So are we all really being watched over by "machines of loving grace"? If you've never seen the documentaries by Adam Curtis, full as they are of quirky and strangely compelling arguments, patterns and links between the seemingly unlinked, then sit back, ingest a huge pinch of salt, take it all in and think for yourself.
The eclectic range of topics that Curtis covered in included:
- Ayn Rand and her impact on business people (e.g. Alan Greenspan) and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who saw themselves as Randian heroes and whose technologies they believed would create order in society without central control, via interconnected webs; feedback between nodes would create a stable system and a new, non-hierarchical order would emerge naturally, making nation states irrelevant.
- Rand challenged the moral code of altruism; humans should put their own happiness and self-esteem first. So let the markets decide, Greenspan told incoming President, Bill Clinton; computer feedback will allow us to hedge risks and keep the economic system stable and growing, allowing money to be lent to millions more people. But the reality was different.
- South East Asia was created as a laboratory for free-market, western capital; but the nations didn't benefit long-term, only the bankers won. Joseph Stiglitz warned Clinton against Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former head of Goldman Sachs. Power hadn't shifted, it was becoming more concentrated and operating new ways.
- However, the popping of the Asian bubble in 1998 (the most catastrophic economic disaster since the 1930s; only counteracted by China's purchasing of US government bonds in recent years, creating a sub-prime mirror image of the 1990s Asian property bubble and again, the bankers persuaded the governments to bail them out, leaving the normal workers to pick up the bill), coupled with the Lewinsky scandal back home, meant that the US dream of a stable world was about to be assaulted by the uncontrollable forces of love and power (in this case, the new financial elite).
- These bankers believed that computers could bring stability to the system, parcelling out loans, hedging them and limiting risk - the collapse of 2008 showed this to be a fantasy.
- Even online, however, people expressing their emotions were commodifying themselves; meaning that they could (as Rand wanted) have their values and thoughts turned into value, just as cheap factory labour has traditionally been treated as a commodity. Emotions were, and are, being turned by businesses into spectacles (viz. X Factor-type shows too) and we were losing ourselves in the spectacle - cyberspace is becoming a black hole.
- We dream of systems that can balance and stabilise themselves, without authority.
- In reality, however, this is the dream of the machines.
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