A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia - but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn't have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It's as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can't put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can't stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently.

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.

Today the United States crumbles under the weight of two pandemics: coronavirus and police brutality. Both wreak physical and psychological violence. And both are animated by technology that we design, repurpose, and deploy--whether it's contact tracing, facial recognition, or social media. We often call on technology to help solve problems. But when society defines, frames, and represents people of color as "the problem," those solutions often do more harm than good.