All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis on How Technology Limits Us

What Ayn Rand has to do with the Occupy movement.

Documentarian Adam Curtis is among our era’s most influential cultural storytellers, with a penchant for debunking the established order of beliefs and ideologies. In The Century of the Self (2002), he traces the origin of consumerism and how Freud’s theories shaped twentieth-century manipulations of public opinion, from politics to marketing; in The Power of Nightmares (2004), he explores the rise of the politics of fear; in The Trap (2007), he examines the concept and evolution of freedom and the simplistic models of human nature on which it is based. His latest BBC documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, premiered last May, mere months before the global Occupy movement erupted, and paints an infinitely intriguing, though in my view wrong on many counts, portrait of technology as a limiting, rather than liberating, cultural and political force. The title of the series comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, in which he envisions a world of cybernetics so advanced that the balance of nature is restored and there is no need for human labor.

Though the film has strong techno-dystopian undertones akin to the Orson-Welles-narrated Future Shock series of the 1970s and neglects how technology enables such powerful phenomena like networked knowledge and crowd-accelerated learning, it offers a dimensional context for many of our present political, economic, and technological givens. Coupled with Curtis’s signature immersive storytelling and exquisite use of historical materials, rare footage, and revealing soundbites, the series is an invaluable primer for much of today’s most pressing sociocultural issues.

The first part, titled Love and Power, deals with how Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism shaped the ethos of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, eventually, the global economy as Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton set out to create the New Economy, based on the premise of a dramatic rise in productivity thanks to emerging information technology. Curtis, however, goes on to argue that instead of creating market stability, these Randian ideals constricted people into a rigid system with little hope of escape.

We are now living through a very strange moment. We know that the idea of market stability has failed, but we cannot imagine any alternative. The original promise of the Californian ideology was that the computers would liberate us of all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite — that we are helpless components in a global system, a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”

Part two, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, explores how technology cornerstones like cybernetics and systems theory were, Curtis argues, falsely applied to natural ecosystems and used to develop unrealistic models for human beings and societies. The episode has particularly timely resonance, in light of the recent global Occupy movement, as Curtis argues that such self-organizing network models without central control might be good at organizing change, but are less effective in what comes after.

The failure of the commune movement and the fate of the revolutions showed the limitations of the self-organizing model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human society: politics and power. The hippies took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics. They believed that this alternative way of organizing the world was good because it was based on the underlying order of nature. But this was a fantasy. In reality, what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines. Now, in our age, we are all disillusioned with politics, and this machine-organizing principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age. And what we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in a system, it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organizing things, even rebellions, but it offers no ideas as to what comes next. And, just like in the communes, it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.”

The final part, The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, examines the selfish gene theory of evolution, developed by William Hamilton in the 1960s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Curtis traces how this applied to everything from the civil war in Congo and the Rwandan genocide to George Price’s quest for the origin of altruism to Dawkins’ atheist reformulation of the religious idea of the “immortal soul” as a computer code in the form of genetic patterns. Curtis concludes by asking whether, in accepting these views of humans as machines, we as a culture have disempowered the human spirit.

Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society — above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic codes. But, the question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences?… We have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.”

Curiously, Brautigan’s original collection of poems, which inspired the film title, was intentionally distributed for free. The Curtis documentary, on the other hand, remains largely (legally) unavailable online and nearly impossible to legally see outside the U.K., as if a stubborn and enforced metaphor for the very thing it argues.

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How Mankind Conquered the Night and Created the 24-Hour Day

What the world’s oldest profession has to do with light pollution.

Why do we need darkness? The twentieth century has at last triumphed over this frightening, lawless place. Night was once a time for thieves and highwaymen, grave-diggers, ghosts, and masked balls. Now it’s a place of bright lights, illuminating every part of the city. According to one of the characters in Hemingway’s story of the same name: “He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing.” And Edward Gorey had his own explanation.

The City Dark, a new documentary by King Corn writer Ian Cheney, looks at the light-filled world we have created in the past hundred years or so. Humans of the twenty-first century have grown accustomed to living twenty-four hour lives, and without the night sky above us, it’s easy to forget our own place in the cosmos. (Astronomer Thomas Hockey’s recent book How We See the Sky is a revolutionary call for a return to stargazing.)

Over the past few years, there have been several wonderful books on the history of night, including Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, and Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. The academic interest in night doesn’t seem incidental: night is now something for the history books, an antique notion of a dark age.

As it turns out, the world’s oldest profession isn’t prostitution, but nightwatching. A night patrol in fifth century Rome was expected to be “the security of those who are sleeping, the protection of houses, guardian of the gates, an unseen examiner and silent judge.”

The Night Watch, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642.

There was quite a bit to be wary of: foreign armies, thieves, and most frightening of all, fire. More destructive than any crime, and cheap to inflict on others, massive fires could be an accident of a headscarf catching on a candle or a unruly stove in a bakehouse, as it was at the beginning of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed four-fifths of the city in four days.

The gate of western London explodes in the Great Fire, Old St. Paul's is to the right.

In a pre-industrial society, work that wasn’t finished during the day simply had to be finished at night: farmers plowed into darkness, weavers worked by candlelight, shoemakers might stay up until midnight or later to meet demand. The dead were also moved at night, their graves dug; the rag-pickers collected garbage; the dust men collected the day’s ashes.

The Dentist, by Gerrit van Honhorst, 1622.

If light was God, than darkness was surely Satan, and the night was the closest to an early Hell. Demons could come to you in dreams, but also on the road or in the woods. “Never greet a stranger in the night,” says the Talmud, “for he may be a demon.”

But terrors of the night also contained the calm of reason. The moon could be measured and mapped as it traveled through the sky, the constellations named, the planets divided from the stars, all of which was useful for farmers, sailors, scientists, and even poets to understand their place in the universe. When he looked at the night sky, Goethe wrote, he was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.”

The telescope of Caroline and her brother William Herschel, who was the first astronomer to spot Uranus.

By studying the night sky for centuries, we learned of the other planets and our place in the solar system, and we set out to order the heavens. With enormous telescopes, Enlightenment-era astronomers like Caroline Herschel would sweep the sky nightly for comets, meteors and changes in the constellations. It was this kind of study, explained Carl Sagan in Cosmos, that “has led directly to our modern global civilization.”

Both The City Dark and these histories of night are reminders that for thousands of years humans have lived by a natural rhythm of night and day that has only recently been broken. By banishing the night, we have extended the hours in the day that we can work and play. We’ve given in to the urgent human desire to live more, but also to live more inwardly, turned away from the night sky. It’s a change that promises to be subtle, unseen, and profoundly lasting on the next thousand years of human life.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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The Dot and the Line: A 1965 Romance in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster

On finding the girl who is perfect from every direction.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is a fantastic 1965 Academy Award winning short film based on the 1963 book of the same name by Norton Juster, best known as the creative genius behind The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the greatest children’s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups. It was inspired by the Victorian novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions and tells the story of a straight line who falls in love with a dot. (Cue in last week’s Schematics, a love story in geometric diagrams.)

Produced by legendary one-man cartoon powerhouse Chuck Jones, the film is a masterpiece of word play, sprinkled with gorgeous vintage design and typography.

The film can be found in the special features section of The Glass Bottom Boat, a 1966 comedic gem starring Doris Day. Juster’s book itself is also a treat in its own right.

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