I'm sorry but if the review comment on the front cover is blatantly wrong, it does not exactly set the tone for a good book. It says "Hilarious, scathing and sobering....". There is not even one slightly hilarious snippet in the whole book. In fact, it is one of a number of clues that indicate the book seems to have been rushed to publication before it was ready.
It is sometimes a fascinating but overall a flawed book about the company she says “invented the future”. Her attempt to use Simulmatics as a parable for and precursor to “the data-mad and near-totalitarian 21st century” is hamstrung by the fact that it failed at almost everything it tried to do — often times spectacularly so.
Despite Lepore’s repeated references to the Simulmatics team as “the best and the brightest,” the group that Greenfield assembled was, well, not that. They were rather a group of extremely unlikeable and immoral people who bluffed and conned their way into contract after contract and never produced the goods. To say that Simulmatics set the stage for the modern data gatherers and interpreters like Facebook, Google, etc, is stretching things too far for me.
Ok, it was interesting to trace the development of social science methodologies (specifically predictive analytics) through the 1950s and 1960s, as the process finally came of age with the help of computers, but the book was a boring read that meandered back and forth, often repeating itself and never making much of an impact as it went. The stupidity of the organisations and governments who gave them their contacts and the poor way the contacts were handled led to the inevitable demise of a company that did little if any good during its 11 years of life.
Good riddance to a bunch of scheisters.
Not recommended for reading. Save your time and energy.
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