This is another entry in the Life Magazine, 1964 series. If you want to read the series from the beginning, use the linkabove.

Before we go any further, I might mention that, no, I'm not covering every little detail. I've skipped a tedious editorial about the state of Mississippi being derelict in its actions to implement civil rights legislation, for example. I skipped it because it offered little insight to the era, wasn't very well written and told us something we all already know very well: the state of Mississippi had a hell of a time accepting (if indeed it has yet) black people as equals.

Next in our little journey, we find a very funny little article in the new "Reviews" section of the magazine. The title is "The Voter Can Still Cross Up A Computer" and it was written by Samuel Lubell, whom we discussed previously. He has been brought in by our Reviews Editor, Bayard Hooper (also discussed previously) to review a book called The 480, by Eugene Burdick, who also co-authored the book Fail Safe. The 480 (which has almost, but not quite, vanished from 21st century view, try googling it yourself) is based on a voting simulation that categorized US voters into 480 categories, based on more than 100,000 interviews performed in the late 1950's. Lubell starts his review thusly:

In this presidential year we seem to be witnessing the nomination of a new kind of American political villain -- the electronic computer.

First there was one named Oscar, who does his dirty work in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II's recent best-seller Convention. Armed with intimate details about all the delegates, Oscar is used to blackmail them into supporting the candidate favored by a leading missile contractor.

Now Eugene Burdick comes along to give villainy by computer a sensationalized working over in a novel called The 480.

It's interesting to note that the computers in question, those vile mechanical monsters, used punch cards and had nowhere near the memory capacity of a 21st century key fob. Their computing ability was roughly equivalent to the microcontroller in your garage door opener. But, hey, a menace is a menace.

Now I suppose I should welcome Burdick's protest against the "computerizing" of society, since currently I happen to be engaged in demonstrating that human beings can beat the computers in projecting and analyzing voting returns. But Burdick's thesis troubles me. He endows his simulators with an efficiency and abilities which they do not posses. As a result he misplaces his villains and also misunderstands the real menace to our society that is posed by computers.

I don't know about you, gentle readers, but I find this stuff fascinating. It's just hard to imagine (even for someone, like me, old enough to have lived through it and still remember it) how vilified computers were in the early days. I mean, here we have a machine as big as a house that may as well be steam powered for all its abilities and people were terrified of it. I think this is because computers could, in popular parlance of the day, "think". Never mind that they couldn't and still don't today, but ordinary people thought that, in some mechanical, punch card way, they could think. I believe this intruded on people's sensibilities. Thinking was the one thing that set people apart from everything else and if a machine could do it, it diminished humanity somehow. We've all gotten over that (most of us, anyway, mostly have) because we now know that computers don't "think", at least not if you define "thinking" as what goes on in the human brain. Anyway, back to our story:

At the same time Burdick overlooks what I regard as the real menace posed by computers -- that they may corrupt the thinking of the so-called intellectuals. It used to be that the intellectuals, somewhat detached from the rest of us, had a wider sensitivity than the general public to the interrelationships that bind our society together. But many of the most important of these relationships cannot be fitted into the computer's binary equivalent of "yes" and "no," or "stop" and "go." These nuances of human thought and reaction, which often cannot be programmed into the machine, tend to be left out of the projections that are supposed to simulate human behavior.

This conflict over what can be properly reduced to quantitative terms is not a new one, of course. However, it gains urgency because we are moving into a managed economy and a manipulated society, with managers and manipulators who are uncertain about their own judgment in the decisions they are called upon to make. Many of these managers and would-be manipulators seem under compulsion to oversimplify the problems they face, and they have been turning to statistics as today's great tool of oversimplification.

OK, now that is laugh-out-loud funny. He's worried that, somehow, in a fashion that still - after 40 years - is not apparent, intellectuals are being overcome by a desire to simplify the processes of society by reducing them to statistics which can be processed by computers. I have two reactions. First, I don't see how "intellectuals" (read that as "college professors") are connected to this process in any way. There must have been a time in the 1960's when a sane, intelligent man could think that "intellectuals" run the country, but I don't see how. On the other hand, the use of statistics and measurement have increased overwhelmingly when it comes to running the country, so, in that sense, he was right. The main take-away here, I think, is that you can read something sober and intelligent and well-meaning in a national magazine that turns out, in hindsight, to be drivel. Remember that next time you get worried about something you read in Time that prophecies doom and gloom. They get this stuff wrong all the time.

It's hard for me to believe, too. There was a time, only forty years ago - why, some of us are still living - when enough women in the American public were worried about being too skinny that it made economic sense to peddle them a quack nostrum in a very expensive advertising medium. These days, it only makes sense to peddle Wate-On on the internet. And, really, if "Wate-On" is the best name you can come up with, perhaps you need to find other work. I love some of the copy, too. "Helps fight fatigue, nervousness, sleepless nights due to exogenous under-weight condition". What percent of the Life-reading public would have known what the word exogenous meant? How many bottles, at $3 a pop for 96 tablets, would they have to sell to pay for the ad?

This is a good reminder that there was a time, not so long ago, when people owned cars that didn't even have seatbelts. I fondly remember a youth when my siblings and I rattled around the back seat of the station wagon like dice in a cup - no seat belts, no child seats, just us, perched along the bench seat. I also fondly remember that Adam West, Batman in the TV series of 1966, would always get a close-up of his lap as he buckled the seat belt in the Batmobile. It was important to let kids know that buckling up was so cool that even Batman did it. The funniest thing about this, however, is the crazy art. What does that marching jester have to do with seat belts? I get the pun between jester and "don't be foolish" (although, wouldn't "don't be a fool" be better?), but why bother? Shouldn't there be an automotive theme in there somewhere? And he's wearing a sword! What the hell is up with that? And, WTF, there's a dog in the picture. Dogs don't wear seat belts! Remember, this was an era when you could still keep a bottle of scotch in that big file drawer of your desk. Clearly, someone at the Ad Council had been having a little nip when they dreamt this one up.

I want to close out today's entry with a picture from an ad for a Philco refrigerator. This issue of Life has two ads for refrigerators (and not at all for stoves or dishwashers or any other kitchen appliances), so I suppose they were hot sellers in 1964. Philco, as I'm sure you will recall, was a subsidiary of Ford that was more associated with electronics - in my mind anyway. They brought us such cultural icons as the Philco Predicta. I was not aware that they had ever produced refrigerators, but apparently they had been for a long time. I know it's painful on the eyes, but here it is:

First of all, it's important to note that this color: , 40% cyan, 15% magenta and 25% yellow, is no longer available for use in appliances. At some point during the 1960's, so much of it had been used that it was put on the Endangered Color Palette and restricted from use. In fact, the horrible color palette of the 1970's can be directly tied to over use of this particular shade of eyeball-damaging blue. Can you imagine stumbling into the kitchen with a Sunday morning hangover and being accosted by a huge appliance of this color? They had more to worry about in the 1960's than The Bomb, that's for sure.

Notice what passes as a perfectly stocked refrigerator in 1964. Meat was important. This family had a turkey, a huge roast, an even bigger ham and a whole brace of sausages on hand. There was a whole gallon of milk for Susie and Junior, not to mention a whole gallon of ice cream in the freezer. There is a wide array of fruits and vegitables, both fresh and frozen, and a whopping one-pound chunk of butter. The real horror, however, of the 1960's can only be appreciated by the ice cube trays in the freezer. They had those old, metal trays, with the lever-action that was supposed to make it easy to get out the cubes, but in fact usually found some way to either shatter them all over the kitchen or pinch some tender part of your hand. That's right, in the primitive 1960's, they had no ice makers. They had to harvest their own ice with their own hands.

That's enough for today. I'll leave you to contemplate the horror of it until our next episode of Life Magazine, 1964.

Note: this entry is part of a series called "Life Magazine, 1964", which contains the following entries:
     Life Magazine, 1964
     Life Magazine, 1964, Part II
     Life Magazine, 1964, Part III
     Life Magazine, 1964, Part IV
     Life Magazine, 1964, Part V