0:15

Pushkin. Imagine

0:20

there's a place in our world where the known things

0:22

go, shelves

0:24

stocked with proof, and all around a

0:26

clutter of clues. At this

0:28

point, it's worse than a clutter. It's

0:31

closer to chaos. On

0:33

the mantel, there's a clock. Its hands are racing,

0:36

its works, ticking too fast. It's

0:38

like a heart about to burst. A

0:41

phonograph won't stop. And

0:44

who let all these birds in? It's

0:48

time to get out of here. Rush

0:50

through the door and out

0:52

into a cornfield in the middle of

0:54

Illinois in the year nineteen thirty nine,

0:57

the American heartland.

1:01

Holy

1:03

wow, they've got an explosion in the

1:05

cornfield. Who

1:13

the devil himself broke a loose down

1:16

in our cornfield? He came a roar

1:18

and a rampagron right up from the fiery

1:20

pit, blowing smoke out of his mouth and fire

1:22

out of his eyes. What is

1:25

going on? Pulpe science

1:27

fiction? Is what? This is? A bananas

1:29

story called The Warning from the Past.

1:32

Not enough trouble to have the radio

1:34

st client his full head off right in

1:36

the middle of my favorite program.

1:39

The Warning from the Past was published in the magazine

1:41

Thrilling Wonder Stories in nineteen

1:44

thirty nine. Here's what happens. After

1:46

the explosion in the cornfield. The farmer's

1:49

wife calls the police. The reporters

1:51

call scientists. The scientists discovered

1:53

that the explosion had come from

1:56

a gigantic time capsule. It

2:03

is buried twenty feet under

2:05

the ground, constructed of rust

2:07

resistant metal. The size

2:09

cannot be determined as yet, but

2:12

it is at least thirty feet in

2:14

diameter. The top of the

2:16

capsule was blown off by an explosion.

2:19

Apparently the light, the smoke,

2:22

and the radio signals were designed

2:24

to call attention to the time capsule.

2:28

I guess the people who built the time capsule were

2:30

worried that unless the thing literally blew its

2:32

top off, known would ever notice it

2:34

was there? Who will be left unopened

2:37

its mysteries Unknown myths

2:40

and legends surviving from

2:42

pre primitive times indicate

2:44

that a civilization may have existed

2:47

on Earth prior to the present,

2:50

but this is the first definite

2:52

proof of their existence ever found.

2:57

In the story, a group of brave men prior

2:59

open the time capsule's giant door and

3:01

make their way inside. Their

3:06

entrance triggers a projector and a film

3:08

starts playing it turns

3:10

out that the time capsule was built by ancient

3:13

Earthlings after their planet was invaded

3:15

by aliens. They made this little film

3:17

about what happened to them, and then they buried it

3:19

in a time capsule. I first ran

3:21

across this story Warning from the Past in

3:24

January twenty twenty. I was really

3:26

into the time Capsule, so goofy.

3:28

But there was another part of the plot that didn't seem

3:30

as important to me at the time. It's this The

3:33

aliens didn't destroy the Earthlings with lasers

3:36

or ray guns. Now they let loose

3:38

a virus, the common cold, a

3:40

coronavirus, and everyone died.

3:43

Time Capsule indeed, welcome

3:48

to the Last Archive. They show about how we know what

3:50

we know and why it seems lately as if we don't

3:52

know anything at all. This is the

3:54

last episode of the season. All along,

3:57

I've been making an argument about the history of evidence,

4:00

arguing that our elemental unit of knowledge

4:02

has changed from mysteries to facts,

4:04

to numbers to data. But the age

4:06

of data is also a return to the age of miss,

4:09

a world in which we can't know anything. Only

4:12

machines can know things, mysterious

4:15

godlike machines. All

4:17

season long I've been trying to figure out who killed

4:20

truth, what a time capsules

4:22

have to do with it. Weirdly, they're

4:24

a clue to me as a historian.

4:27

Chronology is like gravity a law.

4:30

A time capsule tries to break that law.

4:32

That's like a rocket from the past blasted

4:34

into the future by being buried in the ground.

4:37

Sometimes I get the feeling we're all trapped

4:39

in someone else's time capsule. In

4:51

nineteen thirty nine, the world seemed to be coming

4:53

apart. The world was coming

4:56

apart. Pulp science fiction

4:58

aliens from outer space would have been a relief

5:00

compared to what was actually happening. Germany

5:03

has invaded Poland and has

5:05

bombed many times. General

5:08

mobiliza has been ordered in Britain

5:10

and France. It felt unreal,

5:13

dream like a nightmare. But

5:15

over in the United States, in New York, the

5:18

World's Fare was opening a

5:20

fair called the World of Tomorrow.

5:23

The World's Fair was held on hundreds of acres

5:26

and queens. There were all kinds

5:28

of exhibits, Mainly they involved

5:30

traveling to the future. You could visit

5:32

Democracity, a sort of imagined

5:34

Jetson style city of the Future, the

5:37

Future of Democracy, the

5:39

nation's foremost companies present

5:41

the magic of today that paves

5:43

the way while the miracles of tomorrow.

5:47

Or you could check out preparations for a time

5:49

capsule, the kind of thing that inspired

5:51

that thrilling wonder story. We've

5:53

been reading a lot about the time capsule.

5:55

Could we take a look at it? Why? Sure, we

5:57

can get to it this way.

6:00

Time Capsule of Cupola deposited

6:03

on the side of the New York World's Fair

6:06

on September twenty third, nineteen thirty

6:08

eight, by the Westinghouse Electric

6:10

and Manufacturing Company. If

6:13

anyone should come upon this capsule

6:15

before the year A. D. Sixty

6:17

nine thirty nine, let him not wanting

6:20

they disturb it, or to do so

6:22

would be to deprive the people of that era

6:25

of a legacy here left them. This

6:27

weirdness is a scene from a promotional film

6:29

about the World's Fair, in which in all American

6:32

family visits the world of tomorrow. The

6:35

time capsule down there is actually a message

6:37

from our time to those those

6:39

who opened and study it. Will they're more about us than

6:41

any man living today. Well, what I'm wondering

6:44

is how anybody will know how to find it in the year

6:46

What was he sixty nine thirty nine.

6:51

Not quite in sixty nine thirty nine, but

6:54

in the last quarantine free days

6:56

of twenty twenty, I headed out to Queens

6:58

to look for the time capsule buried there in

7:00

nineteen thirty nine. What

7:03

did the people who buried it mean to say about the world

7:05

of tomorrow? Could we go back

7:07

in time and heed that war from the past?

7:10

I went with my producer Ben and with Olivia

7:12

Oldham, who works for the podcast. We

7:14

had an appointment with Liz Sevchenko, a historian

7:17

of New York and of memory. She's

7:19

the director of the Humanity's Action Lab. Anyway,

7:22

if you've seen Men in Black, you've seen the

7:24

place where we met, where Will

7:27

Smith got vomited back out in a

7:29

giant spray of demon

7:32

goo. The sight

7:34

of the nineteen thirty nine World Tomorrow. It's

7:36

pretty close to LaGuardia Airport. It's

7:38

got all these remnants of the fair, these monumental,

7:41

huge rusting structures, gigantic

7:43

abandon spires, a massive

7:45

metal sphere. It looks

7:47

like a graveyard of the future. We're

7:50

also really close too, as I understand

7:52

it. Fact check please, but the you

7:55

know, birthplace of our dear President

7:57

so this is like where it all started, yea

8:02

of the future exactly when

8:05

Donald Trump was born near here in nineteen

8:08

forty six. His father, Fred was the

8:10

owner of a construction business in Queens.

8:12

The Trump's had gotten married in nineteen thirty six,

8:14

and by the time The World Tomorrow opened they

8:16

already had two kids. Probably they

8:18

came to the fair. Fred Trump rented

8:21

a giant billboard near the fair for his Trump

8:23

homes. It called them the Home

8:26

of Tomorrow. When

8:28

I tell people I'm working on a podcast that asks

8:30

the question who killed truth, they

8:33

usually say, isn't the answer

8:35

obvious? The murderer is Donald Trump?

8:38

Okay, fair, But all

8:40

season long I've been avoiding the usual

8:43

suspects. I think they're just a little too

8:45

easy. Also, I don't quite

8:47

buy it. I think Trump might be

8:49

a red herring. God knows, the

8:51

man's a liar, a colossal,

8:53

dangerous liar. But it takes

8:55

a whole lot more than one man to undermine

8:57

an entire system of knowledge.

9:00

Anyway, we had a different mission

9:02

in Queens. Find that time capsule,

9:05

I think you need to ask. I mean, there was a very

9:08

understated, little sort of like

9:11

memorial looking thing back

9:13

there. I don't know if we've a

9:16

was it like a cylinder or like a low silm like every

9:19

stump. Yes, we'd asked

9:21

Sevchenko along to help us think about memorials

9:23

and monuments and whether they contain

9:25

truth or really just containers

9:28

of myths. She's written brilliantly

9:30

about that stuff. We also

9:32

thought she could probably help us find the time capsule.

9:35

Not that that bolder thing, but like

9:37

where those bushes are. Okay,

9:39

wait, this is it.

9:43

It's like a flattened smushed

9:46

something like if it were an obelisk

9:48

that a giant stepped on and

9:50

it went splat. It feels

9:52

kind of self defeating because if you want something to be

9:54

found five thousand years in the future,

9:57

why would you make it so low key and

9:59

everything else about it. I shouldn't be like a giant

10:01

space needle spike putting out of

10:03

it. Yeah, it's like a kind of dimple or

10:06

like a nipple on the top of this pine. It looks like it's

10:08

a button. Should be able to press it rise

10:11

out like a coffee maker or something. If we press

10:13

and just ruin the whole, there's

10:16

like a lip or what's

10:18

the opposite of a lip, because like there's

10:21

a little gutter underneath, right, Maybe

10:23

that's where you're supposed to fry from.

10:28

I'd break my nails, honey, I'm not gonna do that.

10:32

If you went to the World's Fair in nineteen thirty

10:34

nine, you could see some of the contents of the time

10:37

capsule behind a big glass display.

10:40

Who stuff the logical illage in a committee?

10:43

Aided by a thought? He's in every field of science

10:45

on the os. It's a complete record

10:47

of our civilization. A complete

10:50

record of our civilization, brought

10:52

to you by Westinghouse. Section

10:54

one. Small articles of common use alarm

10:57

clock, can opener, eyeglasses,

11:00

bifocals, fountain pen, Mazda

11:03

electric lamp, mechanical pencil,

11:05

miniature camera, nail file,

11:08

padlocking keys, and a safety food.

11:11

I like the lamp socket. They

11:13

have an electrical lamp socket there.

11:15

It was just like outside the context of a house.

11:17

How are you ever going to figure out what that was? For? Our

11:20

guide in Queens Lives of Chenko direct

11:23

some of the world's most powerful public memory projects.

11:26

Our project about American prisons called States

11:28

of Incarceration, another called

11:30

the Guantanamo Public Memory Project. After

11:33

I read the list of the Time Capsule's contents. She

11:36

got this look on her face. I

11:38

just think, I mean, there's this weird sense

11:40

in which they're speaking to an ignorant

11:43

future population, like assuming

11:46

they don't know anything, and they're so excited

11:48

to like educate them. It struck

11:50

us all as a weird and creepy kind of arrogance.

11:53

We just couldn't puzzle the thing out. It

11:55

was also strange that it had so few markings.

11:58

We kept looking for text, a plaque,

12:00

anything, Oh what is

12:02

that? Oh?

12:07

I can't read it. It

12:10

says, I think it's

12:12

the stamp of the granite, the

12:15

you know, the it's a company

12:17

symbol of westings I think it's either

12:19

the Westinghouse or the concrete. It does look like that's

12:21

a W though I think it's

12:24

no. It says Rock of

12:31

Right, you

12:36

can see what the Rock

12:38

of Ages. There's

12:39

a go, this is the

12:42

Rock of Ages. Holy Moses.

12:45

This season started in episode one with a

12:47

crime scene in Barry, Vermont, a place

12:49

whose best known quarry is called the Rock

12:51

of Ages. And Jesus turned

12:53

out that they'd supplied the granite that made

12:55

the lid to close the time capsule. Now

12:58

we'd left the last archive. We

13:00

were in the Twilight Zone. Honestly,

13:05

it really freaked me out. The Rock of

13:07

Ages is the name of the quarry, but it's

13:10

also the title of an eighteenth century hymn, The

13:12

Rock of Ages is Jesus

13:14

Christ, so

13:19

weird. Also, I haven't talked

13:21

very much about religion in this podcast, but a

13:24

certain feeling just then as we read the

13:26

words Rock of Ages engraved

13:28

into stone, that feeling that some

13:30

unknown and mysterious forces in control

13:32

of our lives for better or worse.

13:35

That feeling is how humans came to believe in gods,

13:38

Zeus, Saphrodite, Mars in

13:40

the coronavirus crisis. That feelings

13:43

everywhere. We

13:45

left Queens and Tomorrowland for

13:47

the origins of another future in

13:49

the Valley of the Gods,

13:51

Silicon Valley. It's

14:07

like we could be being pulled by also right

14:09

now, except

14:12

it would sail then. I actually think we

14:18

In February of twenty twenty, we went

14:20

to California. It was a few weeks

14:22

before the whole state shutdown, shelter in place,

14:24

locked down, before people were even

14:26

talking about those things, we were blissfully

14:29

ignorant. We rented a car, got

14:31

on the highway, me and my producer Ben

14:33

and my son Oliver go West. Young

14:35

man. Oliver is fifteen,

14:37

Cherry read twenty seventeen Camaro

14:40

convertible top down,

14:42

of course, chrome wheels.

14:45

It was Oliver's birthday, and so I

14:47

rented a car that is exactly not the right

14:49

car for a podcast. But

14:52

Oliver had never been to California. What

14:54

are your impressions of California?

14:57

Um, it's beautiful. It looks exactly

14:59

like it did in Watchdogs Too. Every

15:03

street go down, Oliver says, I've already

15:05

driven down the street. I've driven down here, guns

15:07

blazing. Watch

15:10

Dogs Too is a video game set in a

15:12

perfect stimulation of the city of San Francisco.

15:16

Playing watch Dogs Too, you're part of an elite

15:18

crew of hackers who are trying to catch the

15:20

guy who killed Truth. Its

15:23

plot is disturbingly like ours at the

15:25

last archive. In the video game.

15:27

The guy who kills Truth is basically Mark

15:29

Zuckerberg, the head of a Silicon Valley

15:31

data company called Bloom Bloom

15:34

CTOs, is like a giant spider whim

15:36

endlessly gathering data. They're making

15:38

backroom deals to trade our private information.

15:41

We have to stop this. We're talking

15:44

data manipulation on a massive scale,

15:46

ricked elections, weapons programs,

15:49

spying into people's homes, all

15:51

of it controlled by one man. Whenever

15:53

I told anyone I was working on a podcast that was trying

15:56

to find out who killed Truth, almost

15:58

everyone's first answer was Donald

16:00

Trump, and almost everyone's second

16:02

answer was Mark Zuckerberg. And fair

16:04

enough. He's an obvious suspect, though, so

16:07

I've been avoiding him too easy. I

16:09

mean, he's the villain in a video game, for

16:11

Christ's sakes. Anyway, when

16:14

my son Oliver plays Watchdogs Too, he

16:16

has to drive simulated fast cars all

16:18

over a simulated San Francisco. And

16:20

here I was taking him on a trip, a birthday

16:22

trip to a thrilling new city. But everywhere

16:25

we went he would be all, oh, yeah,

16:27

I've been here. There's a donut shop on the next block,

16:30

and there would be this looks literally exactly

16:32

Save's Watchops. Mom. I'm gonna have you play some Washdogs

16:35

later. Okay. I look

16:37

at California. I don't see the superimposed

16:39

dystopia of Watchdogs Too. No,

16:42

I'm too old for that future. My

16:44

California future, the one stuck in my mind

16:47

comes straight from the Monorail and Disneyland

16:50

and it done. It's way now, leaving frontier

16:52

Land at going one hundred years into the

16:54

future to tomorrow Land.

17:00

That's Ronald Reagan at the opening of Disneyland

17:03

in nineteen fifty five. The

17:05

nineteen thirty nine World's Fair was nothing compared

17:07

to its successor. While Disneys Tomorrowland

17:10

built at the height of the Cold War. The future

17:13

as a space age future is an invention

17:15

of the Cold War because Cold War scientists

17:18

understood themselves as engaged in

17:20

a battle for the future. Would capitalism

17:23

prevail or communism? Only

17:25

science could tell. If scientists

17:27

could predict the future, then they could

17:29

build it. Yes, this

17:31

is Tomorrowland, and it's not a stylized

17:34

dream of the future, but a scientifically planned

17:36

projection of future techniques by

17:39

leading space experts and science.

17:41

You find yourself living predictions

17:44

of things to come. A

17:47

lot of Tomorrowlands popped up in California

17:49

in the nineteen fifties, not just the one at Disneyland.

17:52

California was like a future factory, full

17:55

of think tanks charged with coming up with a

17:57

general theory of the future, psychologists,

18:00

political scientists. They were trying to predict

18:02

human behavior by way of endless computer

18:04

simulations by the middle

18:07

of the nineteen fifties. When people pictured there,

18:09

they usually pictured computers, and they usually

18:12

pictured California, where the computer industry

18:14

was born. So we

18:16

drove our cherry red Camaro down Highway

18:18

one oh one to the Computer History Museum.

18:21

It's in Mountain View, a couple of blocks from the Google

18:23

Blox, not too far from Facebook. We

18:26

went into museum not to look at old computers,

18:28

but to use them.

18:31

So now I'm going to hit load and

18:33

it's going to start reading the cards. That's

18:46

the sound of those little shoes

18:49

or knips grabbing the cards and sliding

18:51

them in. Carl Claunch is

18:53

a volunteer at the Computer History Museum. He

18:55

was showing us a punch card reader that's part of an IBM

18:57

fourteen oh one, a computer first

19:00

manufactured in nineteen fifty nine. This

19:02

computer is the size of a room, a big

19:04

room, say, an elementary school classroom.

19:07

I asked Claunch, what school it's thought when

19:09

they visited it? Do they recognize

19:11

this as a computer? Like? Are they just baffled

19:14

by it? Yeah? That they The docents

19:16

have to tell a story that takes them

19:18

back to the nineteen fifties and they're

19:20

constantly contrasting it. So, for

19:22

example, there's a piece

19:24

of core memory that's used to speed

19:27

up the printer, and it's entire

19:29

contents of this big block or one tweet.

19:31

Yeah, it's sort of like Honey, I shrunk the kids. Like

19:33

opposite, it's like Honey, I enlarged

19:36

the computer, like it's actually a thing they know

19:38

about, but blown up to this

19:40

giant proportion, like we're

19:42

a little Fusians, we're inside a computer.

19:45

Like the idea of using like a reference from the

19:47

early two thousands, or really in the nineteen nineties

19:49

to explain a machine from the nineteen sixties

19:51

to kids in it

19:55

wasn't Carl

19:58

Clenched. He's a sweetheart, and he's also

20:00

very modest, but he's much more than a volunteer

20:02

at the museum. Carl computer

20:04

archaeologist. I don't

20:07

have my hat. Bunch

20:09

had done a whole lot of the work getting this computer from nineteen

20:11

fifty nine up and running. In his garage,

20:13

he's got an old punch card reader that can handle

20:15

punch cards that are bent and even a little tattered.

20:18

And as it happens, I had some old,

20:21

screwed up punch cards that needed reading. If

20:26

you've ever punched in at work, like I used to do,

20:28

that's a punch card. Their papers

20:30

the size of a business on flope, popped up

20:33

with tiny rectangular holes. Before

20:35

the cloud, before thumb drives, before hard

20:37

disks and floppy disks, they were punch cards.

20:40

He stored information for a computer by encoding

20:43

it in these tiny holes. We

20:45

can still read ancient parchments thousands

20:47

of years later, but old punch cards

20:49

are useless after just a few decades because

20:52

hardly anyone has the machines you need to read

20:54

them. The past is getting shorter and

20:56

shorter, and this matters to the work I

20:58

do as a historian. A

21:00

few years ago I found thousands of really interesting

21:03

punch cards. The cards were boxed in the

21:05

files of this one company, a very

21:07

early startup called the similar Madox

21:09

Corporation, and I was writing a book about

21:11

them. Simomatics was

21:13

founded in nineteen fifty nine, a

21:15

big year for computing. The name was

21:17

a mashup of simulation and automatic,

21:20

and Simomatics wound up being kind of

21:22

like the Cambridge Analytica of the presidential

21:25

election of nineteen sixty. MTS

21:27

Archives held the Symbiomatics punch cards, but

21:30

might couldn't read them, so they ended

21:32

up shipping the cards for me to the Computer History

21:34

Museum, where Carl ran them through his

21:36

ancient machine.

21:40

Here's the backstory on simiomatics, some

21:42

of what you've already heard if you've been a steadfast

21:44

listener to the last archive. He

21:47

might remember in episode five, how we talked

21:49

about the nineteen fifty two election, where

21:51

CBS hired a computer called Univac

21:53

to predict the results on election night. Well,

21:56

a Madison Avenue admin named Ed Greenfield,

21:59

learning about the UNIVAC, got the idea

22:01

of helping the candidate win an election by

22:03

building a massive computer simulation that

22:06

could predict how people would vote. And

22:08

then, four years later, in nineteen fifty

22:10

six, Greenfield got a contract from the Adlai

22:12

Stephenson campaign when Stephenson was

22:14

trying once again to beat Eisenhower,

22:17

a man who can believe

22:22

Ah yeah, Well, first, Stephenson

22:24

had to win the Democratic nomination, and

22:27

to do that he had to win the California primary,

22:29

a big state whose population was booming.

22:32

Greenfield hired a bunch of people in California,

22:34

including two political scientists, and

22:37

helped Stephenson win the state's primary

22:39

and then the nomination, but

22:41

he couldn't help Stephenson win the election.

22:44

As evening returns come in, the trend is unmistakable.

22:47

It's Eisenhower by a landslide with four

22:49

hundred and fifty seven electoral votes to

22:52

seventy four or Stephenson. The

22:54

admen and their computers couldn't save Adlai

22:57

Stevenson in nineteen fifty six, but

22:59

his loss didn't slow them down. Ed Greenfield

23:02

started gearing up for the election of nineteen sixty.

23:04

He hired people who'd done psychological warfare

23:07

for the military, driving people to traction

23:09

targeting messages, attention manipulation.

23:12

One of those guys was the mathematician Alex

23:15

Bernstein. There's a great film from nineteen

23:17

fifty nine called Thinking Machines.

23:20

What can we learn about Thinking from a game

23:22

of Chess? It shows a bespectacled

23:24

Bernstein playing chess against a room sized

23:26

computer. All it takes her some printers,

23:29

magnetic tape, and a chessboard.

23:31

Mister Bernstein and his collaborators

23:33

prepared a chess playing program for

23:35

the IBM seven O four, a

23:38

digital computer that has performed

23:40

one billion calculations in a single

23:43

day. It's never absent minded

23:45

and never makes an obvious plunder. Bernstein

23:48

helped create a field that became known as artificial

23:50

intelligence. For the presidential

23:53

campaign of nineteen sixty, he and

23:55

Ed Greenfield at Cymblematics, they

23:57

built this thing called a People Machine who

23:59

was programmed with punch cards in very early for

24:02

Tran, an ancient computer language.

24:05

There were data cards too. Each card

24:07

the cards I found in the archives. The cards

24:09

only Carl Quanch could now read. Each

24:11

represented an imaginary American

24:14

age, place of residence, economic

24:16

class, race, gender, political persuasion.

24:20

Here was a Similematox Company's vision of

24:22

the future. One day computers would

24:24

be able to predict human behavior and manipulate

24:26

it. There'd be a lot of money to be made. There'd

24:29

be a lot of power to accumulate. Greenfield

24:31

thought Dlea. Stevenson would run again in nineteen

24:33

sixty, and he wanted Stephenson to use

24:36

his People Machine. And here,

24:38

just here is a snag in the fabric of time.

24:41

First of all, Stephenson did not run

24:43

for a third time. He only almost

24:45

ran. But also some of the people

24:47

who got Greenfield's confidential memo about

24:50

the People Machine, they thought christ

24:52

On toast this thing should be illegal.

24:55

One of the people Greenfield sent this proposal too

24:57

was Stevenson's law partner, Newton Minnow.

25:00

Minnow is a really important person because he'd

25:02

go on to be the chairman of the FCC under

25:04

the Kennedy administration. Greenfield's

25:07

proposal freaked Minnow out. Dear

25:10

Arthur, do you remember ed

25:12

Greenfield? Minno wrote

25:14

a letter to the very eminent Pultzer Prize winning

25:16

Harvard historian Arthur Slessinger Junior

25:19

about Greenfield's dangerous idea. Without

25:21

prejudicing your judgment, my

25:24

own opinion is that such a thing

25:26

A cannot work, b is

25:28

immoral, c should be declared

25:31

illegal. Please advise

25:34

best regards, Newton n

25:36

Minnow. Slessinger wrote right back,

25:39

Dear Newt, I have pretty much

25:42

your feelings. I shudder at

25:44

the implications for public leadership

25:46

of the nation. On the other hand,

25:48

I do believe in science and don't

25:50

like to be a party to choking off new

25:52

ideas. Yours ever, Arthur

25:56

Slessinger, The People Machine,

25:58

needless to say, was not declared illegal.

26:01

It went ahead. The Democratic National

26:03

Committee hired Sineomatics, and when John

26:05

F. Kennedy won the nomination, the Kennedy

26:07

campaign hired Cineomatics and

26:09

then unexpectedly delayed climax

26:12

saw sent to Kennedy the victor with a clear

26:14

margin of Electromo vote. Years

26:17

and years later, I found symblematics

26:19

original punch cards, the punch cards

26:21

it used to simulate the nineteen sixty election.

26:24

I figured if I could read them, or rather

26:26

get Carl Claunch computer archaeologists

26:29

to read them, I could understand how this thing

26:31

worked and know whether it worked.

26:34

So Carl read the cards on his ancient

26:36

equipment. But we hit another snag.

26:38

We got the data off the cards, but then we couldn't

26:40

get the Fortran program to run. Knowledge

26:44

on computer's decays becomes obsolete.

26:47

You find your grandmother's photo albums in aerratic.

26:49

You can look at the photographs. You don't need a special

26:51

program. Will your grandchildren

26:54

never be able to see the photographs you've got stored on

26:56

your computer. Not likely, They'll

26:58

have been lost in a forgotten sludge of obsolete

27:00

file name extensions and hard drives

27:03

and operating systems and disused

27:05

connectors. There's a weird

27:07

foreshortening of history going on. I

27:09

think that's one reason people, or at least people

27:11

like me. Why would get obsessed with time

27:14

capsules? Everything just seems

27:16

to be slipping away all the time. If

27:19

data has replaced facts is the elemental

27:21

unit of knowledge. That's a problem,

27:24

because data it's unbelievably

27:26

shoddy. It just doesn't last

27:29

anyway. Even with my punch cards read,

27:31

I couldn't get the Symbiomatics program to run.

27:34

I was sad. But fortunately I

27:37

had more reliable and durable evidence than punch

27:39

cards. I had newspapers, stock

27:41

certificates, and letters, so I

27:44

was able to figure out what happened next.

27:46

John F. Kennedy settles into office as

27:48

a thirty fifth President of the United States,

27:51

the youngest man on the first Roman Catholic

27:53

ever elected to the office. After

27:55

Kennedy was inaugurated, Simiomatics went public

27:58

with a big, splashy vision for changing

28:00

the world. The company proposes to

28:02

engage principally in estimating

28:04

probable human behavior by the use of

28:06

computer technology. For this purpose,

28:09

it may utilize information derived from

28:11

public opinion polls and other sources

28:13

concerning the composition and attitudes of the

28:15

group understudy that summer.

28:18

Summer of nineteen sixty one, the scientists

28:20

of the Cymomatics Corporation met on a beach

28:22

on Long Island, where they worked beneath

28:24

a geodesic dome that looked as if

28:26

it had come from the future and crashed half

28:29

buried in the sand like a time capsule.

28:32

They were perfecting their people machine to

28:34

predict and manipulate all sorts of human

28:36

behavior, not just voting, but things

28:39

like buying a dishwasher too. The

28:42

scientists are preparing to work

28:45

with electronic computers the

28:47

Giant question answering devices

28:49

in use for some years, but are

28:52

using social and economic

28:54

data and their own knowledge to

28:56

work out new programs for computer

28:59

simulation. Facebook,

29:03

Palenteer, Amazon, the Internet

29:05

research agency Google. It's

29:07

as if each of these companies emerged

29:10

out of that time capsule that was buried so

29:12

long ago by the scientists of the Sinemomatics

29:15

Corporation. One

29:17

Guy Eugene, political scientist from

29:19

UC Berkeley, who'd worked on the Stephenson

29:21

campaign, refused to join Sinmomatics.

29:24

Instead, he became its fiercest critic.

29:27

In nineteen sixty four, he called the corporation

29:30

a new underworld. Most of these

29:32

people are highly educated, many of them

29:34

are PhDs, and none that I've

29:36

met of malignant political designs

29:38

on the American public. They

29:41

may, however, radically reconstruct

29:43

the American political system, build

29:46

a new politics, and even modify

29:48

revered and venerable American institutions,

29:51

facts of which they are blissfully

29:53

innocent. The

29:56

scientists of cinematics invented our data

29:58

mad future. If the world

30:01

daily life sometimes feels unreal

30:03

to you, it feels that way to me, maybe

30:05

especially lately, so simulated,

30:09

and you you're very self so

30:11

targeted. Remember sinmomatics

30:13

and when and how this started with

30:16

a people machine. Forget

30:19

Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of

30:21

them, at least for a minute, because

30:24

I wonder, did the sinehomatics guys,

30:27

these masters of simulation, did

30:29

they kill truth by accident?

30:33

We had one more stop on our road trip to

30:35

find out. Califorida

30:47

just always looks to me like a playmo city, like

30:49

a playmobile city, Like

30:51

there's like one of every vehicle. The

30:54

roads are really clean and straight, the

30:56

hills are green. I love the

30:58

hills though, they like looking at a

31:00

street and just seeing like and

31:03

then like all the houses that like are

31:05

like seemed to be above each other. Oliver

31:08

Ben and I love Mountain View and the computer History

31:10

Museum, and I headed back to San Francisco.

31:13

On that drive, we sort of stumbled into the

31:15

third most streequent answer I get when I ask people

31:18

who killed truth? Some people say

31:20

Trump, some people say Zuckerberg, and

31:22

then some people say, poh. Postmodernism

31:25

slightly less obvious, but still a prime suspect.

31:28

So I've been avoiding postmodernism.

31:31

Postmodernism, nothing is real. Everything

31:33

refers to something else. But then it's references

31:36

all the way down, and at the bottom

31:38

there's really nothing. I don't

31:40

think of myself as someone with a postmodern sensibility.

31:43

Do you watch the streets of San Francisco? The

31:46

streets of San Francisco, except,

31:48

of course I do have a postmodern

31:50

sensibility, Like San Francisco

31:53

is gold Russian mining. No,

31:55

my god, it's very young, beautiful Michael Douglas,

31:58

Carl Walden, Yeah,

32:02

it was prospectors, you know my people. Well,

32:05

anyway, in the streets of San Francisco. So

32:07

Michael Douglas plays this young University

32:09

of California Berkeley, either graduate

32:11

or drop out, and Karl Malden is this

32:13

kind of grizzled older detective

32:17

and he always just calls them college boy.

32:20

And he's kind of got this gritty voice, and

32:24

their partners and they solve crimes.

32:26

Sounds terrible. And there

32:28

you go driving around all

32:30

the time. They're always in these car chases, and it

32:33

kind of like gets lofted all the time when they

32:35

go over the hills because they're going so fast. This

32:37

is exactly the kind of thing that happens in Midtown Madness.

32:40

Oh yeah, so maybe I think that's Drive and

32:43

watch Dogs Too. Okay. On

32:45

that drive, we got into something of an argument

32:48

about which was the best simulation

32:50

of San Francisco, watch Dogs

32:52

Too, or another video game that Ben

32:54

likes called Midtown Madness,

32:56

or My Beloved Streets of San Francisco,

33:00

which got us in a roundabout way to

33:02

postmodernism. They're currently

33:04

following the New Matrix in San Francisco.

33:07

Wow. The Matrix, of course,

33:09

is a film about how we're all living in a computer

33:11

simulation. In an early scene in

33:13

the film, our hero played by Keanu Reeves,

33:16

hides a computer disc in a holiday copy

33:18

of a book by the French postmodernist

33:21

Jean Beaudriard. The book is called

33:23

Simulacra and Simulation. Baudriard

33:26

writes the simulacrum is never

33:28

that which conceals the truth. It is the truth

33:30

which conceals that there is none. Apparently

33:33

this book was the filmmaker's gospel. The

33:36

Matrix is everywhere, It is

33:38

all around us. It is the

33:40

world that has been pulled over

33:42

your eyes to blind you from the truth. Yeah,

33:46

yeah, yeah, blah blah blah.

33:48

This stuff drives me bonkers. Also,

33:51

don't sue me, but the Matrix is totally

33:53

derivative of a nineteen seventy three movie

33:56

called World un Awire that was an adaptation

33:58

of a nineteen sixty four novel called Simulacron

34:01

three that was about simblematics.

34:06

So everything is about the simulation of reality.

34:09

We were in a simulation of a simulation

34:11

of a simulation and the look,

34:15

I admit it. We had gone to California mainly

34:17

out of desperation. You try

34:19

answering the question who killed Truth in ten

34:21

episodes. Plus it was winter

34:23

back home and California is so beautiful

34:25

and warm. But it turned out we

34:27

really did find a lot of answers in California.

34:30

Everything did seem somehow to be coming together

34:32

like magic. History often

34:35

works that way. He lined things up on a timeline,

34:37

and suddenly things make sense, because

34:40

chronology really is like gravity.

34:43

Here's the timeline of tomorrow as I was

34:46

starting to see it. In the nineteen

34:48

fifties, all Tomorrowlands were happy

34:50

tomorrow Lands. By the nineteen sixties,

34:53

they were happy tomorrow Lands and unhappy

34:55

tomorrow Lands. By the nineteen

34:57

seventies, Tomorrowland didn't

34:59

look like such a happy place after all. One

35:02

book, Future Shock, a bestseller by

35:04

a futurist named Alvin Toffler, said

35:06

it best Future Shock. There's

35:10

a sickness which comes from too

35:12

much change, too

35:14

short of time. Worse and Wells

35:17

narrated the movie version. It's the reaction

35:19

to change that didn't happened so fast

35:20

that the cat saw of them.

35:24

It's the premature arrival

35:26

at the future. Driving

35:30

around California and ridiculous red convertible,

35:33

we were suffering from plenty of future shock. We

35:36

had one more stop, stop number

35:38

three started the bull on the right are here

35:40

now? It's like a little ways up on the right. Okay,

35:45

I've got a hardy going there. Your

35:47

destination is on the right. I

35:51

don't know what the museum

35:54

now. I think we're going to the office office Bow.

35:58

We pulled up outside the Internet Archive

36:00

near Golden Gate Park. I thought maybe

36:03

this archive would have some kind of antidote to

36:05

future shock. It's hard to think

36:07

of any place else that's done so

36:09

much to use technology to preserve our digital

36:11

past instead of just letting it disintegrates.

36:15

They were walking into it looks like a church, monitor

36:19

church. It's huge. Yeah, these large

36:22

columns out front. Yeah, welcome.

36:31

I'm Brewster. Brewster

36:35

Kill is a digital librarian and founder of the

36:38

Internet Archive Archives. Everything

36:40

you want old time radio dramas, they've

36:42

got them. You want video of Alex Bernstein

36:44

playing chess against a computer, they've got

36:46

it. You want old video games and the systems

36:48

they're played on, Grateful Dead recordings, Russian

36:51

audiobooks, tractor manuals, the

36:53

issue of thrilling wonder stories where we read warning

36:55

from the past. They've got it all in digital

36:58

form. Kill showed us around

37:00

the lobby. So you want to crank it up? Yeah?

37:04

So what is this from this Victor? This

37:06

is a Victor talking machine. Five yep.

37:10

So we undo this break and

37:12

we put down the needle. Sounds

37:26

pretty good, huh.

37:31

That front room looked like the entrance to a post

37:33

office, A post office with old phonographs

37:36

and also old video games. We look

37:38

at some city. Yeah,

37:42

there's some city. Uh,

37:45

name your city. The last archive, last

37:49

archive, let's put it in an earthquake

37:52

zone. Yeah. Then call brought

37:54

us upstairs into the main hall of the church. There

37:56

was a beautiful altar in the front, and in the back

37:59

in the nave giant servers.

38:02

Oliver, those are those

38:05

are servers of the

38:07

two hundredth most popular web site in

38:09

the world. It's about

38:11

fifteen petabytes out of the sixty petabytes

38:14

are the ones on the other side. Here wee

38:18

archive dot org. So every

38:20

time a light blink is somebody uploading something

38:22

or downloading something to the Internet archive.

38:25

So it's actually you never get to see somebody's

38:27

servers, right. The ideas

38:29

to try to put kind of a human face on

38:32

what it is we're building, because that

38:34

way we'll actually want to preserve it and

38:37

keep it going. We stood

38:39

there for a bit, watching the lights flicker, the archive

38:41

growing vaster. Then we headed downstairs

38:44

to the basement to the main office

38:46

and sat down with Kale in a conference room.

38:49

I told him we've been thinking a lot about simulated

38:51

worlds and time capsules, prophecies

38:54

of the future. He doesn't have much

38:56

use for time capsules. It's libraries

38:58

are all about having new things discovered

39:00

such they're worthy of being put in a library.

39:03

Time capsule is a vanity

39:06

project of a particular time. Really

39:09

actually probably doesn't even intend

39:11

to be opened, or who cares if it's opened. It's all

39:13

about the people being photographed

39:15

with it at the time. Aren't they important?

39:18

Right? Who cares? No one will care.

39:20

Most time capsules get forgotten. Also,

39:24

who locks away knowledge? Who buries

39:26

knowledge? It's kind of nuts. The

39:29

Internet archive is something very different.

39:31

The vision of the Internet that I signed on too is

39:33

to try to build the Library of Everything, the

39:35

digital Library of Alexandria, the universal

39:38

access to all knowledge. This

39:41

show is about why it seems so hard lately

39:43

to know things, but of course

39:45

it should be so much easier lately to know

39:47

things, not least because of

39:49

the Internet. This giant free

39:51

library. Books

39:54

can last for centuries. The average life

39:56

of the webpage, though, is just one hundred

39:58

days. And then poof so

40:00

Kale built this thing called the wayback Machine.

40:03

It takes a snapshot of the entire Internet

40:05

constantly. It is literally

40:08

a last archive. It's now, oh,

40:10

I don't eight hundred billion. URL's

40:14

four hundred billion pages. It's

40:17

used by hundreds of thousands

40:19

of people every day. As

40:21

Kale sees that, the Internet was meant to be one thing,

40:23

a library, and it's still that,

40:26

but with a rise of social media, it became something

40:28

else. It became a people machine

40:31

designed to capture and hold your attention, to

40:34

substitute a simulation of reality

40:36

for the actual thing. I think, really

40:39

yeah, it's maybe the sort of late nineties,

40:41

early two thousands when when

40:44

we've talked about these

40:46

great terms like eyeballs, right, what you

40:48

really need is eyeballs for your service,

40:51

and we need sticky eyeballs right

40:53

to go. It

40:55

is just gross. And there's another problem,

40:58

a problem Kale hasn't solved, a

41:00

problem no one has solved. When you

41:02

search on the Internet, you don't search.

41:04

A machine searches how people

41:07

want new things. How you found out

41:09

truth was he did your own searching.

41:11

But on the Internet it's too big. You can't

41:14

do your own searching. Google co

41:16

founder Larry Page once predicted that

41:18

eventually you'll have this implant where

41:20

if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.

41:23

But that's not thinking, and it's a part,

41:26

even if it's only a little part of why.

41:28

It sometimes feels as though the world he

41:30

isn't quite real. We

41:34

say goodbye to the archivists of the Internet, feeling

41:36

a little like Neo in the matrix when he first

41:38

gets unplugged. We're

41:41

like orson Welles suffering from

41:43

future shock. The impact

41:45

of future shock does not depend

41:48

on the nature of its victims.

41:51

They are everywhere future

41:53

shock. That's crap. We

41:55

aren't victims of the future, stuck

41:58

in some lunatic tomorrow land or

42:00

locked in a time capsule. Even

42:02

if we're quarantined in our houses. The

42:05

future isn't something that happens to us. It's

42:07

something we make. Who killed

42:09

truth? Who decided it

42:11

was okay to ignore the past, to erase the past,

42:14

or let it become unreadable, to make

42:16

everything about the future and simulation

42:19

and prediction. I

42:21

had one more place to look. We

42:23

headed home, all the way home,

42:26

back to where we started, a short

42:28

walk from my office, just

42:30

when everything began to shut down. Okay,

42:34

little anticlimactic, like just a dorm

42:36

room. Yeah, the students just

42:39

moved out of here. There's no just

42:41

the sort of prefabricated dorm room furniture

42:44

like slightly higher quality than

42:46

cinder block wall. Not

42:50

such good light. But this is where it happened.

42:52

This is where Facebook was born. For

42:54

face smash, Are

42:56

you hotter? Are you not? We'd

42:59

gone to Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard dorm

43:01

room. All the dorms were emptied

43:04

out, the students all gone

43:06

evacuated. So what

43:09

what was your what was your grand vision for bringing

43:11

us here? I thought there would be flames,

43:14

like licking the walls of

43:18

veneer of Hell. I don't know, I

43:20

just you know, I think about that moment

43:23

of ditching

43:26

your education to

43:28

go make piles of money always

43:31

troubles me, Like if you could go back in

43:33

time, was

43:36

there a different route? But

43:39

I guess ryans aren't supposed to ask those questions.

43:41

Those counterfactuals addresser

43:47

but a

43:49

little desk that nobody uses because everybody

43:51

sets a laptop. This

43:54

is weird. I don't remember this door being

43:56

here when we came in. Did you see

43:58

this dark green door? No? No?

44:02

And everything else is just that bland security

44:05

deposit white? Why

44:08

aren't there? We are in the middle of the hallway

44:11

to this dorm room. Can

44:17

we go through? Okay?

44:25

Oh? No, wait

44:27

a minute, what has happened? How

44:30

are we? How did we get back here? Is

44:33

this the last archive? There's

44:37

a secret passageway from Mark zucker

44:39

Brook's old dorm room into the West Archive.

44:41

Oh my god, thank god, we're Jesus.

44:45

It's like we're in clue.

44:49

Here. We are back in the place

44:51

in our world where the known things go. Shelves

44:54

stocked with proof, and all around the

44:56

clutter of clues, a

44:58

rock quarried in Vermont, reels

45:01

and reels of tape, an

45:03

old punch card reader, all

45:06

this stuff from all the old episodes. It's

45:08

laid out on a big oak library table.

45:11

It's like I'm in a museum exhibit, but the hours

45:13

are only midnight to two am, and there's no marketing

45:16

budget or gift shop, and no one will

45:18

ever come or believe I was here. I

45:20

wish they had like tote bags or something. No

45:23

one ever believes me about this place, and

45:25

I think all along I could have just gone out that

45:27

other weird green door. Zuckerberg

45:34

isn't the killer this case. It's

45:36

like murder on the Orient Express.

45:38

Everyone's the killer, all of us,

45:41

Zuckerberg, Trump, Postmodernism.

45:44

I blame them for a lot for opportunism

45:47

and cynicism and nihilism.

45:49

But with this crime, the killing of truth,

45:52

there's plenty of blame to go around. You

45:56

need people to know things, You

45:59

need a collective commitment to empiricism.

46:02

We hold these truths.

46:06

That's why people invented democracy. Any

46:09

One who gives up on the idea that people together can

46:11

share a world is killing

46:13

truth. In an age of

46:15

global pandemics, it's obvious

46:18

how killing truth kills people. Democracy

46:22

is a pain in the ass. It can be

46:24

hard to be certain about anything when everyone has

46:27

a voice. But the point of living

46:29

with other people, the purpose of democracy,

46:32

like the purpose of a university, is

46:34

that no one has all the answers. You've

46:37

got to inquire. You can't believe in

46:39

someone else's time capsule version of the past

46:42

or the future. You've got

46:44

somehow to get out into the world and

46:47

talk to people, and especially you've

46:50

got to listen mystery,

46:53

fact, number data.

46:56

Truth isn't any one of those things. It's

46:59

in all of those things together. And

47:01

to really understand what the hell is going on,

47:03

you probably also need to read some poetry

47:06

or a book like Silent Spring. And

47:09

I like to think you've got to study some history. You've

47:11

got to love the places that make that knowledge,

47:13

that keep it fragile. Place is

47:15

worth protecting, the last Archive

47:19

and the next one. I've

47:24

got to lock this place up now until

47:28

next season. A season of

47:30

doubt. Wait

47:36

wait, laate. This is a show about truth.

47:38

We can't end without confessing. We

47:40

did not actually go to Mark Zuckerberg's

47:43

dorm room. I'm a professor. I'd

47:45

never go to someone's dorm room. Even after the

47:47

dorms it emptied out. That was

47:50

a simulation, forgive us.

47:53

The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane,

47:55

mckibbon and Ben Natt of Haafrey. Our

47:57

editor is Julia Barton, and our executive

47:59

producer is Emil Abell. Jason

48:02

Gambrel and Martine Gonzalez are engineers.

48:05

Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original

48:07

music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of

48:09

Stellwagen Symfinett. Many of

48:11

her sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and

48:13

The Star Janette Foundation. Our

48:15

Foolproof players are Barlow, Adamson,

48:18

Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John

48:20

Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice

48:22

Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive

48:25

is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special

48:27

thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory

48:30

Theater, to Guy Fedorco, and to Simon

48:32

Leake at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather

48:34

Fane, Maya Knig, Carli Mgliori,

48:37

Emily Rostek, Eric Sandler, Maggie

48:39

Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our

48:41

research assistants are Michellegau, Olivia

48:44

Oldham, Henrietta O'Reilly, Olive

48:46

Riskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. I'm

48:49

Joe Lapoor. If you're interested

48:51

in reading the history of the Simomatics Corporation,

48:54

you could check out my book if then available

48:56

September fifteenth. Wherever books are sold,

48:59

visit simomatics dot com to

49:01

learn more.