Project X
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:09.0 | There's a place in our world where the known things go. A quarter of the mind lined with |
| 0:16.1 | shelves, stocked with proof, and cluttered with snacks. Here on top of this old television Snacks. |
| 0:27.0 | Here on top of this old television set, a pack of M&M's. Oh, does the TV still work? |
| 0:29.0 | I'd listen to everybody. |
| 0:32.0 | On TV and radio, I've read the papers and magazines. I've tried, but I'm still confused. |
| 0:39.0 | Who's right? What's right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell? |
| 0:46.0 | Yeesh! Sounds like something I would say. That's why I come here. |
| 0:51.0 | To this place, this cabinet of curiosities, a place that stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. |
| 0:59.0 | It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. |
| 1:05.0 | It lies in a time between now and then. |
| 1:07.8 | The sign on the door reads, |
| 1:10.0 | The last archive. |
| 1:12.4 | Step through that door. the last archive. |
| 1:12.5 | Step through that door to a studio at the Columbia Broadcasting System on election night |
| 1:20.1 | 1952. |
| 1:21.8 | Good evening everyone. 1952. York City, the big election night, 1952, the year when the United States picks its |
| 1:34.9 | 35 president. |
| 1:36.9 | Welcome to election night! |
| 1:40.3 | But election night 1952 wasn't just any night. |
| 1:44.0 | Because everything you know about how campaigns are run and how results are announced, |
| 1:49.2 | polls, targeted advertising, breathless television coverage, edge of your seat computer projections. |
... |
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