Nik’s blog

All watched over by machines of loving grace

I’ve just finished watching the Adam Curtis documentary series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, and my head-stack is overflowing with ideas. As usual with his films, it is a mesmerizingly seductive experience, watching some incredible archive footage poetically edited and overlaid with maddeningly elusive hopscotch commentary. His general technique is to blend biographical detail of intellectual oddballs and visionaries (including Dian Fossey, George Price, Bill Hamilton, Ayn Rand, Buckminster-Fuller) with grand historical narratives, supplemented by archive footage that is often left to run with no commentary, encouraging us to make connections that are perhaps too tenuous to be spelled out by Curtis. Despite the selective and borderline paranoid tone, I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since I saw The Power of Nightmares. Apart, perhaps from some of his blog posts, this is his best work yet.

As usual, it’s not easy to sum up what he’s doing in these three films. Broadly, they deal with our relationship to computers, and how their development has changed our view of ourselves, as well as the way we live. But they also revisit his favourite theme of the individual and its relationship to society, as well as looking at the science of ecology, genetics, and the history of Africa since colonialism.

The development of computers (and particularly personal computers) after the second world war was, in Curtis’ account, driven first by corporations seeking to model and control society via the mainframe, and then by hippie pioneers in California who saw the information society and personal computing as a way of freeing individuals (in part) by delivering the correct feedback to allow them to become more rational and liberated. By the end, I think Curtis was trying to say that the second model, as perhaps most fully realised to date in social media such as Facebook and Twitter, is just as oppressive or chaotic as the mainframe model, and that the social order that was supposed to emerge once we are all connected is just a vain hope. This is most powerfully demonstrated by the failure of Alan Greenspan’s ‘New Economy’, the telling of which is intertwined with an account of the rise of Ayn Rand’s ideas on the right, demonstrating the appeal of machines of loving grace to radicals from across the political spectrum. I was slightly disappointed by his failure to mention behavioural economics, which in its breathless “Nudge” adoption by politicians around the world is just the latest iteration of the idea that individuals can self-organise as long as the infrastructure of interaction and feedback is set up right. But then I remembered that he had looked at this very issue in a blog post last year.

The second part explores how the parallel emergence of the science of ecology was also driven by a misleading mechanical metaphor (MMM). Emblematic of this school of thought is Buckminster-Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Whole-earth, or whole-ecosystem views of nature as a self-regulating machine were, Curtis argues, unscientific. They took an appealing narrative and used selective evidence to support it. This was one of the most frustrating parts of the film for me. The talking head who argued against the notion of self-regulating feedback loops in nature simply said that the evidence showed that nature showed no stability, that it was always changing. But the concept of feedback loops allows for cycles, with the system in constant flux, but around a central tendency. Curtis’ narrative moved on without challenging this, displaying his tendency to use weak evidence to back up a strong (or merely interesting) argument.

The third film is the most politically driven, and interesting in its own right, but seems somehow to dangle off the series by a thread. Where the first two concentrated on how the fundamental concepts of computing and mechanics changed our views of society, the third seemed to link most of its concerns back to the information revolution via concerns about hardware. The western consumer’s demand for gadgets led in the late 1990s to soaring prices of rare metals found mainly in central Africa. It was this commodity boom that has fuelled the wars in the Congo that have raged over the last decade, largely ignored by the western media (with some notable exceptions). This is a story that needs more attention, but Curtis’ strangely unbalanced narrative that tries to encompass some of the most horrific crimes ever committed alongside Dian Fossey and Bill Hamilton’s esoteric quests doesn’t really do it justice, nor does it fit properly with the rest of his agenda. Even the section on selfish genes and the conception of humans as self-replicating meat-machines  seemed tangential in this context. I would have preferred him to spend more time linking the selfish gene theory (where Fossey and Hamilton form the intersection) into his wider argument and leave the Congo for a series to itself, or perhaps one of his splendidly discursive blog posts.

Overall, the films seem highly sceptical of the role that machines play in our society, and the way that they infantilise, isolate and diminish us. But this in itself is not especially helpful in deciding what to do differently. Presumably we would not be better off in a world with no machines, nor indeed one where we were not able to use computing power to gather information on and control complex systems. I am glad that flight controllers, for example, have computers. Where, then, do we draw the line and say that humanity must retain the reins? How can we be sure that our servers are serving us, and not themselves? Does it make sense to rail against machines when they have no values in and of themselves? No easy answers here, and in some ways no hugely original arguments either, but then that is not what Curtis offers. This is instead a poetic and allusive treat that gathers some fascinating and underreported critiques of our civilisation and manages to be hugely entertaining about some weighty subjects. You may not agree with any of it, but you won’t be bored for a second.