Review of “If/Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future,” by Jill Lepore

This book is another representative of what I see as a new genre of technology/sociology explorations of recent history. With so much data about the people behind events available to researchers, it is relatively straightforward to integrate events with their personal stories. I recently reviewed a similar book focused on Palo Alto, and this nonfiction work dovetails nicely with the West Coast narrative presented by Malcolm Harris. Their stories overlap somewhat and they are good bookends for understanding the origins of the digital/big data revolution; sometimes they come too close to the daily news for comfort.

Jill Lepore is a historian and so she presents the material more formally, but just as personal in terms of details, as Malcolm Harris.

This book is well written. I only had to reread a few sentences that got lost on the path from subject to action.

The story is fascinating, how a couple of visionaries imagined using what today is called “big data” to analyze trends and make predictions. There were quite a few revelations to me, especially with respect to what was going on behind the scenes during the Viet Nam war. The details of the lives of the people involved with Simulmatics were enlightening with respect to their objectives and the failure of their premature attempt to predict social behavior. The book is lacking a detailed description of the methods they used, so the connection to present deep-learning algorithms is speculative. I would have liked to see more depth in the technology itself. I guess that is a subject to be addressed by another author, one with a more technical background.

No one book can cover a subject as complex as recent social-technological-economic-political trends, with so much data available to the researcher, so this work shouldn’t be treated as definitive by any means. However, by coincidence I have read a couple of other books that give a more complete picture of important events that contributed significantly to the world we live in.

For anyone interested in recent U.S. history I recommend this book, as well as Palo Alto and The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.

I like the tone of these recent histories, which are replete with facts, but written to be read.