Theme to All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Leela's theme from Futurama

Pizzicato Five-Baby Love Child

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 3 "The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey"

In the late 20th Century we have seen the political dreams of changing the world begin to collapse. Ideologies have become unpalatable and have been replaced by machine-fantasies that suggest that we have no control over our actions.

Adam Curtis in this episode suggests that the ideas that underpin this shift in thinking are connected to the studies of human behaviour and the human genome. Scientists like Bill Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist argued that it was the codes, our DNA that determined our behaviour. The scientist George R. Price is also a key influence in this shift in ‘our’ thinking. These ideas have been recently popularised by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Human then are merely vessels for DNA code and that it is the code that determines our choices and our behaviour. Human beings are merely there to propagate that code.

This episode interweaves the story of scientific discoveries with the tragedy of colonialism and civil war in the Congo (Zaire) and Rwanda.  The Congo has since the 19th Century been exploited for its natural resources, first by the Belgians until the 1960s and then by the rest of us. . Today its minerals are vital for the continuing digital revolution.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 2, "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts".

This episode continues to explore the idea that humans are being colonised by machines. Our modern idea of nature as a self-regulating ecosystem is a machine fantasy. It has very little to do with the realities of nature.  This cybernetic idea of nature emerged in the 1950s. Human beings, the rest of life and everything else on the planet are mere components of that eco-system.

These ideas of a self-regulating ecosystem have it is argued become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self organising networks’. These networks would bypass the traditional needs of government or leaders of a society. The Facebook and Twitter revolutions, the Arab Spring in Syria and Egypt among a number of Middle Eastern countries and the protests for change in Iran gives proof to the idea of global vision of connectivity that would bring about social and political change. Global visions of connectivity fuse with Gaia Theory. One also thinks of Ted Nelson’s description of computers as “liberation machines”.

Buckminster Fuller Witchita House, Kansas 1946

In an earlier blog or two I spoke of the counter culture as an influencing factor in cyber evangelism. This model for connectivity and freedom was developed in the 1960s communes of America. Buckminster Fuller’s designs provided this fantasy with its architecture. Such communes include Drop City in Arizona in 1966. It was the counterculture scientists that would go on to help formulate the global computer networks.

Drop City, Arizona 1966.

As we began to believe in an idea of an ecosystem, ecologists were quietly proving that a self regulating ecosystem did not exist. Nature constantly changed and was rather unstable. However this idea of a self-organizing network had captured our imagination and it had offered us an alternative to political ideologies. 

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 1, "Love and Power".

A story about the rise of the machines and fusion of ideologies: Ayn Rand's objectivism and "virtue of selfishness", free market capitalism and the Californian sun drenched individualism and utopian dreams that seem to be the basis of so much that came out of the sixties. These ideas came to influence many in Silicon Valley with some citing Rands Atlas Shrugged (1957) as a key influence on their lives.

This film proposes that humans have been colonised by the machines they have built and shows us how we have let this happen. Since this has happened technology has dangerously started to shape how we view the world.

This series tells the story of the dream of the information revolution that was going to create a stable world and bring about a new kind of global capitalism and democracy. It meant the abolishment of hierarchies as represented in computer networks such as the World Wide Web. We are, it proposes, just mechanisms in a larger cybernetic system.

A small group of disciples gathered around Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They imagined a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The idea of a global utopia was also being developed in Silicon Valley. Many of these entrepreneurs were disciples of Rand and her philosophy. They saw the new computer as their salvation and the computer networks would create a new society where it would be possible to follow one’s own desires. Alan Greenspan was one of Rand’s disciples became convinced in the 1990s that computers were creating a new kind of capitalism that would move us away from decades of boom and bust economies. Yet, it was human desires for love and for power that would tear apart this dream of stability.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Trailer