#awobmolg

[benromberg]

Excellent spoof of Adam Curtis' documentary series 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'.

[strangerco-blog]

ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

[lacividemsky-blog]

Eugene & Howard T. Odum featured in ep2 of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.

[benromberg]

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis exploring how computers have changed society. This looks at how the idea of nature as a self-regulating ecosystem is based on a fantasy (and the origin of eco-technics and the hippy movement).

[haydnj]

BBC + AWOBMOLG + "The Net"

Vol Libre (by Loren Carpenter)

Carpenter was featured in Adam Curtis' first third of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace last the other night on the BBC. The documentary was an antagonistic socio-techno-political lecture/dog's dinner (in good and bad ways). Carpenter and his giant Pong/human murmuration experiment stood out for me and I'm glad I looked him up.

AWOBMOLG was also enjoyable because it was on BBC2, featured reels of over-saturated nineties NSTC footage and therefore brought back fond memories from my geekily mispent youth watching BBC's The Net; reading Microserfs and emailing my best mate (three streets over) about it using my numerical character only address. Despite its name, subject matter and the BBC's track record it is hard to find much about The Net on the, uh, net. If you have more then send me an "E-Mail" to [email protected].

Here is a retro treat. As with Curtis' film this clip features the Clinton family but without the unsettling Lewinsky/Leonard Cohen overdub.

[alexblandford]

AWOBMOLG

How does the social work? If we take Adam Curtis's documentary "All watched over by machines of loving grace" then we would be no nearer an answer to the question, but we would see that there is an impossibility of escape from it.

Through the lens of the mundane we can start to see where consistency falls apart. Ayn Rand asks a follower in her clique to sleep with her secretly as by her model of selfish individualism, her sexual desire should be met. All this serves to do is abrogate responsibility and pass it on to the man's wife who had to make a decision based on what she described with a curl of the lip as "altruism", thereby breaking Randian theory around keeping to a path of individualism and "objectivism". Whether Greenspan's thought is directly from Ayn Rand is debatable, especially considering Curtis's previous work on Project for the New American Century (especially regarding intervention in Indonesia), attributing philosophy to one person is flawed (says this Foucaudian/Marxian/Freudian/Foulksian/Marcusian/Irigarayan/Hartian).

Belief in the death of community relies on a cognitive dissonance, stepping outside of experience and qualitative evidence to create an "in theory" paradise; a world where power is dissolved and devolved to groupthink and crowdsourcing. Web 2.0 but also 1.0 if you look at pre graphical web in things like Usenet.

"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," Carmen Hermosillo wrote: "this is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."

Recently in the b3ta newsletter, http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046 this link was put up to a pithy phrase: "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". Which makes it sound insidious, but in fact as we see from Carmen Hermosillo, we do it to ourselves. Here in this post I am doing it. How much of this post do I own beyond the moral right of authorship. And even if I own all of it, does that mean anything?

Adam Curtis works best when his documentaries tell a story (see how much better "the way of all flesh" is than "the trap") and this feels like it has the start of a good story. Watch this week's episode and think about it.