All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (television documentary series)
Encyclopedia
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a three part BBC
documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis
, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self
, The Trap and The Power of Nightmares
. The first episode aired on Monday 23 May 2011 at 9pm on BBC2.
It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us".
The title is the same as a 1967 poem and collection of poems
by Richard Brautigan
.
In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand
's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan
.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille
, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead
from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.
When published, although critically savaged, Rand's Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley
. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology
) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become 'Randian heroes', only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.
Rand entered into an affair with Nathaniel Branden
, another married person in The Collective, which she proposed to justify in terms of her value of "rationality", and with the approval of his wife. After several years, the affair ended violently and was revealed to rest of The Collective, which broke up. Rand ended up alone in her New York apartment, although Greenspan continued to visit.
Greenspan entered government in the 70s, and became Chairman of the Federal Reserve
. In 1992 he visited the newly elected Bill Clinton
. He persuaded him to let the markets grow, cut taxes, and to let the markets stabilise themselves with computer technology, to create the New Economy
. This involved using computer models to predict risks and hedge against them, in accordance with the Californian Ideology. However, by 1996, the production figures had failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless increasing; and Greenspan suggested that it wasn't working. After political attacks from all side, Greenspan changed his mind and decided that perhaps the New Economy was real, but that it couldn't be measured using normal economic measures, and so the apparent boom continued.
In 1994 Carmen Hermosillo
published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace", and it began to be argued that the result of computer networks had led to, not a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to companies.
Although the Asian miracle had led to long-term growth in South Korea and other countries Joseph Stiglitz began warning that the withdrawing of foreign financial investment from the Far Eastern economies could cause devastation there. However, he was unable to warn the president, being blocked by Robert Rubin
, who feared damage to financial interests.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand
, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.
After his handling of the economic effects of 9/11 Alan Greenspan became more important, and in the wake of Enron he cut interest rates to stimulate the economy. Unusually this failed to cause inflation. It seemed that the New Economy was working to stabilise the economy.
However, in reality, to avoid a repeat of the earlier collapse, China's Politburo
had decided to manage America's economy via similar techniques to those used by America on the other Far Eastern countries; by keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, and with the proceeds, had bought American bonds. The money flooding into America permitted massive loans to be available to those that would previously be considered too risky. The belief in America was that computers could stabilise and hedge the lending of the money. This permitted lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable. The high level of loan defaulting led ultimately to the 2008 collapse
due to a similar housing bubble that the Far Eastern countries had previously faced.
Curtis ends the piece by pointing out that not only had the idea of market stability failed to be borne out in practice, but that the Californian Ideology had also been unable to stabilise it; indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.
This episode investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature
. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings to attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.
Arthur Tansley
had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud
. However, one part of Freud's theory was that the human brain was an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystem
s, which he believed were inherently self-stable and self correcting and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.
Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems, who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought that computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.
The ecology
movement adopted this idea also and viewed the natural world as systems as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.
Norbert Wiener
laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics.
Howard T. Odum
and Eugene Odum
were brothers who were both ecologists. Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them. His brother Eugene then took these ideas to make them the heart of ecology, and the hypothesis then became a certainty. However, they had distorted the idea, and simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. That ecology was balanced became an unexamined and unscientific assumption.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s Buckminster Fuller
invented a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome
which emulated ecosystems by being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts. His other system based ideas inspired the Counterculture movement. Commune
s of people considering themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, and used his domes as habitats. These societies mostly broke up within 3 years.
Also in the 1960s Stewart Brand
filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboard
that he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals.
In 1967 Richard Brautigan
published the poetry work All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
which called for a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability.
By the 1970s new problems such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution that couldn't be solved by normal hierarchical systems had arrived. Jay Forrester stated that he knew how to solve this, and applied systems theory
to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model, which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome
, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth, to maintain a steady state stable equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth.
However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement
, since the model didn't allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansley
who had invented the term ecosystem
, had once accused Field Marshal Jan Smuts
of the abuse of vegetational concepts. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism
, where everyone had a 'rightful place', which was to be managed by white races. The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.
At the time, there was a general belief in the stability of natural systems. However cracks started to appear when a study was made of predator-prey relationship of wolf and elks. It was found that wild population swings had occurred over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne
then tried to build a computer model, to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, so as to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise the computer model did not stabilize like the Odums' electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality whereas the Odums and other previous ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature." The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.
In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only by the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians.
However, the freedom from these revolutions in fact lasted for only a short time. Curtis compared them with the hippie communes, all of which had broken up within three years as the powerful members of the group began to bully the weaker ones; the weaker members were unable to band together in their own defence because power structures had been prohibited by the commune's rules.
Adam Curtis closes the piece by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, it is much less good at what comes next; networks leave people helpless in the face of people already in power in the world.
. Adam Curtis also covered the source of ethnic conflict that was created by Belgian colonialism's artificial creation of a racial divide and the ensuing slaughter
that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
, which is a source of raw material for computers and cell phones.
William Hamilton went to Kisangani
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
while the Second Congo War
was raging. He went there to collect Chimpanzee faeces to test his theory that HIV was due to a medical mistake
. Unfortunately he caught malaria
, for which he took aspirin
, which caused a haemorrhage and he died. However his selfish gene theory lived on.
In 1960 Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup and the elected leader was assassinated, creating chaos. The Western mining operations were largely unaffected however.
Bill Hamilton was a solitary man, and he saw everything through the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution
. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans gave up their life for others, he went to Waterloo station and stared at humans for hours, and looked for patterns. In 1963 he realised that most of the behaviours of humans was due to genes, and looking at the humans from the genes' point of view. Humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and that it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene elsewhere would prosper.
In the 1930s Armand Denis
made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's Tutsi
s being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race. In reality they were racially the same and the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth. But when it came to create independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided that the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to a blood bath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.
In 1967 American George R. Price
went to London after reading Hamilton's little known papers and discovering that he was already familiar with the equations, that they were the equations of computers. He was able to show that the equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness, spite, since these behaviours could help the genes. John Von Neumann
had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence, that humans were the machines.
This had a bad effect on Price, and Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though the equations disproved the existence of God.
In Congo, a civil war was ongoing, and Dian Fossey
, who was researching gorillas was captured. She escaped and created a new camp high up on a mountain in Rwanda where she continued to study gorillas. She tried to completely protect the gorillas who were very susceptible to human diseases, and with the best of intentions, terrorised the local people and became hated.
In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity, as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions Price decides to start helping poor and homeless people all his possessions in acts of pure altruism, influenced and inspired by Christian religion.
In the Congo, President Mobutu changed the Congo's name to Zaire
and looted millions of dollars and let mines and industries collapse, killed his opponents and stopped a liberal democracy from forming.
While this was happening, at Fossey's camp, Digit, her favourite gorilla had been killed, and later she was too.
Price's attempt to disprove Hamilton's theory had utterly failed, and he comes to believe he is being followed by the hound of heaven
. He finally reveals, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.
Richard Dawkins
took the equations and popularised them and explains that humans are simply machines controlled by the selfish genes; and in a sense reinventing the immortal soul, but as computer code in the form of the genes.
In 1994 the ruling Hutu government set out to eradicate the Tutsi minority. This was explained as incomprehensible ancient rivalry by the Western press. In reality it was due to the Belgian myth created during the colonial rule. Western agencies got involved, and the Tutsi fought back creating chaos. Many flooded across the border into Zaire, and the Tutsi invaded the refuge camps to get revenge. Mobutu fell from power. Troops arrived from many countries, allegedly to help, but in reality to gain access to the country's natural resources, used to produce consumer goods for the west. 4.5 million people died.
Hamilton by this point was well-honoured. However, by now he supported eugenics
. He heard a story that HIV had been created from an accident with a polio vaccine, which it was thought could have been infected with a chimp virus. This supported his idea that modern medicine could be negative as he thought medicine opposed the logic of the genes. So he travelled to eastern Congo to look for the virus, through the midst of the murder and chaos. He died, and later research disproved the idea that HIV had come from a medical accident.
Curtis ends the piece by saying that Hamilton's ideas that humans are computers controlled by the genes have been accepted. But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are unable to improve and change the world.
In May 2011, Adam Curtis was interviewed about the series by Katharine Viner
in the The Guardian
,
by the Register
and by Little Atoms.
Sam Wollaston at the The Guardian
reviewed the first episode and stated that he no idea whether any of it was right but that it was a fun ride that "bombards you in waves and leaves you feeling bewildered and a little bit giddy".
Catherine Gee
at the Daily Telegraph said that what Adam Curtis "reveals is the dangers of human beings at their most selfish and self-satisfying. Showing no compassion or consideration for your fellow human beings creates a chasm between those able to walk over others and those too considerate – or too short-sighted – to do so."
John Preston also reviewed the first episode, and said that although it showed flashes of brilliance it had an "infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched. No one could dispute that Curtis has got a very big bite indeed. But what about the chewing, you ask. There wasn’t any – or nothing like enough of it to prevent a bad case of mental indigestion."
Andrew Anthony
published a review in The Observer
and The Guardian, and commented on the central premise that we had been made to "believe we could create a stable world that would last for ever" but that he doesn't "recall ever believing that "we" could create a stable world that would last for ever", and noted that: "For the film-maker there seems to be an objective reality that a determined individual can penetrate if he is willing to challenge the confining chimeras of markets and machines. Forget the internet tycoons. The Randian hero is Curtis himself."
.
Music used 'at length', or repeatedly, includes:
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis is a British BAFTA winning documentarian and a writer, television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs.-Early life and education:Curtis was born in 1955...
, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self
The Century of the Self
The Century of the Self is an award winning British television documentary film. It focuses on how Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have thought about, dealt with, and controlled people....
, The Trap and The Power of Nightmares
The Power of Nightmares
The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration...
. The first episode aired on Monday 23 May 2011 at 9pm on BBC2.
It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us".
The title is the same as a 1967 poem and collection of poems
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is Richard Brautigan's fifth poetry publication. As with several of his early works, the entire edition was distributed for free...
by Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.- Early life :...
.
Love and Power
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private advisor and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC...
.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...
, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead
The Fountainhead
The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and brought her fame and financial success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide....
from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.
When published, although critically savaged, Rand's Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology
Californian Ideology
The Californian Ideology is a set of beliefs combining bohemian and anti-authoritarian attitudes from the counterculture of the 1960s with techno-utopianism and support for neoliberal economic policies...
) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become 'Randian heroes', only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.
Rand entered into an affair with Nathaniel Branden
Nathaniel Branden
Nathaniel Branden, né Nathan Blumenthal , is a psychotherapist and writer best known today for his work in the psychology of self-esteem from a humanistic perspective...
, another married person in The Collective, which she proposed to justify in terms of her value of "rationality", and with the approval of his wife. After several years, the affair ended violently and was revealed to rest of The Collective, which broke up. Rand ended up alone in her New York apartment, although Greenspan continued to visit.
Greenspan entered government in the 70s, and became Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Chairman of the Federal Reserve
The Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is the head of the central banking system of the United States. Known colloquially as "Chairman of the Fed," or in market circles "Fed Chairman" or "Fed Chief"...
. In 1992 he visited the newly elected Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
. He persuaded him to let the markets grow, cut taxes, and to let the markets stabilise themselves with computer technology, to create the New Economy
New Economy
The New Economy is a term to describe the result of the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This particular use of the term was popular during the Dot-com bubble of the late 1990s...
. This involved using computer models to predict risks and hedge against them, in accordance with the Californian Ideology. However, by 1996, the production figures had failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless increasing; and Greenspan suggested that it wasn't working. After political attacks from all side, Greenspan changed his mind and decided that perhaps the New Economy was real, but that it couldn't be measured using normal economic measures, and so the apparent boom continued.
In 1994 Carmen Hermosillo
Carmen Hermosillo
Carmen Hermosillo , A.K.A. humdog, was a community manager/research analyst, essayist, and poet. A contributor to 2GQ , FringeWare Review, wired, and Leonardo, Peter Ludlow's High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, and How to Mutate and Take Over the World, she was a participant in many online...
published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace", and it began to be argued that the result of computer networks had led to, not a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to companies.
Although the Asian miracle had led to long-term growth in South Korea and other countries Joseph Stiglitz began warning that the withdrawing of foreign financial investment from the Far Eastern economies could cause devastation there. However, he was unable to warn the president, being blocked by Robert Rubin
Robert Rubin
Robert Edward Rubin served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton administrations. Before his government service, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs eventually serving as a member of the Board, and Co-Chairman from 1990-1992...
, who feared damage to financial interests.
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.
After his handling of the economic effects of 9/11 Alan Greenspan became more important, and in the wake of Enron he cut interest rates to stimulate the economy. Unusually this failed to cause inflation. It seemed that the New Economy was working to stabilise the economy.
However, in reality, to avoid a repeat of the earlier collapse, China's Politburo
Politburo of the Communist Party of China
The Central Politburo of the Communist Party of China or Political bureau of the CPC Central Committee , formerly as Central Bureau before 1927, is a group of 24 people who oversee the Communist Party of China...
had decided to manage America's economy via similar techniques to those used by America on the other Far Eastern countries; by keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, and with the proceeds, had bought American bonds. The money flooding into America permitted massive loans to be available to those that would previously be considered too risky. The belief in America was that computers could stabilise and hedge the lending of the money. This permitted lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable. The high level of loan defaulting led ultimately to the 2008 collapse
Late-2000s financial crisis
The late-2000s financial crisis is considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s...
due to a similar housing bubble that the Far Eastern countries had previously faced.
Curtis ends the piece by pointing out that not only had the idea of market stability failed to be borne out in practice, but that the Californian Ideology had also been unable to stabilise it; indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.
The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Balance of nature
The balance of nature is a theory that says that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium , which is to say that a small change in some particular parameter will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest...
. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings to attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.
Arthur Tansley
Arthur Tansley
Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. He obtained his degree in Biological Science in 1896, with specialization in botany and zoology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed...
had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
. However, one part of Freud's theory was that the human brain was an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystem
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
s, which he believed were inherently self-stable and self correcting and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.
Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems, who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought that computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.
The ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
movement adopted this idea also and viewed the natural world as systems as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a...
laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics.
Howard T. Odum
Howard T. Odum
Howard Thomas Odum was an American ecologist...
and Eugene Odum
Eugene Odum
Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American scientist known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He wrote the first ecology textbook: Fundamentals of Ecology....
were brothers who were both ecologists. Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them. His brother Eugene then took these ideas to make them the heart of ecology, and the hypothesis then became a certainty. However, they had distorted the idea, and simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. That ecology was balanced became an unexamined and unscientific assumption.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
invented a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome
Geodesic dome
A geodesic dome is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure or lattice shell based on a network of great circles on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the structure. When...
which emulated ecosystems by being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts. His other system based ideas inspired the Counterculture movement. Commune
Commune
Commune may refer to:In society:* Commune, a human community in which resources are shared* Commune , a township or municipality* One of the Communes of France* An Italian Comune...
s of people considering themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, and used his domes as habitats. These societies mostly broke up within 3 years.
Also in the 1960s Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboard
The Mother of All Demos
The Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...
that he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals.
In 1967 Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.- Early life :...
published the poetry work All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is Richard Brautigan's fifth poetry publication. As with several of his early works, the entire edition was distributed for free...
which called for a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability.
By the 1970s new problems such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution that couldn't be solved by normal hierarchical systems had arrived. Jay Forrester stated that he knew how to solve this, and applied systems theory
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...
to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model, which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome
Club of Rome
The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. Founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, the CoR describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity." It consists of current and...
, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth, to maintain a steady state stable equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth.
However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement
Environmental movement
The environmental movement, a term that includes the conservation and green politics, is a diverse scientific, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues....
, since the model didn't allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansley
Arthur Tansley
Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. He obtained his degree in Biological Science in 1896, with specialization in botany and zoology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed...
who had invented the term ecosystem
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
, had once accused Field Marshal Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts
Jan Christiaan Smuts, OM, CH, ED, KC, FRS, PC was a prominent South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader and philosopher. In addition to holding various cabinet posts, he served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948...
of the abuse of vegetational concepts. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism
Holism
Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...
, where everyone had a 'rightful place', which was to be managed by white races. The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.
At the time, there was a general belief in the stability of natural systems. However cracks started to appear when a study was made of predator-prey relationship of wolf and elks. It was found that wild population swings had occurred over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne
George Van Dyne
George Van Dyne was a pioneer of systems ecology and served as the first director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory in the USA.-Early Career:Van Dyne was brought up on a ranch at Trinidad, Colorado, not far from the New Mexican border...
then tried to build a computer model, to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, so as to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise the computer model did not stabilize like the Odums' electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality whereas the Odums and other previous ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature." The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.
In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only by the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians.
However, the freedom from these revolutions in fact lasted for only a short time. Curtis compared them with the hippie communes, all of which had broken up within three years as the powerful members of the group began to bully the weaker ones; the weaker members were unable to band together in their own defence because power structures had been prohibited by the commune's rules.
Adam Curtis closes the piece by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, it is much less good at what comes next; networks leave people helpless in the face of people already in power in the world.
The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
This programme looked into the selfish gene theory which holds that humans are machines controlled by genes which was invented by William HamiltonW. D. Hamilton
William Donald Hamilton FRS was a British evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century....
. Adam Curtis also covered the source of ethnic conflict that was created by Belgian colonialism's artificial creation of a racial divide and the ensuing slaughter
Second Congo War
The Second Congo War, also known as Coltan War and the Great War of Africa, began in August 1998 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo , and officially ended in July 2003 when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power; however, hostilities continue to this...
that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a state located in Central Africa. It is the second largest country in Africa by area and the eleventh largest in the world...
, which is a source of raw material for computers and cell phones.
William Hamilton went to Kisangani
Kisangani
Kisangani is the capital of Orientale Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is the 3rd largest urbanized city in the country and the largest of the cities that lie in the tropical woodlands of the Congo....
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a state located in Central Africa. It is the second largest country in Africa by area and the eleventh largest in the world...
while the Second Congo War
Second Congo War
The Second Congo War, also known as Coltan War and the Great War of Africa, began in August 1998 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo , and officially ended in July 2003 when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power; however, hostilities continue to this...
was raging. He went there to collect Chimpanzee faeces to test his theory that HIV was due to a medical mistake
OPV AIDS hypothesis
The oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis argues that the AIDS pandemic originated from live polio vaccines prepared in chimpanzee tissue cultures and then administered to up to one million Africans between 1957 and 1960 in experimental mass vaccination campaigns.Data from molecular biology and...
. Unfortunately he caught malaria
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
, for which he took aspirin
Aspirin
Aspirin , also known as acetylsalicylic acid , is a salicylate drug, often used as an analgesic to relieve minor aches and pains, as an antipyretic to reduce fever, and as an anti-inflammatory medication. It was discovered by Arthur Eichengrun, a chemist with the German company Bayer...
, which caused a haemorrhage and he died. However his selfish gene theory lived on.
In 1960 Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup and the elected leader was assassinated, creating chaos. The Western mining operations were largely unaffected however.
Bill Hamilton was a solitary man, and he saw everything through the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans gave up their life for others, he went to Waterloo station and stared at humans for hours, and looked for patterns. In 1963 he realised that most of the behaviours of humans was due to genes, and looking at the humans from the genes' point of view. Humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and that it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene elsewhere would prosper.
In the 1930s Armand Denis
Armand Denis
Armand Denis was a Belgian-born documentary film-maker. After several decades of pioneering work in filming and presenting the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia, he became best known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in...
made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's Tutsi
Tutsi
The Tutsi , or Abatutsi, are an ethnic group in Central Africa. Historically they were often referred to as the Watussi or Watusi. They are the second largest caste in Rwanda and Burundi, the other two being the Hutu and the Twa ....
s being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race. In reality they were racially the same and the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth. But when it came to create independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided that the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to a blood bath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.
George R. Price
George Robert Price was an American population geneticist. Originally a physical chemist and later a science journalist, he moved to London in 1967, where he worked in theoretical biology at the Galton Laboratory, making three important contributions: first, rederiving W.D...
went to London after reading Hamilton's little known papers and discovering that he was already familiar with the equations, that they were the equations of computers. He was able to show that the equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness, spite, since these behaviours could help the genes. John Von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence, that humans were the machines.
This had a bad effect on Price, and Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though the equations disproved the existence of God.
In Congo, a civil war was ongoing, and Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey was an American zoologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by famous anthropologist Louis Leakey...
, who was researching gorillas was captured. She escaped and created a new camp high up on a mountain in Rwanda where she continued to study gorillas. She tried to completely protect the gorillas who were very susceptible to human diseases, and with the best of intentions, terrorised the local people and became hated.
In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity, as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions Price decides to start helping poor and homeless people all his possessions in acts of pure altruism, influenced and inspired by Christian religion.
In the Congo, President Mobutu changed the Congo's name to Zaire
Zaire
The Republic of Zaire was the name of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo between 27 October 1971 and 17 May 1997. The name of Zaire derives from the , itself an adaptation of the Kongo word nzere or nzadi, or "the river that swallows all rivers".-Self-proclaimed Father of the Nation:In...
and looted millions of dollars and let mines and industries collapse, killed his opponents and stopped a liberal democracy from forming.
While this was happening, at Fossey's camp, Digit, her favourite gorilla had been killed, and later she was too.
Price's attempt to disprove Hamilton's theory had utterly failed, and he comes to believe he is being followed by the hound of heaven
Hound of Heaven
The Hound of Heaven is a 182 line poem written by English poet Francis Thompson. The poem became famous and was the source of much of Thompson's posthumous reputation. The poem was first published in Thompson's first volume of poems in 1893. It was included in the Oxford Book of English Mystical...
. He finally reveals, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
took the equations and popularised them and explains that humans are simply machines controlled by the selfish genes; and in a sense reinventing the immortal soul, but as computer code in the form of the genes.
In 1994 the ruling Hutu government set out to eradicate the Tutsi minority. This was explained as incomprehensible ancient rivalry by the Western press. In reality it was due to the Belgian myth created during the colonial rule. Western agencies got involved, and the Tutsi fought back creating chaos. Many flooded across the border into Zaire, and the Tutsi invaded the refuge camps to get revenge. Mobutu fell from power. Troops arrived from many countries, allegedly to help, but in reality to gain access to the country's natural resources, used to produce consumer goods for the west. 4.5 million people died.
Hamilton by this point was well-honoured. However, by now he supported eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. He heard a story that HIV had been created from an accident with a polio vaccine, which it was thought could have been infected with a chimp virus. This supported his idea that modern medicine could be negative as he thought medicine opposed the logic of the genes. So he travelled to eastern Congo to look for the virus, through the midst of the murder and chaos. He died, and later research disproved the idea that HIV had come from a medical accident.
Curtis ends the piece by saying that Hamilton's ideas that humans are computers controlled by the genes have been accepted. But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are unable to improve and change the world.
Interviews and reviews
Katharine Viner
Katharine Viner is a British journalist who is deputy editor of The Guardian.Raised in Yorkshire, the daughter of teachers, she was educated at Ripon Grammar School and read English at Oxford University. Just before her finals, Viner won a competition organised by The Guardians women's page and...
in the The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
,
by the Register
and by Little Atoms.
Sam Wollaston at the The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
reviewed the first episode and stated that he no idea whether any of it was right but that it was a fun ride that "bombards you in waves and leaves you feeling bewildered and a little bit giddy".
Catherine Gee
Catherine Gee
Catherine Gee is a television presenter and property expert who took over as the host of the popular ITV daytime makeover show 60 Minute Makeover in 2011. Prior to this she was best known for presenting the BBC relocation programme, Escape to the Country and being the location presenter on the...
at the Daily Telegraph said that what Adam Curtis "reveals is the dangers of human beings at their most selfish and self-satisfying. Showing no compassion or consideration for your fellow human beings creates a chasm between those able to walk over others and those too considerate – or too short-sighted – to do so."
John Preston also reviewed the first episode, and said that although it showed flashes of brilliance it had an "infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched. No one could dispute that Curtis has got a very big bite indeed. But what about the chewing, you ask. There wasn’t any – or nothing like enough of it to prevent a bad case of mental indigestion."
Andrew Anthony
Andrew Anthony
Andrew Anthony is a journalist who has written for The Guardian since 1990, and The Observer.He is also the author of On Penalties and The Fall-Out .-Published works:*On Penalties...
published a review in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
and The Guardian, and commented on the central premise that we had been made to "believe we could create a stable world that would last for ever" but that he doesn't "recall ever believing that "we" could create a stable world that would last for ever", and noted that: "For the film-maker there seems to be an objective reality that a determined individual can penetrate if he is willing to challenge the confining chimeras of markets and machines. Forget the internet tycoons. The Randian hero is Curtis himself."
Music
Curtis' style is exemplified by frequent and often incongruous cuts of film and music, often lasting only a fraction of a second, a technique similar to samplingSampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
.
Music used 'at length', or repeatedly, includes:
- (Opening Credits) "Baby Lovechild" from 'This Year's Girl' by Pizzicato FivePizzicato FivePizzicato Five was a Japanese pop group best known to audiences in the West in their later incarnation as a duo of Maki Nomiya and Yasuharu Konishi...
- (Closing Credits) "Aua" from 'Monokini' by Stereo TotalStereo TotalStereo Total is a Berlin-based multilingual, French-German duo comprising Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring . Both Cactus and Göring sing and play multiple instruments...
- "2 Ghosts I" from 'Ghosts I-IV' by Nine Inch NailsNine Inch NailsNine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
- "Right Where It Belongs" from 'With Teeth' by Nine Inch NailsNine Inch NailsNine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
- "SuzanneSuzanne (Leonard Cohen song)"Suzanne" is a song written by Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen in the 1960s, and often heard in a recording by Judy Collins. It has become one of the most-covered songs in Cohen's catalogue....
" from 'Songs of Leonard CohenSongs of Leonard CohenSongs of Leonard Cohen is the debut album of Canadian musician Leonard Cohen. It foreshadowed the future path of his career, with less success in the United States and far better in Europe, reaching #83 on the Billboard chart but achieving gold status only in 1989, while it reached #13 in UK and...
' by Leonard CohenLeonard CohenLeonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
- played during slow-motion coverage of Monica LewinskyMonica LewinskyMonica Samille Lewinsky is an American woman with whom United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "improper relationship" while she worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996...
and Bill ClintonBill ClintonWilliam Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
(Part 1) - "Radioactivity" from 'Radioactivity' by KraftwerkKraftwerkKraftwerk is an influential electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The group was formed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in 1970, and was fronted by them until Schneider's departure in 2008...
- "Forgive" from 'Burial' by BurialBurialBurial is the act of placing a person or object into the ground. This is accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing an object in it, and covering it over.-History:...
- "Welcome to Lunar Industries" from 'Moon' by Clint MansellClint MansellClinton Darryl "Clint" Mansell, is an English musician, composer, and former lead singer and guitarist of the band Pop Will Eat Itself....
- "I'm Sam Bell" from 'Moon' by Clint MansellClint MansellClinton Darryl "Clint" Mansell, is an English musician, composer, and former lead singer and guitarist of the band Pop Will Eat Itself....
- "Le Fiacre" by Jean SablonJean SablonJean Sablon was a popular French singer and actor.The son of a composer, with brothers and sisters who had successful careers of their own in musical entertainment, Jean Sablon studied piano at the Lyceé Charlemagne in Paris...
- "The Heavenly Music Corporation" from '(No Pussyfooting)(No Pussyfooting)is a 1973 ambient music album by the British musicians Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. was the first of three major collaborations between the musicians, growing out of Eno's early tape recording loop experiments and Fripp's electric guitar playing. was recorded in three days over the course of a year...
' by Brian EnoBrian EnoBrian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
and Robert FrippRobert FrippRobert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique... - "Monkey 23" from 'Keep on Your Mean Side' by The KillsThe KillsThe Kills is a rock band formed by American singer Alison Mosshart and British guitarist Jamie Hince . Their first three albums, Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow, and Midnight Boom, have garnered much critical praise...
- "Sally and Jack" from 'Blow OutBlow OutBlow Out is a 1981 thriller film, written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a movie sound effects technician from Philadelphia who, while recording sounds for a low-budget slasher film, serendipitously captures audio evidence of an assassination involving a...
' by Pino DonaggioPino DonaggioGiuseppe "Pino" Donaggio is an Italian composer.Born in Burano , into a family of musicians, Donaggio began studying violin at the age of ten, first at the Benedetto Marcello conservatory in Venice, followed by the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan... - "Tristan und Isolde" by Richard WagnerRichard WagnerWilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
- "4 Sea Interludes, Op. 33a: I. Dawn" by Benjamin BrittenBenjamin BrittenEdward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
- "Theme from Carrie" from 'CarrieCarrieCarrie may refer to:* Carrie , a given name and those with it* Carrie , a novel by Stephen King** Carrie , a 1976 film adaptation*** Carrie , a 2002 remake** Carrie , a musical adaptation...
' by Pino DonaggioPino DonaggioGiuseppe "Pino" Donaggio is an Italian composer.Born in Burano , into a family of musicians, Donaggio began studying violin at the age of ten, first at the Benedetto Marcello conservatory in Venice, followed by the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan... - "The Nursery" from 'Moon' by Clint MansellClint MansellClinton Darryl "Clint" Mansell, is an English musician, composer, and former lead singer and guitarist of the band Pop Will Eat Itself....
- "A Warm Place" by Nine Inch NailsNine Inch NailsNine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
- "No Man's Land" by David HolmesDavid HolmesDavid Holmes is the name of:* David Holmes , stuntman and actor in the Harry Potter films* David Holmes , former Chairman of Rangers* David Holmes , former BBC Political Editor...
- "In Dreams" by Roy OrbisonRoy OrbisonRoy Kelton Orbison was an American singer-songwriter, well known for his distinctive, powerful voice, complex compositions, and dark emotional ballads. Orbison grew up in Texas and began singing in a rockabilly/country & western band in high school until he was signed by Sun Records in Memphis...
- "On the Rebound" by Floyd CramerFloyd CramerFloyd Cramer was an American Hall of Fame pianist who was one of the architects of the "Nashville sound." He popularized the "slip note" piano style where an out-of-tune note slides effortlessly into the correct note...
- "Parlez-Moi D'Amour" by Lucienne BoyerLucienne BoyerLucienne Boyer was a French diseuse and singer, best known for her song "Parlez-moi d'amour". Her impresario was Bruno Coquatrix.-Early career:...
- "Nocturne" from 'The Gadfly SuiteThe Gadfly SuiteThe Gadfly Suite, Op. 97a, is a suite for orchestra arranged from the composition by Dmitri Shostakovich for the 1955 Soviet film The Gadfly, based on the novel of the same name by Ethel Lilian Voynich .The Suite known as Op...
' by Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri ShostakovichDmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.... - "Once Upon a Time in the West" from 'Once Upon a Time in the WestOnce Upon a Time in the WestOnce Upon a Time in the West is a 1968 Italian epic spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone for Paramount Pictures. It stars Henry Fonda cast against type as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Jason Robards as a bandit, and Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader with a...
' by Ennio MorriconeEnnio MorriconeEnnio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, , is an Italian composer and conductor, who wrote music to more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces... - "I Feel LoveI Feel Love"I Feel Love" is a song by Donna Summer, taken from her 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday.The song constituted the "future" segment of the album, which represented a stylistic progress through time...
" by Donna SummerDonna SummerLaDonna Adrian Gaines , known by her stage name, Donna Summer, is an American singer/songwriter who gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s. She has a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Summer is a five-time Grammy winner and was the first artist to have three consecutive double albums reach... - "Magnolia" by Jon BrionJon BrionJon Brion is an American rock and pop multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, composer and record producer.-Early life:...
- "Main Theme From 'The FogThe FogThe Fog is a 1980 horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also co-wrote the screenplay and composed the music for the film. It stars Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins and Janet Leigh...
'" by John CarpenterJohn CarpenterJohn Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
External links
- Teaser on Adam Curtis's BBC blog
- Longer promo on Adam Curtis's BBC blog together with many comments This article by Adam CurtisAdam CurtisAdam Curtis is a British BAFTA winning documentarian and a writer, television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs.-Early life and education:Curtis was born in 1955...
in The ObserverThe ObserverThe Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
(www.guardian.co.uk) complements the second episode.