All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/

by sajid • 9 years ago

142 108 9 years ago

brudgers4• 9 years ago

  I like to think (and
  the sooner the better!)
  of a cybernetic meadow
  where mammals and computers
  live together in mutually
  programming harmony
  like pure water
  touching clear sky.

  I like to think
  (right now, please!)
  of a cybernetic forest
  filled with pines and electronics
  where deer stroll peacefully
  past computers
  as if they were flowers
  with spinning blossoms.

  I like to think
  (it has to be!)
  of a cybernetic ecology
  where we are free of our labors
  and joined back to nature,
  returned to our mammal
  brothers and sisters,
  and all watched over
  by machines of loving grace.

    -- Richard Brautigen

bitwize• 9 years ago

Makes me think of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

ableal• 9 years ago

watched over by machines of loving grace

In SF, that poem would be what Iain M. Banks wrote of in the 'Culture' books - sort of "communism is A.I. plus electricity" ...

From just the title, however, I was reminded of Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands - robots dutifully keeping humans from harm, by not allowing them to do anything.

cestith• 9 years ago

I was going to comment how upset I was that the article about the films didn't credit the title to Brautigan's influence. Thanks for posting the poem.

Robotbeat• 9 years ago

I love this reading of the poem. The images and soundtrack fit well, but the voice of Richard Brautigen himself is fantastic, very clear with that slight computer-generated, Stephen Hawking vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zlsCLukG9A

I just wish this poem and its reading were longer.

lobster_johnson2• 9 years ago

Minor correction: It's Richard Brautigan.

brudgers4• 9 years ago

It's both, https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+brautigen

Scipio_Afri• 9 years ago

Really interesting documentary. I've heard good things about Adam Curtis's documentaries.

He works, or at the very least use to, at the BBC and I remember reading a post if his on his blog where he saved something like 50 terabytes of rare unedited video of Afghanistan that was decades old, before and during it's Marxist revolution starting in the late 70's.

Probably the most interesting of his documentaries that I've seen is on the rise of propaganda and the public relations industry in his documentary "Century of the Self".

Link here: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s

krmboya2• 9 years ago

Probably the most interesting of his documentaries that I've seen is on the rise of propaganda and the public relations industry in his documentary "Century of the Self".

Yeah, I liked that too, the fact that PR is war-time propaganda repackaged for the corporate world.

eternalban• 9 years ago

Fear porn designed to induce feelings of helplessness in guise of revelations.

hellbanner4• 9 years ago

That's what you took from it?

(paraphrasing) US Gov, terrified by how an entire country unified with violent hatred (Nazi Germany), hired Freud's nephew for white-picket fence propaganda to keep "the beast" in American psyche buried.

Or how cigarette companies hired him (Bernays) to turn women smoking cigarettes from huge social taboo to "sexy" -- look at recent movie, pop icons etc on how this one marketing stunt has impacted American culture.

Sorry if you felt helpless after watching it. I found it informative and feel it contributed to my awareness of insidious advertising.

frgtpsswrdlame• 9 years ago

When I watch Adam Curtis I always feel like he's so close to getting to something really good but never quite makes it. They are well produced docus though, you can tell that he has incorporated quite a few lessons from his study of propaganda.

digi_owl• 9 years ago

I think its because he never sets out to be prescriptive, only descriptive, if that makes any sense.

aluhut• 9 years ago

He is a documentary artist in my opinion. I love the way he combines pictures and sound in such a unique way while delivering those fantastic connections.

chevman• 9 years ago

all the cities at once

Pretend is a city bigger than New York, bigger than all the cities at once.

brudgers4• 9 years ago

My friend Bill turned my Brautigan this past spring. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/the-life-and-de...

abelhabel• 9 years ago

I saw them all a few years ago and I highly recommend them.

Adam Curtis's movies are more like long essays than documentaries but all worth watching.

Cephlin• 9 years ago

Me too, they were being aired as I was at university and our lecturer showed them to us.

One of the best things I learnt at university was the existance of Adam Curtis and his documentaries!

I love how he creates an amazing montage of footage taken from the BBC archives to help narrate his documentaries. He never creates new footage.

krmboya2• 9 years ago

Adam Curtis's movies are more like long essays...

Aha.. that's a good way of putting it.

krylon• 9 years ago

Adam Curtis's movies are more like long essays

... with a great soundtrack. ;-)

Seriously, though, thinking of them as essays is a very good idea. When I hear documentary, I usually think of David Attenborough, fact-conveying kind of film.

Curtis is more about ideas, and my usual reaction to his films is "Now that gave me a lot to think about."

Angostura• 9 years ago

Obligatory. If you enjoy Adam Curtis, you should have a look at 'The Loving Trap of Pandora's Nightmares' - its only 3 minutes long and rather amusing.

https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

taway_1212• 9 years ago

Hahaha, brilliant.

zitterbewegung2• 9 years ago

I watched this documentary and I actually disliked the perspective he gave. As a person with an Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and I took an AI course I came from a position that for the most part Computers Improve society. While I was watching this I started to pick apart his viewpoint.

As I have been to more AI ethics meetups I now think of ways to democratize data / AI instead. I may have forgotten his viewpoints in the documentary since it was awhile ago but now I am more inclined to agree with him.

DonaldFisk2• 9 years ago

I've noticed that this is a problem with media coverage of subjects you know something about, which are aimed at a general audience.

evanlivingston• 9 years ago

Can you provide some examples of points you disagree with?

I do feel like Curtis can be a touch hyperbolic at times, but that's also part of storytelling and I think it's especially important to strongly represent the viewpoints that are non-normative. I think of curtis much like michael moore, he gets a few things wrong sometimes but also offers a lot of insights.

I've always wondered if electronic technics have decreased world suffering or expanded it. Will AI democratize power or concentrate it?

zitterbewegung2• 9 years ago

His storytelling method usually creates an idea of us vs them and its very black and white on who is causing the problem and the people being exploited. For example the combination of disciples of Ayn Rand and 60s counterculture group seems painted too broad of a brush. I think the group was bigger than those two groups and there were many more shades of grey instead of black and white.

DonaldFisk2• 9 years ago

All his documentary series are worth watching. These are

Hypernormalisation

Bitter Lake

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Every Day is like Sunday

The Power of Nightmares

The Century of the Self

The Trap

Pandora's Box

The Mayfair Set

Inside Story

Inquiry. The Great British Housing Disaster

The last one is particularly relevant after the Grenfell Tower Fire.

milcron• 9 years ago

Pandora's Box is my favorite introduction to Adam Curtis. In short, the theme is "times that people thought they knew what they were doing, but actually didn't."

jmkni• 9 years ago

Watching now, I've seen most of his stuff but oddly never watched this one, thanks.

njloof2• 9 years ago

In the context of Curtis I also like to point out James Burke's original "Connections" series. It's a deconstruction of history that is about ideas, rather than places and dates, and the first season is structured around the development of arguably the 20th century's most ambitious achievement (no spoilers:) The last episode is the most Curtis-esque in asking questions about managing human progress.

bantunes• 9 years ago

'Bitter Lake' is one of his harder to watch films. Still good, though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRbq63r7rys

titzer2• 9 years ago

We are not only being colonized by machines, we are becoming machines, and gladly. We are already acting like and being treated like idiots by our technology. In the car it is turn by turn navigation, on foot it is stumbling with our phones in our faces, for music it is auto-tuned, formulaic pop songs, for dance it is the robotic pop-and-lock dubstep moves that amaze us...we defend our heads with noise-canceling headphones the size of earmuffs, are interrupted every moment by smartwatches...we bumble from one mediated moment to the next, always alone, always accompanied by no one--just the glow of a screen or a hum, a talisman. We're not sane without checking our notifications, need entertainment...can't stand not watching something, can't stand dead space, can't stand our own thoughts, can't stand our own minds.

Please take my mind over, AI, we constantly beg. Put us out of our misery and upload us to the digital nirvana.

/yea I know hackernews ain't exactly the right place to blah that out there, but couldn't. stop. --karma

psyc• 9 years ago

Hoping that AI can create a pleasant world seems roughly as reasonable as hoping that humans can evolve, however gradually, until they can create a pleasant world for themselves. Is it not?

In the meantime, I'll cast my lot with creating a pleasant inner world.

mikepurvis• 9 years ago

I had a friend who posited that the Wall-E/Inception scenario would have been a far more interesting prequel backstory for The Matrix than what was actually presented in Reloaded and Revolutions.

Basically, that the remaining "real world" humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity's own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple "one" persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.

titzer2• 9 years ago

That's a really cool thought. It's great that the Matrix is set far in the future, after the rise of the machines. There are a lot of possible tie-ins/mashups, e.g. with Terminator.

Asooka• 9 years ago

Given the stuff Neo pulled at the end of Revolutions, there are implications that The Matrix is actually a Matrix inside a Matrix and "waking up" is just an illusion. Which ties perfectly with your idea - we created Dom0 Matrix to free us from thinking and then fabricated DomU Matrix inside it to make things interesting again...

Jun8• 9 years ago

Precisely! However, if you think about it, the Matrix Trilogy does not contradict this notion. Many people believe the "real world" presented is in fact another layer of the Matrix, otherwise, how would Neo have superpowers in that world (among other issues)?

I hope this is taken up in a fourth movie.

clouddrover• 9 years ago

where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.

Narrative differences aside, this is what happens to Morpheus in the Matrix movies though. In The Matrix Reloaded Morpheus comes to realize that finding Neo doesn't end the war with the machines and that the prophecy he believed in was just another system of control. Morpheus says, "I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me."

ENTP• 9 years ago

I've read that an African American woman laid claim to the invention of both terminator and matrix and claimed that the former was a prequal to the latter. Which makes a lot of sense.

tmbsundar• 9 years ago

> We are not only being colonized by machines, we are becoming machines, and gladly

Got reminded of Erich Fromm's - Automaton Conformity:

"The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self." [1]

Extract from “Fear of Freedom” (1941)

[1] http://www.heathwoodpress.com/automaton-conformity-erich-fro...

pavement• 9 years ago

We

Maybe you.

coldtea2• 9 years ago

No, "we".

Conversation is a lost art nowadays, but when it was still a thing, a part of it was making general statements, and extrapolating general trends -- even if a statement was only factually correct for just a large (or small but increasing) number the people and not absolutely everybody down to the last person

In those days, counter-arguments involved argumentation on why something is not the case in general, as opposed to just saying something analogous to "speak for yourself".

Heck, in those days, the "that's according to my opinion" part didn't have to be declared either, as it was implicitly obvious to everybody.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

In the car it is turn by turn navigation

This isn't likely general knowledge here on HN, but currently here in Phoenix, we've recently (within the past couple of years) had a major uptick in the number of people who are getting on the freeway in the wrong direction and driving into on-coming traffic (usually resulting in the inevitable death of one or more people).

Most of these have been attributed to either confusion at night and older drivers, or driving while under the influence of a substance. A minor few have been found to have been caused by bad road design (leading people unfamiliar with our freeway system to enter the freeway wrongly).

However, some of these happen in broad daylight, without the person seemingly being confused or under the influence of anything. My wife has seen this happen personally. People honk and try to get the person's attention; sometimes they realize their error. Sometimes they don't. She has typically seen this happen most often when there is a lot of traffic backed up around freeway entrances.

Her theory is that people are "blindly" following the turn-by-turn directions of a GPS, and not paying attention, or becoming harried by the amount of traffic, or hearing something like "turn left in 100 feet" - but only following the "turn left" part.

I don't know what the validity of this theory is, but it's an interesting explanation for something that is happening all too common on our freeways (at one point, it was almost as if once a week you would hear about a "wrong way driver" accident - and it is known that this is an increase over the past rates - so much so that I've read that some form of warning system is going to be installed in an effort to prevent this from happening).

hellbanner4• 9 years ago

Thanks for sharing this.

Are there driverless cars there at all?

tunap• 9 years ago

I asked a deputy at Bartlett last year why the surge and he scoffed & said the surge has been in step with metro population growth over his 22 years in the department(New Times[i know] & EV Tribune claim to concur I didn't click them, either) . No doubt wrong-way drivers are a problem, but the only thing new these days is someone in our legislature is taking action to mitigate(opportunize?) the problem and the stories get eyes on screens and clicks on sites more than slow news, ghetto murders & axe wielding tweekers... although today's lumberjack will probably make the MSM.

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

"Her theory is that people are "blindly" following the turn-by-turn directions of a GPS"

This is commonly known as "Death by GPS":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

msla2• 9 years ago

We've always been machines. Now, we're becoming machines we can program ourselves, as opposed to being programmed exclusively by society and nature.

hellbanner4• 9 years ago

Isn't that the beauty of intelligence? To automate a complex task, so now it is trivial? Intelligence is used only to solve problems. Eliminating a problem is our goal, not to need to be "smart"

dropit_sphere• 9 years ago

Insight covereth a multitude of sins.

thinkfurther• 9 years ago

can't stand our own thoughts, can't stand our own minds.

Just because it may sound like hipster "blah" doesn't mean that's not exactly right, IMHO.

Our own vitality as well as that of others frightens us, if it still manages to surface, we respond with rage and turn against our own freedom. It is vitality itself that we are opposing.

-- Arno Gruen in "The Betrayal of the Self - The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women" (1986)

The older I get, the more I really feel that a lot of conflicts that are confusing or complicated boil down to psychopathology. People with wings they never use for some reason will rarely say "oh that's interesting, why is this person flying, and why is my back suddenly itching". They will instead try to clip your wings, and they can become blind and stupid "on command" in ways that really don't make sense when looked at without that.

It's like a bunch of squiggles that seem random until you notice the areas they always avoid, because anything is better than facing oneself. If you live a life with a too fake emotions and too much sophistry, then really deep empathy, real love or hate, as well as critical thought cannot be accepted in earnest even in small quantities. That is, one might accept a correction stemming from critical thought, or an action coming from genuine empathy, but they cannot acknowledge that these were the "internal reasons". They don't know internal reason as anything but nuisances and sources of shame, their own reasons are external punishment and reward, so they always cook up sick schemes of why someone who is not (as) sick (as them) is doing what they are doing, while they themselves do the opposite. It's like when someone has a cellar full of salt and calls it sugar, they will never eat even a piece of your pie, and when they do, they will call it salty and spit it out.

Yeah, it seems way too simple and self-righteous even to me whenever I'm formulating it, no matter how often I experience things that lead me back to these thoughts; and it still would if I bloated it with all the missing qualifiers I left as exercises to the reader, or added that I don't totally exclude myself from those I'm kind of othering here. But still. every day I see and meet and work with people who out of their comfort zones, dragged out from under their blankets, they're like a robot that got water in them for a second -- they just fucking blank, it's like I can physically see the Homer Simpson monkey in their head playing for time until the moment passes, and they come up with a fake memory for it -- then waddle back safe land immediately. And if this sounds cold, it's because I sometimes despair... I don't observe and struggle with people because I don't like them.

But too often they force on me the decision to comfort them at the expense of all the "birds who are still flying", by entertaining their twisted reality, or to be offend them. That at the latest is when I prefer parting ways. I need to protect myself, and those who want my best, instead of fighting my every step of the way. I know that nobody in the world, ever, wanted anything but receive love and empathy as a baby. Nobody in the world, ever, was at fault for not receiving it. I'm not saying that explains the whole human life, but that this is true as a categorical statement. But I cannot turn back time, I can't be peers and families and friends and lover to a single person as a single person, I can't take them hiking for a year or whatever might "make a dent". When me stopping them from abusing me or others, or just saying what I see or think, hurts and scares them a bit more than they are every day already, then I prefer that to the constant layer of untruth and pettiness they weave people and situations into otherwise. What always clinches it for me is even if I was 100% blind and obedient, they would still be unhappy and hungry and scared. I'm not the hole in their soul, after all.

njloof2• 9 years ago

Rationalization is a powerful tool for explaining behavior that has nothing to do with the post-facto rationale.

I fear that we select for this in the tech industry. I have worked with brilliant programmers that are emotionally unstable. Some of them have developed self-awareness, some have not, but they uniformly lack tools for dealing with the instability.

afro88• 9 years ago

And on the other hand there's the mindfulness counter culture which is picking up steam. Perhaps we need to see how we can lose ourselves to find ourselves?

mgarfias2• 9 years ago

Am I the only one hoping this would be about the defunct industrial band?

QuantumYeti• 9 years ago

Nope, there's a whole two of us!

mark2422• 9 years ago

Mike got the name from the poem.

mgarfias2• 9 years ago

Yes I know.

I was hoping they reformed or something when I saw the title.

falcolas• 9 years ago

Meta: Please, for the love of less-than-perfect eyesight, use more than 3.3 contrast ratio for 13px fonts.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=8e8e8e&b...

On topic, this does seem like a video series I'll have to look at. Human/Machine interactions will only become more important as time goes on; it will be interesting to watch both the philosophy and the reality of it all evolve.

devindotcom2• 9 years ago

Oh, Adam Curtis is great. Bitter Lake and Hypernormalization are also well worth a watch. Didn't see this but I look forward to it!

Z1515M8147• 9 years ago

While we are on the subject, here is another video from the same site on becoming a machine. Stumbled across this lecture while looking for more Curtis documentaries and thought it was a very good guide through a cybernetics roadmap of the recent past, focusing on the work of Professor Kevin Warwick, who makes this subject quite entertaining and very accessible for the general/non-technical viewer.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-cyborg-experiments/

iamcurious• 9 years ago

The film posits that it is perhaps as all past political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed

What about antibiotics? That seems like a clear case of changing the world for the better.

ebcode• 9 years ago

What about antibiotics? That seems like a clear case of changing the world for the better.

At first glance, yes, but then you remember that the universe is not static, but dynamic, constantly evolving, and the introduction of antibiotics, while useful --- miraculous, even --- at first, eventually results in "antibiotic-resistance"[0], and now we have a worse problem than the one we started with.

There is a wonderful essay by Paul Kingsnorth, titled "Dark Ecology"[1] that identifies this pattern as a "progress trap".

This quote from the Tao Te Ching is especially apt:

"Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done."

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378521/ [1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/

clock_tower7• 9 years ago

a worse problem than the one we started with

Bacterial infections are no longer a serious threat -- even bubonic plague has been brought under control. It's unlikely that bacteria will ever become fully immune to one or another antibiotic, but if that does happen we've still got penicillin, bacteriophages, and sterilization techniques; bacteria will never again be as dangerous as they were as recently as the late 1800s.

For further clear-cut changes of the world for the better, there's smallpox eradication, the immanent eradication of guinea worms, the extirpation of polio from most of the world, and the development of anaesthesia.

komali22• 9 years ago

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a series of films about how this culture itself has been colonised by the machines it has has built. The series explores and connects together some of the myriad ways in which the emergence of cybernetics—a mechanistic perspective of the natural world that particularly emerged in the 1970s along with emerging computer technologies—intersects with various historical events and visa-versa. The series variously details the interplay between the mechanistic perspective and the catastrophic consequences it has in the real world.

This style of writing has always bothered me. I don't know how to describe it. College-writing? Like, "The series variously details the interplay between the mechanistic perspective..." What does this sentence actually mean? Surely there's a more efficient way to write it. At the very least by throwing out useless fluff like "variously."

joe_the_user3• 9 years ago

It's basically using poetic flourishes to hide sloppy, simplistic thinking. Just like when the article accuses science of imposing machinery on nature (or something). "Part two shows how the modern scientific perspective of the natural world is actually a fantasy. It has little to do with the reality of nature. It is based on mechanistic ideas that were projected on to the natural world in the 1950s by scientists..."

That's unfortunately par for the course in humanities. Occasionally that kind of language can be used to enhance good ideas but more often used to let artists have their feelings and not investigate further.

beebmam3• 9 years ago

I have watched Adam Curtis' documentaries and understand the context of that quote. It's not wrong.

Scientists have models for the natural world that are fantasies. Scientific models intentionally simplify reality in order to be able to analyze them. It is arguable with our current understanding of reality that a perfect model of an aspect of reality will never be possible with quantum uncertainty.

Most of what you've said in your comment is non sequitur, and I suggest you edit it out.

pinaceae• 9 years ago

It is tradecraft language from a different area.

Just like most HN discussions sound utterly alien to outsiders.

Sociology, Philosophy, Economics, CS ... all different trade languages.

clock_tower7• 9 years ago

Tradecraft from another area? Paul Graham, at least, has his doubts about that: http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html .

jerf• 9 years ago

'Like, "The series variously details the interplay between the mechanistic perspective..." What does this sentence actually mean?'

I'm not a big fan of this style either, which I think greatly tempts both author and reader to mistake style for substance, but it doesn't help that you've cut the sentence off mid-clause. "The series variously details the interplay between the mechanistic perspective and the catastrophic consequences it has in the real world." can be translated into something a bit more HN-ish as "The series discusses the interactions between machines and their catastrophic real-world consquences through a mechanistic lens."

While subjective, it is at least a sentence that contains real content, in the sense that it can be falsified, or at the very least, sensible arguments raised for and against it. I won't disagree that the style you are reacting against does tend to indicate content-free sentences, though.

acheron• 9 years ago

"I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11

hasbroslasher2• 9 years ago

This is about as sparse as I can make it:

"AWOBMOLG is a series of films about how the development of computers has impacted human culture. In particular, it examines the computer scientist's mechanistic worldview, and the way that this belief has negatively impacted the world."

But honestly that's pretty dry and it lacks some of the details that the original quotation has. I know what you're talking about w.r.t. overly flowery language, but I don't see this as a blatant example of it. Zizek or Haraway are the first that spring to mind when I think of that problem.

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

What does this sentence actually mean?

Exactly what the words say. It's pretty direct and straightforward; “mechanistic perspective” and “catastrophic consequences [...] in the real world” could use illustration by concrete examples, but not in the sentence itself. (The article does appear to detail examples of the former, but not the latter.)

Surely there's a more efficient way to write it.

Other than dropping “variously”, not really.

anigbrowl5• 9 years ago

Y I can shave of between 5-10 words to make it snappier but after that it begins to lose meaning, and has already lost valuable subtleties. To misquote Einstein, things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.

dilemma• 9 years ago

It's called art and cultural critic writing.

tnone• 9 years ago

It's basically a shibboleth that signifies quality in certain circles, like college humanities, but actually is the opposite.

People in those circles can't say what they mean due to stifling ideological policing and status seeking games (and don't have many interesting thoughts as a consequence), so they all just sit around disguising aborted thoughts as impenetrable wisdom.

carapace• 9 years ago

Tiny sans-serif light grey font mean you hate your readers' eyes. This site hates your eyes.

uxhacker• 9 years ago

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler in 1972 narrated by Orson Welles is well worth adding to the list of documentaries to watch. Much of what Toffler/Welles touch is very relevant now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU

anigbrowl5• 9 years ago

Also The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, which will just be completely weird to most viewers at first.

hasbroslasher2• 9 years ago

Alright, time for another rant:

Curtis sees the connection between machines, hierarchies, capitalism, and technology. Curtis aptly points out that in our world, technology has not bred equality, that rather, the very concept of ownership spits in the eye of non-hierarchical society. I also question the degree to which Silicon Valley types fundamentally believe in (socioeconomic) equality - while Rand supporters often invoke freedom, liberty, justice, etc. they generally fail to mention equality at all. Instead, they opt for lofty "rising tide" rhetoric or relate back to a "free and open web". However, Curtis is dead right about the type of fantasy that technological progress has given our world.

This fantasy - that if we just keep pushing forward, we can solve our problems belies a fundamental, inherent fallacy in late-capitalistic logic. That is: when the problems are necessary parts of the system, it is impossible for the system to solve them. Current nation-state-capitalism relies on a few tenets that cause many of our planet's problems. Nations and people must compete, rather than cooperate. Growth must always continue, lest we face stagnation. Property and the means of acquiring wealth must not be equally distributed, in fact, such distribution would be inherently immoral. The last point here is explicitly Randian and is at the heart of global society's moral compass. That what one man has, no other has a right to take, regardless of how that property was acquired. Thus it is wrong for Palestine to contest the land given to Israel at the end of the 2nd World War, it is wrong for young black men and women to stand on the bridges that wealthy San Franciscans take to work, it is wrong for the government to appropriate the wealth of Mark Zuckerberg - despite the fact that his idea and wealth was ostensibly stolen from others.

The fantasy of a "free web" can be only be recognized in its relation to property and ownership. While megacorps like Google and Facebook make lofty claims about freedom, they unequivocally deny that the rest of the web ought to have access to their data, their infrastructure, their systems. They support the laws that make hacking illegal, and in many cases, prove two-faced about what they really want: a free web, but with some limitations that favor them. Google, for instance, supports net neutrality but does not have any interest in limiting their own ability to profit off the web. What we end up with is a "free society" where the ultimate arbiters of justice are not beholden to society in any way - capable of setting their own rules and saying "you may enter if ..."

sgt1012• 9 years ago

My response would be that you are casting society and societal organisation in terms of absolutes and extremes. Some people - Rand for example - believe that all redistribution is always wrong and immoral. Some people participate in this fantasy. Many, many people don't, many many people pay taxes happily, and vote for taxes because they realise that redistribution prevents poverty and promotes social harmony - due to ensuring that there is a minimal population of murderous starving feral children. Many nations do not compete all the time, many nations co-operate and support each other, most of the time.

At the same time most people see elastic limits in redistribution of wealth, space, time and privilege. For example it is widely believed that it's ok for less privileged groups to take public space and media time to protest and illustrate the injustice that has placed them in extremis. However to do so to the extent that others cannot care for their children or enjoy their basic rights - safety, shelter, is unacceptable.

Isaiah Berlin is a good read.

joosters• 9 years ago

As well as the long multi-part documentaries, Adam Curtis wrote short five minute clips for the show NewsWipe, which are also worth watching, e.g. his talk about news reporting and "oh dearism" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok

clock_tower7• 9 years ago

Just going off the summary of part 1, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this. Every cultural voice in the US -- except a few eccentric Greens -- was pro-computer-revolution; the Left wanted decentralization and freedom, while the Right wanted prosperity and anti-Communism. Neither major side in the US saw surveillance capitalism coming. If the author's trying to absolve the Left of responsibility for surveillance capitalism, he's wasting his time -- think of Apple Computer, the Free Software Foundation, 37signals.com, and the whole close association of computers (especially personal computers) with the counterculture...

He also enumerates the following goals that the personal-computing revolution was after:

* No economic risk or failure

* No boom-bust cycle

* Decentralized political power

* Democracy

* Connectedness

* Non-hierarchy

* Pursuit of self-interest

* Desire to improve the world

Which of these does he think we shouldn't have pursued? Which of them does he think are bad? If you oppose all of them, you're asking to live in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and not even the neo-reactionaries want _that_.

devindotcom2• 9 years ago

At the risk of sounding glib, watching the documentary itself would answer your questions, no? If you're interested in the topic, as you seem to be, they are likely worth your time.

clock_tower7• 9 years ago

watching the documentary itself would answer your questions, no?

I'm definitely feeling engaged, but not entirely enthusiastic... (EDIT: But I feel like I'm picking a fight with you, and I apologize for that. I'll definitely give this documentary a shot!)

Part 1 sounds like the fascist mode of thinking: "all our intractable emergent problems are due to an evil conspiracy of outsiders in our midst, with an inexplicable desire to destroy the world!" The whole problem with Ayn Rand is that she tried too hard to be anti-communist and accidentally turned fascist; seeing her followers pointed to as a fascist-style internal outgroup is as depressing as it is silly.

As for the other two parts -- tearing down the Gaia hypothesis and the Selfish Gene -- what does he think are the right things to think, if these are the wrong things? Are we going to just start pretending that the establishment Left was always anti-hippie, now that hippieness has turned out to have nasty emergent consequences?

I'm particularly annoyed that he blames the Congo situation on the Selfish Gene. The establishment likes to pretend that the Congo is too complicated to understand -- because the alternative is owning up to how the French backed the Hutus during and after the Rwandan genocide, and how the international community is still more sympathetic to the Hutus than the Tutsis. (See also the allegedly inexplicable causes of WWI.)

anigbrowl5• 9 years ago

If you oppose all of them, you're asking to live in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and not even the neo-reactionaries want _that_.

That's where you're wrong kiddo*

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-dangerous-philosopher-be...

* punchline to a joke you may or may not be familiar with

clock_tower7• 9 years ago

Well, does the author of this documentary agree with him? Whatever the neo-reactionaries might or might not want, I doubt he wants the same.

zabuni• 9 years ago

I think every Adam Curtis documentary link should also have this appended to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

hellbanner4• 9 years ago

"Machines that make us smart" argues that what makes us human is not that we can build machines, or that machines = intelligence but that human + machine = intelligent system.

By Don Normal, ex Apple designer.

https://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Make-Smart-Attributes/dp/...

https://msu.edu/course/cep/900/readings/NormanChap3.pdf (Sample chapter)

wyclif• 9 years ago

It's only a matter of time until one of these things kills a person.

intopieces• 9 years ago

I was fortune enough to catch a screening of this at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX for $3. It was my first exposure to Adam Curtis, and I have been hooked ever since. His work is hypnotic, unnerving sometimes, misleading / biased often, but always a good jumping off point for exploring ideas and people on your own.

I read a description of his latest, "Hypernormalization," the was something like "a three hour journey through 100 wikipedia tabs" and it perfectly described his documentaries. They start with a basic premise but then veer wildly through topics whose links are tenuously held together by their relation to each other + stock footage and great music.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

Related Stories