In 1967 the appliance manufacturer Philco-Ford made a short promotional film, 1999 A.D., directed by Lee Madden, showing how an American family would live at the turn of the millennium. A mother and her small son build a sandcastle replica of their house on a Southern California beach and write “1999 AD” next to it. The house is a modular “honeycomb structure” with a school center, a pool room, two bedrooms, one bathroom — and “the room where the computer lives.” The boy asks what everyone would go on asking: how does the computer know everything?

Broadly, it got the future right:

  • Video chat, on-demand weather, a chess simulator, a living-room synthesizer old enough to be dated
  • Fingertip shopping, disposable dishware, electronic banking with a home printer
  • A digital “home post office” for “instant written communication between individuals anywhere in the world”
  • Home schooling by “teaching machines” administering “audio-visual lessons”
  • Part-time work — a few days a week for the astrophysicist father, leaving time for golf, parties and a home laboratory hybridizing a giant peach

The prescience is the easy part. What makes the film worth watching sixty years on is the price list, which it recites with a chuckle. The household mainframe holds “all pertinent information about this family, its records, its tastes, and reference materials.” When the father requests a cheeseburger lunch and the kitchen monitor finds it over his daily caloric allotment, the request is tabled and cold roast beef arrives instead, freezer to microwave in two minutes. He logs his vitals on a “medical couch” that transmits them instantly to the community medical center and objects that “this thing can make a mistake you know” — to no effect. The home runs on its own fuel cell that burns waste and produces pure water, which PDR’s text notes has the trappings of a survivalist space colony.

The narration does not hide any of it. “If the computerized life occasionally extracts its pound of flesh,” the narrator allows, “it holds out some interesting rewards.” And the closing line is the best thing in the film: “Too computerized? Too cold? The world of tomorrow will be as cold as sunlight tuned through photochromic windows.”

The collection’s argument — and Thea Applebaum Licht’s — is that the sinister part was never smuggled in. It was in the sales pitch, packaged as convenience, and it is the half of the prediction that arrived most completely: the appliance company imagining the household that would buy its appliances, and writing itself into the plot as the computer that runs everything. The recommendation engine overriding the stated request is not a 2020s corruption of this vision. It was the vision.