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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

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posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 04:30 AM
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I know this has been posted before, however the links are gone due to BBC copyright. This is being broadcast on SBS Australia.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Anyway, for those who haven't seen them here is the synopsis. You should also know that it's only up for another 12 days. I'll post the others when they become available.


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.


Enjoy
edit on 20-10-2011 by myselfaswell because: breaking up a wall of text



posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 04:41 AM
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I tried to watch the video, but it said Geoblocked, this video is not available in your region.

Is there anywhere else to watch it?

By the way, completely off topic, but I was totally expecting something more along this line:



posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 05:02 AM
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Yeah I saw this when it was broadcast in the UK, even my eight year old enjoyed watching it.

Certainly is helpful keeping it in mind given the current crisis, having aired on BBC 2 I do question just how many people would have seen it though.

But it definately a must see, if een to understand just how we ended up in this current mess .



posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 05:25 AM
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Craziest thing I have ever heard I'm am writing a document like this in America but I guess that go's out the window.



posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 05:26 AM
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reply to post by Astrithr
 


You should be able to watch it here

LINK

Along with a multitude of other documentaries



posted on Oct, 20 2011 @ 06:21 AM
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Adam Curtis has done many documentaries and all of them are worth a watch, i've seen them all, and on several occasions watched the full 4hrs consecutively.




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