce" - the necessity for good, clean, and massive amounts of data. Without which, any forecast is worthless.