A Documentary by Adam Curtis
Episode 1: Love and Power
Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, and got some of the plot for what becameThe Fountainhead from this time. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.
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 a disastrous affair with Nathaniel Branden, another married person in The Collective, albeit with the approval of their spouses. 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 1997 Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, and it began to be realised that the result of computer networks had led to, not a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commoditification 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 the those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of the 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 born 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.
Episode 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
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 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 ecosystems, 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. 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, and set upcommunes 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 Steward 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 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 was 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 also they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansleywho had invented the term ecosystem had once accused Field Marshall 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 Odum's electical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality whereas the Odum's 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. Without any central control at all, nobody seemed to be in charge, except possibly the internet, 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.
In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Without any central control at all, nobody seemed to be in charge, except possibly the internet, 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 text has been taken from Wikipedia
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