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IF THEN: HOW THE SIMULMATICS CORPORATION INVENTED THE FUTURE Jill Lepore. New York, NY: Liveright, 2020. 432 pages.
Though the Simulmatics Corporation opened during the Cold War and declared bankruptcy in 1970, its resonance has lasted beyond its shelf life. In Jill Lepore's book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, the corporation is revealed to be a precursor of and prelude to contemporary data science.
Data mining and analysis provide the science and patterns to help predict and understand people and information systematically; they are a tool for websites such as Facebook and Google, which depend on a (knowing or ignorant) customer base to keep them in business. Companies selling their products to a world of Internet users look at "cookies" of their website users, word searches, and various Web ads to discover their best marketing chances. Political campaigning, seen throughout conscious propaganda/disinformation and behind-the-scenes meddling, uses data science to find appealing messages to steady and potential voters. The man who would be the founder and president of the Corporation, Ed Greenfield, worked in advertising in the 1950s and had a passion for politics, while other major future members worked with/had interests in political science and social science research - the code to predict data science's future was embedded.
The title of the book comes from the Simulmatics' scientists' usage of FORTRAN to help the process of possible actions and consequences. IF "this" happens, THEN "that" will be the outcome; a basic outline for inserting data and scenarios to discover potential results....