The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge―decades before Facebook, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk―or so argues the author in this account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

Prologue: What if? -- The social network. Madly for Adlai ; Impossible man ; The quiet American ; Artificial intelligence ; Project Macroscope -- The people machine. The IBM president ; Billion-dollar brain ; Fail-safe -- The four-eighty -- Hearts and minds. Armies of the night ; The things they carried ; The fire next time ; An octoputer ; The Mood Corporation -- Epilogue: More data.