If Then Quotes

“And yet Simulmatics’ legacy endures in predictive analytics, what-if simulation, and behavioral data science: it lurks behind the screen of every device. Simulmatics, notwithstanding its own failure, helped invent the data-mad and near-totalitarian twenty-first century, in which the only knowledge that counts is prediction and, before and after the coming of the coronavirus, corporations extract wealth by way of the collection of data and the manipulation of attention and the profit of prophecy. In a final irony, Simulmatics, whose very past has been all but erased, helped invent a future obsessed with the future, and yet unable to improve it.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“It seems to me unthinkable that a man with his background of slander, abuse, innuendo, expediency and resort to all the most devious political devices should ever occupy an office which we have tried for generations to exalt in the esteem of young people and the world,”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future

“But by 1904 the Times, like other big-city papers, had all sorts of ways of telling its readers about the outcomes, as soon as the numbers were in. On Election Night, it broadcast the results from its building in New York by way of searchlights that could be seen for thirty miles, as if the building itself had become a lighthouse. Steady light to the west meant a Republican victory in the presidential race, steady light to the east a Democratic one; flashing lights in different combinations broadcast the winners of congressional and gubernatorial races. This is what’s meant by a news “flash.”4”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he said, and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Morgan loved Stevenson. He also pegged him, exactly: “He was a Henry James character in a Joseph Heller world.”8”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Computers learning language and following rules for behavior are a lot like infants acquiring intelligence and figuring out how to be a person, a similarity that appears to have been entirely lost on the men who studied behavioral science and artificial intelligence in the 1950s.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“I am skeptical of people whose God is testing. —Sylvia Plath to her mother, 1960”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Every four years, the country stages a large-scale experiment in political propaganda and public opinion,”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“The American public believes that it ‘chooses’ the Party candidates for the Presidency and then makes a free and sovereign choice between the two candidates,” Burdick would later write. “This is hardly an accurate description of what happens. The American public believes it is sovereign. It is not.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“RAND had hired a pioneer in psychological warfare to head its new Social Science Division.26 Its projects included charting, mathematically, “a general theory of the future.”27”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“During the Second World War, he founded a war communications research project at the Library of Congress and recommended that the United States preserve democracy from authoritarianism by way of systematic, government-run mass manipulation.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY,” read the headline.31 The UNIVAC would stay in Philadelphia—it was too big to move—but in New York, CBS would install a fake, a console lit, from the inside, by a string of Christmas lights. The first computer most Americans ever saw was an empty shell: a stunt.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“I think of a man in the voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drugstore,” Reeves explained. “The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people,” James Madison warned in 1787.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who ran a California company called Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the history of the world.9 They’d opened shop in 1933, chiefly running political campaigns for Republican candidates. For a long time, they’d taken only California clients. But beginning in 1949, they’d engaged in a national campaign, and they’d won: retained by the American Medical Association, they’d defeated a national health insurance plan proposed by the Democratic president, Harry S. Truman”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“tax”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future

“Simulacra and Simulation, a metatext about the meaningless “hell of simulation.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“Simulmatics died. The fantasy of predicting human behavior by way of machines did not. Instead, it took new forms, forms that depended on forgetting that Simulmatics had ever existed.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future

“Vietnamese men, women, and children were dying, starving, being shot, bombed, burned, and napalmed. American soldiers were being shipped home in boxes, coffins, and bags. And the U.S. government was paying an Upper West Side Freudian analyst to explain that the Vietnamese, as a people, had Oedipal issues.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

“In 1952, Republicans spent $1.5 million on television advertising to the Democrats’ puny $77,000.”
― Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future