If Then is a fascinating and flawed account of how Simulmatics, a pioneering market research team, prefigured much of contemporary concerns around big data and surveillance capitalism, while failing in almost every venture it embarked on. Lepore bounces between her primary protagonists and the great events that they failed to substantially influence or capitalize on to paint a picture of the 60s as a decade when a utopian dream of technocratic moderation became a nightmare of simulated insanity.

Ed Greenfeld, the founder of Simulmatics, was a Madison Avenue ad man and backslapping hustlers, who frustrated at the perennial failure of his favored candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, teamed up with social scientists in the nascent fields of behavioral science to create an election in a box, a computerized data model that would give a cannier Democrat an oraclucular advantage. The first few reports went to the Kennedy campaign in the summer of 1960 suggested that he should embrace civil rights and Catholicism; that the votes of racists and anti-Catholics had already been lost, and he could shore up support among African-Americans and non-bigots. Kennedy famously won by a narrow margin. An article in Harper's Magazine by Thomas Morgan sold Simulmatics as a magic people machine that gave the Kennedy campaign strategic insights (Morgan would shortly join the company), but Simulmatics proved best at selling itself, and failed to land subsequent opportunities.

Madison Avenue was rightfully skeptical of the shoddy data bases and under theorized models of consumer behavior. An attempt to use computers to model the 1964 election in near real time for the New York Times collapsed under a tidal waves of bugs and lack of technical experience with actual IBM mainframes. The most successful project was an expansion to Saigon, to try and simulate how communist insurgencies could be defeated, but Simulmatics was never more than a tertiary player in McNamara's data-driven war. After failing to deliver on an expensive contract, their efforts were cancelled by ARPA.

Meanwhile, the personnelle of Simulmatics imploded in their own way. Ed Greenfeld sunk into alcoholism. Mathematician Bill McPhee was committed to an insane asylum for a time, and then mostly failed to deal with his bipolar disorder. Political scientist/novelist Eugene Burdick (The Ugly American, among other didactic 60s political thrillers) used his insider access to skewer the company in his 1964 novel The 480, a reference to the 480 identified categories of people in the Simulmatics database. Burdick died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Ithial de Sola Pool, a Trotskyite turned ardent cold warrior, pushed Simulmatics ever closer to the defense establishment, while fighting the rising peace movement in American universities. Everybody's marriage fell apart.

A last gasp at predicting urban race riots collapsed in 1968, and Simulmatics suffered an undignified bankruptcy in 1970. Ithiel de Sola Pool had the longest successful career, serving as a neoconservative prophet of the nascent internet until his death in 1984. Much like cybernetics, another trendy 1950s computerized synthesis, Simulmatics abilities never matched its ambitions. Yet, as Lepore shows, the concerns raised then are the same as our current concerns around Facebook, face news, information warfare, and all that postmodern jazz. Nothing is new under the sun, except in 2021 computers are fast enough and data models rich enough that it actually works.

Lepore ably blends the "Mad Men but real" flawed personalities with the great events of this time, but I wish she'd been a little more detailed as an intellectual and technical historian. I'm a lover of obsolete ideas and obsolete machines, and I'd have liked a little more detail on how it worked. Still, a fascinating book on a mostly forgotten group of visionaries.