User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Notes/All Watched Over

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Adam Curtis – BBC documentary (3 episodes, 1st aired on may 23, 2011)

A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

— BBC

Read also: De Witte Raaf, ed. 153

EPISODE I: Love and Power

intro (excerpt):{{#ev:youtube|qL9BjKH5MSY|500}}

Ayn Rand (1905-1981)

• Alissa "Alice" Zinovievna Rosenbaum
• born in Russia -> moved to NY in 1950s
• writer / philosopher
• influenced by Aristotle "only"

Novels

• We the Living
• Fountainhead
• Atlas Shrugged

-> science fiction world that resembles America in the 50's very much

-> heads on the (destruction of the) idea of altruism

-> politics are abolished and replaced by 'the virtue of selfishness'

Philosophy

• main line of thought: the supremacy of the individual

-> justifies greed, selfishness, desire -> in order to achieve his own happyness ("highest" purpose of man on earth)

-> free oneself from all political and religious forms of control

• "Rational Egoism":

-> a new code of morality: not based on faith, not on faith, not on arbitrary whim, not on emotion, not on arbitrary edict, mystical or social, but on reason. A morality which can be proved by means of logic. Which can be demonstrated to be true and necessary. Each man must live as an end in itself and follow his own rational self-interest.

• Reading Group: The Collective

members:

Joan Mitchell (writer)

Alan Greenspan !!! (Inception of the free, self-regulating financial market idea – computers would keep it stable)

Nathaniel Branden

Barbara Branden

...

• statement about love: "in love the currency is virtue"
• statement about death: "I will not die, it's the world that will end"
• 50's: Rand's ideas were considered dangerous

-> selfishness and greed had lead to the depression and financial crisis of the 1930s

-> role of politics was to manage and control the selfish desires of the individual

Silicon Valley

• 1990's (40 years after Rand's death)
• immensely inspired by Ayn Rand (especially her novel Atlas Shrugged)

-> "The self-made heroic individual" – the new SV entrepreneurs ("An Ayn Rand hero")

-> global social vision: everyone could be an Ayn Rand hero, aided by computer technologies

-> "old forms of political control unnecessary because computer networks could create order in society without central control"

• the cybernetic dream: If human beings all over the world could be linked by webs of computers, together they could create their own kind of order.

-> self stabilizing system through feedback systems, where everyone was free to follow his own desires.

• Loren Carpenter 1991: interactive pong game with massive audience

-> creation of a model of society where there was no hierarchy: free individuals linked by technology lead to stability and order::====> "subconscious consensus"

The Californian Ideology

• fusion of radical individualism and utopian theories about computer systems
• "the global system of networked individuals" (do away with the traditional/established model of politics, economics,...)
• the government should be a facilitator, not a regulator and controller

-> THE NEW ECONOMY: a new age of (financial-economical) stability controlled by computers

-> free flow of capital

Free Market Economy Model

• 1986: Alan Greenspan speech

doubts about the stability of the free market system

-> stockmarket overvalued?

-> fear that a speculative bubble was being created (figures couldn't show in which way the productivity was increased)

-> created huge fuzz in economical and political world

-> eventually changed his mind under political pressure: concluded that the new system was so revolutionary that data figures were just unable to represent its (read: the computer's) ways of establishing productivity growth

• computer systems and the global systems they created hadn't distributed power, they just shifted it and concentrated it in new forms

-> www was not new form of democracy but a commodifying system (of emotions into entertainment)

look into:Carmen Hermosillo (humdog)

• 1997: 2 major crises

• Lewinsky scandal
• Asian property bubble burst

-> the 2 uncontrollable forces of love and power

• constant push and pull between politics and economics, leading eventually to massive crises that are ultimately being payed by the ordinary people (taxpayers). First the asian property crash, fueled by American 'support', afterwards the western depression, fueled by Chinese 'support'. The belief that computers would take care of the stability (selling and bouncing shares according to algorithms), was an illusion kept alive until the economy breaks down, resulting in heavy inflation.

Conclusion

Instead of becoming Randian heroes in control of our own destiny, we feel like today we've become helpless components in a global system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.