All Your Tomorrows Today is a Ken Hollings/​BBC doc­u­men­tary about the early days of RAND Corporation. Assembled by Curtis LeMay’s post-​​war Airf Force and highly influ­en­tial to US cold war polit­ical strategy, the RAND people were early sys­tems thinkers, and their sys­tems were com­prised largely of nations and nuclear weapons. They desired ratio­nality on topics that don’t lend them­selves to ratio­nality. And per­haps shouldn’t, but don’t sug­gest that to the main char­ac­ters in this story.

I par­tic­u­larly like one critic’s sug­ges­tion that RAND gen­er­ated a “rumor of war”, which is his term for a set of dis­jointed facts which give the illu­sion of rep­re­senting the whole truth. These people are what Dean Bavington would decry as ‘epis­ti­mo­log­ical’ com­plexity thinkers. They are willing to see the world as com­plex, but only as an inter­me­diary step to under­standing it deter­min­is­ti­cally. And just think, they had the ear of the people who had their finger on the button.

And yes, there is cov­erage of the inven­tion of the internet. I knew the stan­dard story about it being a com­mu­ni­ca­tion system meant to with­stand a nuclear strike, but I didn’t realize just how lit­er­ally and directly that was true. Although set in the Santa Monica sun, the whole story is frankly spooky.