A little-known company creates a technology that uses vast amounts of data to profile voters and offers it to a party during a big election year. The year is 1960 — not 2016. And that company is the subject of Harvard historian Jill Lepore's new book.
It's a big election year, and one party's candidate is the successor to a popular two-term president. A little-known company offers the other party, which is in disarray, technology that uses vast amounts of data to profile voters. The election is incredibly close — and the longshot candidate wins.
Simulmatics, she argues, is"a missing link in the history of technology," the antecedent to Facebook, Google and Amazon and to algorithms that attempt to forecast who will commit crimes or get good grades."It lurks behind the screen of every device," she writes.presents Simulmatics as both ahead of its time and, more often than not, overpromising and under-delivering.
The company ended up producing three reports for the Kennedy campaign, although it's unclear how much impact its work had. Many of its recommendations were"fairly commonplace political wisdom among his close circle of advisers," Lepore reports, like suggesting Kennedy address anti-Catholic prejudice head-on."There's a lot of bluster and nonsense in the archival trail left behind by flimflam men," she notes.
Soon, Simulmatics went to Vietnam, thanks to the political connections of another co-founder, Ithiel de Sola Pool, an MIT political scientist whose research interests included groundbreaking work on social networks. In Saigon, the Pentagon gave the company a contract to evaluate its counterinsurgency efforts to win the"hearts and minds"of the Vietnamese population.
At the same time, she braids in the larger context: the fracturing of the Democratic party over the civil rights movement, the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the upheaval of the anti-war movement on college campuses, the shattering impact of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the death of mid-century liberal idealism.
And so we keep looking to technology to predict the future, in political polling, in academic data science programs, in Silicon Valley start-ups. Today, Lepore reports, the"predictive analytics" market is worth $4.6 billion dollars.
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