Before Google and Facebook

Book review of If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

In late December 1960, Harper’s Magazine hit the newsstands with a story by a freelancer named Thomas Morgan: John F Kennedy’s razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon the previous month had been orchestrated by a top-secret computer called the “People Machine.” This mysterious device, which had been invented by an equally mysterious company called the Simulmatics Corporation, had, according to Harper’s, concluded that taking a firm stand on civil rights and confronting anti-Catholic bigotry directly, both of which Kennedy did, would help the young senator from Massachusetts win the presidency. 

In a period of rising anxiety about both communist brainwashing and automation,