Tomorrowland

year nineteen thirty nine, the American heartland. Holy wow, they've got an explosion in the cornfield. Who the devil himself broke a loose down in our cornfield? He came a roar and a rampagron right up from the fiery pit, blowing smoke out of his mouth and fire out of his eyes. What is going on? Pulpe science fiction? Is what? This is? A bananas story called The Warning from the Past. Not enough trouble to have the radio st client his full head off right in the middle of my favorite program.

The Warning from the Past was published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in nineteen thirty nine. Here's what happens. After the explosion in the cornfield. The farmer's wife calls the police. The reporters call scientists. The scientists discovered that the explosion had come from a gigantic time capsule. It is buried twenty feet under the ground, constructed of rust resistant metal. The size cannot be determined as yet, but it is at least thirty feet in diameter. The top

of the capsule was blown off by an explosion. Apparently the light, the smoke, and the radio signals were designed to call attention to the time capsule. I guess the people who built the time capsule were worried that unless the thing literally blew its top off, known would ever

notice it was there? Who will be left unopened its mysteries Unknown myths and legends surviving from pre primitive times indicate that a civilization may have existed on Earth prior to the present, but this is the first definite proof of their existence ever found. In the story, a group of brave men prior open the time capsule's giant door

and make their way inside. Their entrance triggers a projector and a film starts playing it turns out that the time capsule was built by ancient Earthlings after their planet was invaded by aliens. They made this little film about what happened to them, and then they buried it in a time capsule. I first ran across this story Warning from the Past in January twenty twenty. I was really into the time Capsule, so goofy. But there was another part of the plot that didn't seem as important to

me at the time. It's this The aliens didn't destroy the Earthlings with lasers or ray guns. Now they let loose a virus, the common cold, a coronavirus, and everyone died. Time Capsule indeed, welcome to the Last Archive. They show about how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. This is the last episode of the season. All along, I've been making an argument about the history of evidence, arguing that our elemental unit of knowledge has changed from

mysteries to facts, to numbers to data. But the age of data is also a return to the age of miss, a world in which we can't know anything. Only machines can know things, mysterious godlike machines. All season long I've been trying to figure out who killed truth, what a time capsules have to do with it. Weirdly, they're a clue to me as a historian. Chronology is like gravity a law. A time capsule tries to break that law. That's like a rocket from the past blasted into the

future by being buried in the ground. Sometimes I get the feeling we're all trapped in someone else's time capsule. In nineteen thirty nine, the world seemed to be coming apart. The world was coming apart. Pulp science fiction aliens from outer space would have been a relief compared to what was actually happening. Germany has invaded Poland and has bombed many times. General mobiliza has been ordered in Britain and France.

It felt unreal, dream like a nightmare. But over in the United States, in New York, the World's Fare was opening a fair called the World of Tomorrow. The World's Fair was held on hundreds of acres and queens. There were all kinds of exhibits, Mainly they involved traveling to the future. You could visit Democracity, a sort of imagined Jetson style city of the Future, the Future of Democracy, the nation's foremost companies present the magic of today that

paves the way while the miracles of tomorrow. Or you could check out preparations for a time capsule, the kind of thing that inspired that thrilling wonder story. We've been reading a lot about the time capsule. Could we take a look at it? Why? Sure, we can get to it this way. Time Capsule of Cupola deposited on the side of the New York World's Fair on September twenty third, nineteen thirty eight, by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.

If anyone should come upon this capsule before the year A. D. Sixty nine thirty nine, let him not wanting they disturb it, or to do so would be to deprive the people of that era of a legacy here left them. This weirdness is a scene from a promotional film about the World's Fair, in which in all American family visits the world of tomorrow. The time capsule down there is actually a message from our time to those those who opened and study it. Will they're more about us than any

man living today. Well, what I'm wondering is how anybody will know how to find it in the year What was he sixty nine thirty nine. Not quite in sixty nine thirty nine, but in the last quarantine free days of twenty twenty, I headed out to Queens to look for the time capsule buried there in nineteen thirty nine. What did the people who buried it mean to say about the world of tomorrow? Could we go back in

time and heed that war from the past? I went with my producer Ben and with Olivia Oldham, who works for the podcast. We had an appointment with Liz Sevchenko, a historian of New York and of memory. She's the director of the Humanity's Action Lab. Anyway, if you've seen Men in Black, you've seen the place where we met, where Will Smith got vomited back out in a giant spray of demon goo. The sight of the nineteen thirty

nine World Tomorrow. It's pretty close to LaGuardia Airport. It's got all these remnants of the fair, these monumental, huge rusting structures, gigantic abandon spires, a massive metal sphere. It looks like a graveyard of the future. We're also really close too, as I understand it. Fact check please, but the you know, birthplace of our dear President so this is like where it all started, yea of the future exactly when Donald Trump was born near here in nineteen

forty six. His father, Fred was the owner of a construction business in Queens. The Trump's had gotten married in nineteen thirty six, and by the time The World Tomorrow opened they already had two kids. Probably they came to the fair. Fred Trump rented a giant billboard near the fair for his Trump homes. It called them the Home of Tomorrow. When I tell people I'm working on a podcast that asks the question who killed truth, they usually say,

isn't the answer obvious? The murderer is Donald Trump? Okay, fair, But all season long I've been avoiding the usual suspects. I think they're just a little too easy. Also, I don't quite buy it. I think Trump might be a red herring. God knows, the man's a liar, a colossal, dangerous liar. But it takes a whole lot more than one man to undermine an entire system of knowledge. Anyway, we had a different mission in Queens. Find that time capsule,

I think you need to ask. I mean, there was a very understated, little sort of like memorial looking thing back there. I don't know if we've a was it like a cylinder or like a low silm like every stump. Yes, we'd asked Sevchenko along to help us think about memorials and monuments and whether they contain truth or really just containers of myths. She's written brilliantly about that stuff. We also thought she could probably help us find the time capsule.

Not that that bolder thing, but like where those bushes are. Okay, wait, this is it. It's like a flattened smushed something like if it were an obelisk that a giant stepped on and it went splat. It feels kind of self defeating because if you want something to be found five thousand years in the future, why would you make it so low key and everything else about it. I shouldn't be like a giant space needle spike putting out of it. Yeah, it's like a kind of dimple or like a nipple

on the top of this pine. It looks like it's a button. Should be able to press it rise out like a coffee maker or something. If we press and just ruin the whole, there's like a lip or what's the opposite of a lip, because like there's a little gutter underneath, right, Maybe that's where you're supposed to fry from. I'd break my nails, honey, I'm not gonna do that. If you went to the World's Fair in nineteen thirty nine, you could see some of the contents of the time

capsule behind a big glass display. Who stuff the logical illage in a committee? Aided by a thought? He's in every field of science on the os. It's a complete record of our civilization. A complete record of our civilization, brought to you by Westinghouse. Section one. Small articles of common use alarm clock, can opener, eyeglasses, bifocals, fountain pen, Mazda electric lamp, mechanical pencil, miniature camera, nail file, padlocking keys, and a safety food. I like the lamp socket. They

have an electrical lamp socket there. It was just like outside the context of a house. How are you ever going to figure out what that was? For? Our guide in Queens Lives of Chenko direct some of the world's most powerful public memory projects. Our project about American prisons called States of Incarceration, another called the Guantanamo Public Memory Project. After I read the list of the Time Capsule's contents.

She got this look on her face. I just think, I mean, there's this weird sense in which they're speaking to an ignorant future population, like assuming they don't know anything, and they're so excited to like educate them. It struck us all as a weird and creepy kind of arrogance. We just couldn't puzzle the thing out. It was also strange that it had so few markings. We kept looking for text, a plaque, anything, Oh what is that? Oh?

I can't read it. It says, I think it's the stamp of the granite, the you know, the it's a company symbol of westings I think it's either the Westinghouse or the concrete. It does look like that's a W though I think it's no. It says Rock of Right, you can see what the Rock of Ages. There's a go, this is the Rock of Ages. Holy Moses. This season started in episode one with a crime scene in Barry, Vermont, a place whose best known quarry is called the Rock

of Ages. And Jesus turned out that they'd supplied the granite that made the lid to close the time capsule. Now we'd left the last archive. We were in the Twilight Zone. Honestly, it really freaked me out. The Rock of Ages is the name of the quarry, but it's also the title of an eighteenth century hymn, The Rock

of Ages is Jesus Christ, so weird. Also, I haven't talked very much about religion in this podcast, but a certain feeling just then as we read the words Rock of Ages engraved into stone, that feeling that some unknown and mysterious forces in control of our lives for better or worse. That feeling is how humans came to believe in gods, Zeus, Saphrodite, Mars in the coronavirus crisis. That

feelings everywhere. We left Queens and Tomorrowland for the origins of another future in the Valley of the Gods, Silicon Valley. It's like we could be being pulled by also right now, except it would sail then. I actually think we In February of twenty twenty, we went to California. It was a few weeks before the whole state shutdown, shelter in place, locked down, before people were even talking about those things,

we were blissfully ignorant. We rented a car, got on the highway, me and my producer Ben and my son Oliver go West. Young man. Oliver is fifteen, Cherry read twenty seventeen Camaro convertible top down, of course, chrome wheels. It was Oliver's birthday, and so I rented a car that is exactly not the right car for a podcast. But Oliver had never been to California. What are your impressions of California? Um, it's beautiful. It looks exactly like

it did in Watchdogs Too. Every street go down, Oliver says, I've already driven down the street. I've driven down here, guns blazing. Watch Dogs Too is a video game set in a perfect stimulation of the city of San Francisco. Playing watch Dogs Too, you're part of an elite crew of hackers who are trying to catch the guy who killed Truth. Its plot is disturbingly like ours at the

last archive. In the video game. The guy who kills Truth is basically Mark Zuckerberg, the head of a Silicon Valley data company called Bloom Bloom CTOs, is like a giant spider whim endlessly gathering data. They're making backroom deals to trade our private information. We have to stop this. We're talking data manipulation on a massive scale, ricked elections, weapons programs, spying into people's homes, all of it controlled

by one man. Whenever I told anyone I was working on a podcast that was trying to find out who killed Truth, almost everyone's first answer was Donald Trump, and almost everyone's second answer was Mark Zuckerberg. And fair enough. He's an obvious suspect, though, so I've been avoiding him too easy. I mean, he's the villain in a video game, for Christ's sakes. Anyway, when my son Oliver plays Watchdogs Too, he has to drive simulated fast cars all over a

simulated San Francisco. And here I was taking him on a trip, a birthday trip to a thrilling new city. But everywhere we went he would be all, oh, yeah, I've been here. There's a donut shop on the next block, and there would be this looks literally exactly Save's Watchops. Mom. I'm gonna have you play some Washdogs later. Okay. I look at California. I don't see the superimposed dystopia of

Watchdogs Too. No, I'm too old for that future. My California future, the one stuck in my mind comes straight from the Monorail and Disneyland and it done. It's way now, leaving frontier Land at going one hundred years into the future to tomorrow Land. That's Ronald Reagan at the opening of Disneyland in nineteen fifty five. The nineteen thirty nine World's Fair was nothing compared to its successor. While Disneys

Tomorrowland built at the height of the Cold War. The future as a space age future is an invention of the Cold War because Cold War scientists understood themselves as engaged in a battle for the future. Would capitalism prevail or communism? Only science could tell. If scientists could predict the future, then they could build it. Yes, this is Tomorrowland, and it's not a stylized dream of the future, but a scientifically planned projection of future techniques by leading space

experts and science. You find yourself living predictions of things to come. A lot of Tomorrowlands popped up in California in the nineteen fifties, not just the one at Disneyland. California was like a future factory, full of think tanks charged with coming up with a general theory of the future, psychologists, political scientists. They were trying to predict human behavior by way of endless computer simulations by the middle of the

nineteen fifties. When people pictured there, they usually pictured computers, and they usually pictured California, where the computer industry was born. So we drove our cherry red Camaro down Highway one oh one to the Computer History Museum. It's in Mountain View, a couple of blocks from the Google Blox, not too far from Facebook. We went into museum not to look at old computers, but to use them. So now I'm going to hit load and it's going to start reading

the cards. That's the sound of those little shoes or knips grabbing the cards and sliding them in. Carl Claunch is a volunteer at the Computer History Museum. He was showing us a punch card reader that's part of an IBM fourteen oh one, a computer first manufactured in nineteen fifty nine. This computer is the size of a room, a big room, say, an elementary school classroom. I asked Claunch, what school it's thought when they visited it? Do they

recognize this as a computer? Like? Are they just baffled by it? Yeah? That they The docents have to tell a story that takes them back to the nineteen fifties and they're constantly contrasting it. So, for example, there's a piece of core memory that's used to speed up the printer, and it's entire contents of this big block or one tweet. Yeah,

it's sort of like Honey, I shrunk the kids. Like opposite, it's like Honey, I enlarged the computer, like it's actually a thing they know about, but blown up to this giant proportion, like we're a little Fusians, we're inside a computer. Like the idea of using like a reference from the early two thousands, or really in the nineteen nineties to explain a machine from the nineteen sixties to kids in

it wasn't Carl Clenched. He's a sweetheart, and he's also very modest, but he's much more than a volunteer at the museum. Carl computer archaeologist. I don't have my hat. Bunch had done a whole lot of the work getting this computer from nineteen fifty nine up and running. In his garage, he's got an old punch card reader that can handle punch cards that are bent and even a little tattered. And as it happens, I had some old,

screwed up punch cards that needed reading. If you've ever punched in at work, like I used to do, that's a punch card. Their papers the size of a business on flope, popped up with tiny rectangular holes. Before the cloud, before thumb drives, before hard disks and floppy disks, they were punch cards. He stored information for a computer by

encoding it in these tiny holes. We can still read ancient parchments thousands of years later, but old punch cards are useless after just a few decades because hardly anyone has the machines you need to read them. The past is getting shorter and shorter, and this matters to the work I do as a historian. A few years ago I found thousands of really interesting punch cards. The cards were boxed in the files of this one company, a very early startup called the similar Madox Corporation, and I

was writing a book about them. Simomatics was founded in nineteen fifty nine, a big year for computing. The name was a mashup of simulation and automatic, and Simomatics wound up being kind of like the Cambridge Analytica of the presidential election of nineteen sixty. MTS Archives held the Symbiomatics punch cards, but might couldn't read them, so they ended up shipping the cards for me to the Computer History Museum,

where Carl ran them through his ancient machine. Here's the backstory on simiomatics, some of what you've already heard if you've been a steadfast listener to the last archive. He might remember in episode five, how we talked about the nineteen fifty two election, where CBS hired a computer called

Univac to predict the results on election night. Well, a Madison Avenue admin named Ed Greenfield, learning about the UNIVAC, got the idea of helping the candidate win an election by building a massive computer simulation that could predict how

people would vote. And then, four years later, in nineteen fifty six, Greenfield got a contract from the Adlai Stephenson campaign when Stephenson was trying once again to beat Eisenhower, a man who can believe Ah yeah, Well, first, Stephenson had to win the Democratic nomination, and to do that he had to win the California primary, a big state

whose population was booming. Greenfield hired a bunch of people in California, including two political scientists, and helped Stephenson win the state's primary and then the nomination, but he couldn't help Stephenson win the election. As evening returns come in, the trend is unmistakable. It's Eisenhower by a landslide with four hundred and fifty seven electoral votes to seventy four

or Stephenson. The admen and their computers couldn't save Adlai Stevenson in nineteen fifty six, but his loss didn't slow them down. Ed Greenfield started gearing up for the election of nineteen sixty. He hired people who'd done psychological warfare for the military, driving people to traction targeting messages, attention manipulation. One of those guys was the mathematician Alex Bernstein. There's a great film from nineteen fifty nine called Thinking Machines.

What can we learn about Thinking from a game of Chess? It shows a bespectacled Bernstein playing chess against a room sized computer. All it takes her some printers, magnetic tape, and a chessboard. Mister Bernstein and his collaborators prepared a chess playing program for the IBM seven O four, a digital computer that has performed one billion calculations in a single day. It's never absent minded and never makes an obvious plunder. Bernstein helped create a field that became known

as artificial intelligence. For the presidential campaign of nineteen sixty, he and Ed Greenfield at Cymblematics, they built this thing called a People Machine who was programmed with punch cards in very early for Tran, an ancient computer language. There were data cards too. Each card the cards I found in the archives. The cards only Carl Quanch could now read. Each represented an imaginary American age, place of residence, economic class, race, gender,

political persuasion. Here was a Similematox Company's vision of the future. One day computers would be able to predict human behavior and manipulate it. There'd be a lot of money to be made. There'd be a lot of power to accumulate. Greenfield thought Dlea. Stevenson would run again in nineteen sixty, and he wanted Stephenson to use his People Machine. And here, just here is a snag in the fabric of time. First of all, Stephenson did not run for a third time.

He only almost ran. But also some of the people who got Greenfield's confidential memo about the People Machine, they thought christ On toast this thing should be illegal. One of the people Greenfield sent this proposal too was Stevenson's law partner, Newton Minnow. Minnow is a really important person because he'd go on to be the chairman of the FCC under the Kennedy administration. Greenfield's proposal freaked Minnow out.

Dear Arthur, do you remember ed Greenfield? Minno wrote a letter to the very eminent Pultzer Prize winning Harvard historian Arthur Slessinger Junior about Greenfield's dangerous idea. Without prejudicing your judgment, my own opinion is that such a thing A cannot work, b is immoral, c should be declared illegal. Please advise best regards, Newton n Minnow. Slessinger wrote right back, Dear Newt, I have pretty much your feelings. I shudder at the

implications for public leadership of the nation. On the other hand, I do believe in science and don't like to be a party to choking off new ideas. Yours ever, Arthur Slessinger, The People Machine, needless to say, was not declared illegal. It went ahead. The Democratic National Committee hired Sineomatics, and when John F. Kennedy won the nomination, the Kennedy campaign hired Cineomatics and then unexpectedly delayed climax saw sent to Kennedy the victor with a clear margin of Electromo vote.

Years and years later, I found symblematics original punch cards, the punch cards it used to simulate the nineteen sixty election. I figured if I could read them, or rather get Carl Claunch computer archaeologists to read them, I could understand how this thing worked and know whether it worked. So Carl read the cards on his ancient equipment. But we hit another snag. We got the data off the cards, but then we couldn't get the Fortran program to run.

Knowledge on computer's decays becomes obsolete. You find your grandmother's photo albums in aerratic. You can look at the photographs. You don't need a special program. Will your grandchildren never be able to see the photographs you've got stored on your computer. Not likely, They'll have been lost in a forgotten sludge of obsolete file name extensions and hard drives and operating systems and disused connectors. There's a weird foreshortening

of history going on. I think that's one reason people, or at least people like me. Why would get obsessed with time capsules? Everything just seems to be slipping away all the time. If data has replaced facts is the elemental unit of knowledge. That's a problem, because data it's unbelievably shoddy. It just doesn't last anyway. Even with my punch cards read, I couldn't get the Symbiomatics program to run. I was sad. But fortunately I had more reliable and

durable evidence than punch cards. I had newspapers, stock certificates, and letters, so I was able to figure out what happened next. John F. Kennedy settles into office as a thirty fifth President of the United States, the youngest man on the first Roman Catholic ever elected to the office. After Kennedy was inaugurated, Simiomatics went public with a big, splashy vision for changing the world. The company proposes to engage principally in estimating probable human behavior by the use

of computer technology. For this purpose, it may utilize information derived from public opinion polls and other sources concerning the composition and attitudes of the group understudy that summer. Summer of nineteen sixty one, the scientists of the Cymomatics Corporation met on a beach on Long Island, where they worked beneath a geodesic dome that looked as if it had come from the future and crashed half buried in the

sand like a time capsule. They were perfecting their people machine to predict and manipulate all sorts of human behavior, not just voting, but things like buying a dishwasher too. The scientists are preparing to work with electronic computers the Giant question answering devices in use for some years, but are using social and economic data and their own knowledge to work out new programs for computer simulation. Facebook, Palenteer, Amazon,

the Internet research agency Google. It's as if each of these companies emerged out of that time capsule that was buried so long ago by the scientists of the Sinemomatics Corporation. One Guy Eugene, political scientist from UC Berkeley, who'd worked on the Stephenson campaign, refused to join Sinmomatics. Instead, he became its fiercest critic. In nineteen sixty four, he called

the corporation a new underworld. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I've met of malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions, facts of which they are blissfully innocent. The scientists of

cinematics invented our data mad future. If the world daily life sometimes feels unreal to you, it feels that way to me, maybe especially lately, so simulated, and you you're very self so targeted. Remember sinmomatics and when and how this started with a people machine. Forget Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of them, at least for a minute, because I wonder, did the sinehomatics guys, these

masters of simulation, did they kill truth by accident? We had one more stop on our road trip to find out. Califorida just always looks to me like a playmo city, like a playmobile city, Like there's like one of every vehicle. The roads are really clean and straight, the hills are green. I love the hills though, they like looking at a street and just seeing like and then like all the houses that like are like seemed to be above each other. Oliver Ben and I love Mountain View and the computer

History Museum, and I headed back to San Francisco. On that drive, we sort of stumbled into the third most streequent answer I get when I ask people who killed truth? Some people say Trump, some people say Zuckerberg, and then some people say, poh. Postmodernism slightly less obvious, but still a prime suspect. So I've been avoiding postmodernism. Postmodernism, nothing is real. Everything refers to something else. But then it's references all the way down, and at the bottom there's

really nothing. I don't think of myself as someone with a postmodern sensibility. Do you watch the streets of San Francisco? The streets of San Francisco, except, of course I do have a postmodern sensibility, Like San Francisco is gold Russian mining. No, my god, it's very young, beautiful Michael Douglas, Carl Walden, Yeah, it was prospectors, you know my people. Well, anyway, in

the streets of San Francisco. So Michael Douglas plays this young University of California Berkeley, either graduate or drop out, and Karl Malden is this kind of grizzled older detective and he always just calls them college boy. And he's kind of got this gritty voice, and their partners and they solve crimes. Sounds terrible. And there you go driving

around all the time. They're always in these car chases, and it kind of like gets lofted all the time when they go over the hills because they're going so fast. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens in Midtown Madness. Oh yeah, so maybe I think that's Drive

and watch Dogs Too. Okay. On that drive, we got into something of an argument about which was the best simulation of San Francisco, watch Dogs Too, or another video game that Ben likes called Midtown Madness, or My Beloved Streets of San Francisco, which got us in a roundabout way to postmodernism. They're currently following the New Matrix in San Francisco. Wow. The Matrix, of course, is a film

about how we're all living in a computer simulation. In an early scene in the film, our hero played by Keanu Reeves, hides a computer disc in a holiday copy of a book by the French postmodernist Jean Beaudriard. The book is called Simulacra and Simulation. Baudriard writes the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth. It is the truth which conceals that there is none. Apparently this book was the filmmaker's gospel. The Matrix is everywhere, It is

all around us. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah blah blah. This stuff drives me bonkers. Also, don't sue me, but the Matrix is totally derivative of a nineteen seventy three movie called World un Awire that was an adaptation of a nineteen sixty four novel called Simulacron three that was about simblematics. So everything is about the

simulation of reality. We were in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation and the look, I admit it. We had gone to California mainly out of desperation. You try answering the question who killed Truth in ten episodes. Plus it was winter back home and California is so beautiful and warm. But it turned out we really did find a lot of answers in California. Everything did seem somehow to be coming together like magic. History often works

that way. He lined things up on a timeline, and suddenly things make sense, because chronology really is like gravity. Here's the timeline of tomorrow as I was starting to see it. In the nineteen fifties, all Tomorrowlands were happy tomorrow Lands. By the nineteen sixties, they were happy tomorrow Lands and unhappy tomorrow Lands. By the nineteen seventies, Tomorrowland didn't look like such a happy place after all. One book, Future Shock, a bestseller by a futurist named Alvin Toffler,

said it best Future Shock. There's a sickness which comes from too much change, too short of time. Worse and Wells narrated the movie version. It's the reaction to change that didn't happened so fast that the cat saw of them. It's the premature arrival at the future. Driving around California and ridiculous red convertible, we were suffering from plenty of future shock. We had one more stop, stop number three started the bull on the right are here now? It's

like a little ways up on the right. Okay, I've got a hardy going there. Your destination is on the right. I don't know what the museum now. I think we're going to the office office Bow. We pulled up outside the Internet Archive near Golden Gate Park. I thought maybe this archive would have some kind of antidote to future shock. It's hard to think of any place else that's done so much to use technology to preserve our digital past instead of just letting it disintegrates. They were walking into

it looks like a church, monitor church. It's huge. Yeah, these large columns out front. Yeah, welcome. I'm Brewster. Brewster Kill is a digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive Archives. Everything you want old time radio dramas, they've got them. You want video of Alex Bernstein playing chess

against a computer, they've got it. You want old video games and the systems they're played on, Grateful Dead recordings, Russian audiobooks, tractor manuals, the issue of thrilling wonder stories where we read warning from the past. They've got it all in digital form. Kill showed us around the lobby. So you want to crank it up? Yeah? So what is this from this Victor? This is a Victor talking machine. Five yep. So we undo this break and we put

down the needle. Sounds pretty good, huh. That front room looked like the entrance to a post office, A post office with old phonographs and also old video games. We look at some city. Yeah, there's some city. Uh, name your city. The last archive, last archive, let's put it in an earthquake zone. Yeah. Then call brought us upstairs into the main hall of the church. There was a beautiful altar in the front, and in the back in

the nave giant servers. Oliver, those are those are servers of the two hundredth most popular web site in the world. It's about fifteen petabytes out of the sixty petabytes are the ones on the other side. Here wee archive dot org. So every time a light blink is somebody uploading something or downloading something to the Internet archive. So it's actually

you never get to see somebody's servers, right. The ideas to try to put kind of a human face on what it is we're building, because that way we'll actually want to preserve it and keep it going. We stood there for a bit, watching the lights flicker, the archive growing vaster. Then we headed downstairs to the basement to the main office and sat down with Kale in a conference room. I told him we've been thinking a lot about simulated worlds and time capsules, prophecies of the future.

He doesn't have much use for time capsules. It's libraries are all about having new things discovered such they're worthy of being put in a library. Time capsule is a vanity project of a particular time. Really actually probably doesn't even intend to be opened, or who cares if it's opened. It's all about the people being photographed with it at the time. Aren't they important? Right? Who cares? No one will care. Most time capsules get forgotten. Also, who locks

away knowledge? Who buries knowledge? It's kind of nuts. The Internet archive is something very different. The vision of the Internet that I signed on too is to try to build the Library of Everything, the digital Library of Alexandria, the universal access to all knowledge. This show is about why it seems so hard lately to know things, but of course it should be so much easier lately to know things, not least because of the Internet. This giant

free library. Books can last for centuries. The average life of the webpage, though, is just one hundred days. And then poof so Kale built this thing called the wayback Machine. It takes a snapshot of the entire Internet constantly. It is literally a last archive. It's now, oh, I don't eight hundred billion. URL's four hundred billion pages. It's used

by hundreds of thousands of people every day. As Kale sees that, the Internet was meant to be one thing, a library, and it's still that, but with a rise of social media, it became something else. It became a people machine designed to capture and hold your attention, to

substitute a simulation of reality for the actual thing. I think, really yeah, it's maybe the sort of late nineties, early two thousands when when we've talked about these great terms like eyeballs, right, what you really need is eyeballs for your service, and we need sticky eyeballs right to go. It is just gross. And there's another problem, a problem Kale hasn't solved, a problem no one has solved. When you search on the Internet, you don't search. A machine

searches how people want new things. How you found out truth was he did your own searching. But on the Internet it's too big. You can't do your own searching. Google co founder Larry Page once predicted that eventually you'll have this implant where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer. But that's not thinking, and it's a part, even if it's only a little part of why. It sometimes feels as though the world

he isn't quite real. We say goodbye to the archivists of the Internet, feeling a little like Neo in the matrix when he first gets unplugged. We're like orson Welles suffering from future shock. The impact of future shock does not depend on the nature of its victims. They are everywhere future shock. That's crap. We aren't victims of the future, stuck in some lunatic tomorrow land or locked in a time capsule. Even if we're quarantined in our houses. The

future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we make. Who killed truth? Who decided it was okay to ignore the past, to erase the past, or let it become unreadable, to make everything about the future and simulation and prediction. I had one more place to look. We headed home, all the way home, back to where we started, a short walk from my office, just when everything began to shut down. Okay, little anticlimactic, like just a dorm room. Yeah,

the students just moved out of here. There's no just the sort of prefabricated dorm room furniture like slightly higher quality than cinder block wall. Not such good light. But this is where it happened. This is where Facebook was born. For face smash, Are you hotter? Are you not? We'd gone to Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard dorm room. All the dorms were emptied out, the students all gone evacuated. So what what was your what was your grand vision for

bringing us here? I thought there would be flames, like licking the walls of veneer of Hell. I don't know, I just you know, I think about that moment of ditching your education to go make piles of money always troubles me, Like if you could go back in time, was there a different route? But I guess ryans aren't supposed to ask those questions. Those counterfactuals addresser but a little desk that nobody uses because everybody sets a laptop. This is weird. I don't remember this door being here

when we came in. Did you see this dark green door? No? No? And everything else is just that bland security deposit white? Why aren't there? We are in the middle of the hallway to this dorm room. Can we go through? Okay? Oh? No, wait a minute, what has happened? How are we? How did we get back here? Is this the last archive? There's a secret passageway from Mark zucker Brook's old dorm room into the West Archive. Oh my god, thank god,

we're Jesus. It's like we're in clue. Here. We are back in the place in our world where the known things go. Shelves stocked with proof, and all around the clutter of clues, a rock quarried in Vermont, reels and reels of tape, an old punch card reader, all this stuff from all the old episodes. It's laid out on a big oak library table. It's like I'm in a museum exhibit, but the hours are only midnight to two am, and there's no marketing budget or gift shop, and no

one will ever come or believe I was here. I wish they had like tote bags or something. No one ever believes me about this place, and I think all along I could have just gone out that other weird green door. Zuckerberg isn't the killer this case. It's like murder on the Orient Express. Everyone's the killer, all of us, Zuckerberg, Trump, Postmodernism. I blame them for a lot for opportunism and cynicism and nihilism. But with this crime, the killing of truth,

there's plenty of blame to go around. You need people to know things, You need a collective commitment to empiricism. We hold these truths. That's why people invented democracy. Any One who gives up on the idea that people together can share a world is killing truth. In an age of global pandemics, it's obvious how killing truth kills people. Democracy is a pain in the ass. It can be hard to be certain about anything when everyone has a voice.

But the point of living with other people, the purpose of democracy, like the purpose of a university, is that no one has all the answers. You've got to inquire. You can't believe in someone else's time capsule version of the past or the future. You've got somehow to get out into the world and talk to people, and especially you've got to listen mystery, fact, number data. Truth isn't any one of those things. It's in all of those

things together. And to really understand what the hell is going on, you probably also need to read some poetry or a book like Silent Spring. And I like to think you've got to study some history. You've got to love the places that make that knowledge, that keep it fragile. Place is worth protecting, the last Archive and the next one. I've got to lock this place up now until next season. A season of doubt. Wait wait, laate. This is a show about truth. We can't end without confessing. We did

not actually go to Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room. I'm a professor. I'd never go to someone's dorm room. Even after the dorms it emptied out. That was a simulation, forgive us. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben Natt of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is Emil Abell. Jason Gambrel and Martine Gonzalez are engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music

by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Many of her sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and The Star Janette Foundation. Our Foolproof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Guy Fedorco, and to Simon

Leake at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Knig, Carli Mgliori, Emily Rostek, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michellegau, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta O'Reilly, Olive Riskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. I'm Joe Lapoor. If you're interested in reading the history of the Simomatics Corporation, you could check out my book if then available September fifteenth. Wherever books are sold, visit simomatics dot com to learn more.