Adam Curtis's 2011 triptych argues that the silicon faith in self-correcting networks began with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and ended in the 2008 crash. Episode one follows Alan Greenspan from Rand’s ‘Collective’ reading group to the Federal Reserve, where he persuaded Bill Clinton to deregulate markets while Silicon Valley evangelists promised friction-free prosperity. Asian contagion in 1997 and the subsequent housing collapse expose the flaw: models that ignored human messiness amplified the very volatility they claimed to tame.
Curtis braids archive, pop songs and dead-pan voice-over to show how cyber-utopians recast people as nodes, love as data and politics as feedback loops. Stewart Brand, the Merry Pranksters and the Homebrew Computer Club appear as apostles of a Californian religion that believed networks could replace governments. When the dot-com bubble burst, China bought U.S. debt, suppressed its currency and fed cheap goods back to Wal-Mart, postponing reckoning until sub-prime mortgages detonated.
The final hour widens the lens to Africa, where Western NGOs imposed eco-systems thinking that treated starving populations as balanced machines, and to the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic warlords used satellite TV and encrypted phones to choreograph atrocity. Curtis’s conclusion is bleak: the dream of a planet run by benevolent code has delivered oligarchy, endless debt and a spectacle society that mines intimacy for profit. The title comes from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem that once read like liberation and now sounds like a surveillance lullaby.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2011
Created by: Adam Curtis
Showrunner(s): Dominic Crossley-Holland
Writer(s): Adam Curtis
Producer(s): Lucy Kelsall
Main Cast
Adam Curtis as Self - Narrator (voice)
Ayn Rand as
Stewart Brand as Self
Peder Anker as Self
David Attenborough as Self
Richard Brautigan as Self
Bill Clinton as Self
Richard Dawkins as Self
Tord Björk as Self
Daniel Botkin as Self
Barbara Branden as Self
Nathaniel Branden as Self
