A National Book Award Longlist
An O, The Oprah Magazine Best Book
The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge a�� decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore came across the companya�TMs papers in MITa�TMs archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley. The scientists of Simulmatics created a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions. If Then is its cautionary tale.