Lydia Conwell 
This is really worth a listen.
How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
https://www.cityarts.net/event/jill-lepore-2/
#JillLepore #Simulmatics #PsychologicalWarfare #Privacy #Surveillance #Manipulation
via @dredmorbius
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕Jill Lepore on the link between WWII Psychological Warfare and Mass Communications
A lot of [psychologists] worked both in the study of voting behaviour in the US and in the study of propaganda in third-world countries trying to prevent them from becomming Communist.
Those things are closely related. They’re both the study of how you get inside someone’s head and change their mind? You have to know what they’re thinking, what you want them to think, and then you have to figure out what message will move them from what they’re thinking now to what you want them to think. This used to be called “psychological warfare”, and after the 2nd World War people were like, we shouldn’t call it that any more, we’ll call it “the study of mass communications”.
-- Jill Lepore, 2020
https://www.cityarts.net/event/jill-lepore-2/
Transcription by me, edited lightly for clarity / continuity.
#JillLepore #Simulmatics #SimulmaticsCorporation #Psywar #PsychologicalWarfare #MassCommunications #MassMedia #AdTech #Facebook #Google #SiliconValley #Privacy #Surveillance #Propaganda #Manipulation #Monopoly
रञ्जित (Ranjit Mathew)On #Simulmatics and using #DataMining for targeting #voters in #elections in the #US:
"Simulating Democracy", The New York Review Of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/simulating-democracy/).
#Book #BookReview #Politics #Profiling #SocialMedia #Campaigning #Advertising #Facebook #CambridgeAnalytica
Simulating Democracy
Jill Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and her new book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future is a remarkable saga, sometimes comical, sometimes ominous: a “shadow history of the 1960s,” as she writes, because Simulmatics stumbled through the decade as a bit player, onstage for the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the riots and protests. It began with grand ambitions to invent a new kind of predictive behavioral science, in a research environment increasingly tied to a rising defense establishment amid the anxiety of the cold war. It ended ignominiously, in embarrassment and bankruptcy.