A powerful, provocative series from celebrated filmmaker Adam Curtis, which argues that humans have unwittingly been colonised by machines.
A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines that we have built, seeing everything in the world today through the eyes of computers.
Episode One: Love and Power
A dream rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world, bringing about a new kind of global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy. This episode tells the story of two perfect worlds.
One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism – “Like a new planet,” he said. But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by two dynamic human forces: love and power.
Episode Two: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a fantasy based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components, cogs in a system. But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human "self-organising networks" – dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.
This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world. At the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organising network had by now captured our imaginations.
Episode Three: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
This film argues that because our political dreams seem to have failed, we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions, to excuse our failure. At its heart is one of the most famous scientists in the world, Bill Hamilton, who argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us. This was later popularised by Richard Dawkins as "the selfish gene" and said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on. The episode begins in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda.
Hamilton is there to help prove his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart by "Africa’s First World War". The film interweaves the two stories – the strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured relationship with the Congo over the past 100 years.
(Synopsis : sbs.com)
Réalisé par Adam Curtis
