Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020)

From James Gleick, New York Review of Books: “Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and this one is a remarkable saga, sometimes comical, sometimes ominous: a “shadow history of the 1960s,” as she writes…. Lepore finds in it a plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behavior―including, most insidiously, our behavior as voters…. It didn’t have to be this way. That is Lepore’s final message: history is not inevitable.”