The Simulmatics Corporation
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2020
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jill Lepore joined me on the podcast to discuss The Simulmatics Corporation. Founded in 1959, it mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, welcome to Ann Snow's history at such an important podcast today. We've got |
| 0:04.1 | one of the most brilliant historians writing at the moment, or speaking at the moment, or being |
| 0:08.0 | the moment, Jill LePore. She is a professor at Harvard University. She has her own podcast, |
| 0:14.4 | the last archive. She's won prizes, and you'll see why. She's written a book about the |
| 0:19.9 | Simulmatics Corporation. How they invented the future, or certainly attempt to invent the future. |
| 0:25.3 | How they used this new machine, a computer back in the 1960s, to try and analyse data about us |
| 0:32.8 | people in order to sell us things, change the way we vote, understand us, and change our behaviour. |
| 0:39.6 | It is the history of technology that the tech giants do not want to talk about and refuse to |
| 0:46.8 | acknowledge. If you want to go and watch shows about American history, we've got plenty of them |
| 0:49.9 | on history hit TV. Use the code pod1pod1 because you're a podcast listener. And then you get |
| 0:55.1 | a month for free, and then your second month is just one pound-year-old dollar. So you can binge |
| 0:59.2 | all of that historical content. We've got lots of US history on there. Lots and lots of podcasts |
| 1:03.9 | about US history and electoral politics. So please, please go and check it out. But in the meantime, |
| 1:08.3 | everyone here is Jill LePore. |
| 1:17.9 | Jill, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Oh, happy to be here. Your book is so remarkable. |
| 1:22.4 | Tell everyone about the Simulmatics Court. So the Simulmatics Court was a pioneering data analytics |
| 1:27.2 | company founded in 1959. It went bankrupt in 1970. But in those short 11 years, it tried out pretty |
| 1:34.2 | much everything that is now done today by every major company that uses data, gathers data, |
| 1:40.4 | and uses algorithms to make predictions about human behaviour. So they worked in all of the |
| 1:46.2 | different realms that this kind of work is now done. They generally didn't succeed in any of those |
| 1:51.8 | realms, because there just wasn't enough data to do the work. And also computing speed wasn't |
| 1:56.0 | obviously anywhere near what it is now. And they didn't have machine learning. I mean, there were a |
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