All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

There are few people who's work I enjoy more than Adam Curtis. His documentaries draw together historical strands of psychology, philosophy, politics and economics in a way that I find hugely interesting.

He's best known for his take on the origins of The War on Terror, in "The Power of Nightmares", and how Freudian ideas shaped modern consumerism in "The Century of Self".

Now he's added a third full scale documentary to his canon,  "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

This is being broadcast over three episodes on BBC2, and the first one was tonight. Titled, "Love and Power" it showed how the individualistic philosophy of Ayn Rand fitted in with the post hippie ideologies of Silicon Valley to shape the globalisation of the world economy, and how those ideas, far from creating a sort of stable egalitariansim, caused instead, a shift in power from the State to the Markets. The next episode is broadcast next monday and is called

The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

2/3. This looks at how the idea of nature as a self-regulating ecosystem is a machine fantasy.

 

I can't wait.

In the meantime, if you didn't get the chance to see it, you can watch it again on the BBC iplayer

If you live outside the UK, and you'd like a copy, please let me know and I'll either put it onto soulseek, or burn you a copy.

If you're unfamiliar with Adam's work, I've embedded the fisrt parts of "The Power of Nightmares" and "The century of self" below.

You should be able to chain the following parts from there.