Simulmatics: a warning from history

 Computer prediction of voting patterns or mass purchasing decisions is not that recent a development. It was fascinating to hear last week's Radio 4 serialisation of Jill Lepore's If Then. (The nerd in me kept wanting continuity announcers to pause between the two words, because they are two parts of a conditional sentence in COBOL, and some other high-level procedural programming languages: IF [condition] THEN [action].) The story goes back to 1959. As Waterstones blurb says:

Charting the history of Simulmatics, the first corporation dedicated to the prediction of human behavior and manipulation of data, If Then reveals the mid-twentieth century forebears to the companies rising out of Silicon Valley.

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.

In If Then, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, unearths 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.

If they had not overstretched by attempting to predict the future of Vietnam, Simulmatics may still be with us today and as the holding oompany for Facebook. Cambridge Analytica would not have arisen.  Rather like Babbage in the 19th century, the moving spirits of the company foresaw the future of computing but were limited by the technology of the time.