Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate's army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine.

Ignorance of history is a badge of honour in Silicon Valley. "The only thing that matters is the future," self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski told The New Yorker in 20181. Levandowski, formerly of Google, Uber and Google's autonomous-vehicle subsidiary Waymo (and recently sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets), is no outlier. The gospel of'disruptive innovation' depends on the abnegation of history2. 'Move fast and break things' was Facebook's motto. Another word for this is heedlessness. And here are a few more: negligence, foolishness and blindness.

A collection of current and past presidential advertising materials hang on a wall in November in the visitor center of the New Hampshire State House in Concord, N.H. A collection of current and past presidential advertising materials hang on a wall in November in the visitor center of the New Hampshire State House in Concord, N.H. Decades before Google or Facebook existed, a Madison Avenue advertising man started a company called Simulmatics based on a then-revolutionary method of using computers to forecast how people would behave. Formed in 1959, Simulmatics charged clients a hefty fee to access its "people machine" -- a computer program that drew on polling information and behavioral science to predict mathematically the impact of an advertising pitch or political message. The New Yorker's Jill Lepore writes about Simulmatics in her new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.

It's a big election year, and one party's candidate is the successor to a popular two-term president. A little-known company offers the other party, which is in disarray, technology that uses vast amounts of data to profile voters. The election is incredibly close -- and the longshot candidate wins. This was 1960, not 2016, and the winning ticket was John F. Kennedy, not Donald Trump. The little-known -- and now nearly entirely forgotten -- company was called Simulmatics, the subject of Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's timely new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.