Be Excellent To Each Other

BBC2, 21:00, tonight.

A new Adam Curtis documentary. Yay!

Don't know him. Is that as big a 'Yay!' as a 'New Jonathan Meades documentary, YAY!'?

Really? I'm surprised.

His most famous work is 'The Power of Nightmares' but his credits include 'The Trap' and the 'Century of the Self'. The documentaries usually take one idea (in the 'Power of Nightmares', about the use of fear) and discuss it in terms of its political, economical, historical and sociological contexts. He always crafts his documentaries with skilful use of archive footage so his arguments become even more compelling.

He occasionally does bits for Charlie Brooker's shows in the same style.

He did the Power of Nightmares thing which was ace. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOlwbaPe2os

His blog posts tend to be in the same style as his shows: I can hear his dismembered voice reading this example.

His stuff is usually fantastic. He makes art from documentary. HOWEVER, this one is about "how computers have failed to liberate us and instead have 'distorted and simplified our view of the world around us'" which has the potential to massively piss me off, because I don't necessarily agree with that statement. I guess he'll convince me otherwise, though. Cos he good.

I for one was glad when Twitter users showed me that all the most complicated problems of politics, philosophy, and religion could be solved in fewer than 140 characters, including hashtags.

How dare you make it look like I've made a grammatical error.

Ah right, so the whole documentary is about Twitter?

You made a manufacturer error.

Yes, Apple owners are free to do whatever Mr Jobs wants.

What's a hashtag, eh, my precious?

I had made a mental note the other day to start a thread on this in case nobody else had, but anyway here we are.

Watched part 1 last night.

As i suspected all along, economists have no more idea about running the economy than a wombat.

A very greed wombat.

Finished the three parts yesterday. I think the second episode was better than the first, but the third was probably the best of the them: his arguments seemed to flow more coherently.

It's depressing that the stuff about the Congo and Rwanda has been largely forgotten, and it's worrying how easily we forget about the horrible backgrounds to the things that we rely on in our lives. Worth watching.

Worth watching: agreed (although I haven't see part 3 yet).

But I do find some things annoying e.g. the totally random flashes of video that have nothing obvious to do with the subject at the time, the occasional bit of footage played backwards and the Letraset style captioning.

I can forgive all these, and other annoyances, because of the content.

So what did it all mean then? How do we know his theories aren't as crackpot as the other ones suggested were wrong? What's the solution to the problems?

No one has a solution. I reached that conclusion ages ago. Gordon Brown promised 'no more boom and bust' and he was wrong. WWII was supposed to be the war to end all wars. It wasn't. USSR and the US have each had a go at sorting out the problems in Afghanistan. USSR failed and the US will do so as well, just as they did in Korea and Vietnam. Ayn Rand's Objectivism, "a philosophy for living on earth," is all very interesting, but when most of the planet has never heard of it and is never going to sign up to it, is irrelevant.

Curtis' theories are as valid as anyone else's and potentially as right/wrong as anyone else's. Modern society is now global and too complicated for us to sort out because we can't factor in every issue that might put a spanner in the works.

This.

Or, in short, 'humans are far to complicated to reduce down to nice little theories. And are often shits to each other.'

I'm sayin,' bro.

Or, even shorter, 'We're fucked. Live with it.'

Equally though, I'd add '...though once you make the latter the basis of your outlook, you have to ignore all the lovelinesses, and be constantly surprised when people are helpful'. But I am digressing, I know.

Enjoyed that third part, haven't seen the others, but it was good to see so much on Rwanda and the horrors of colonialism - something we covered in my masters course, but it was quite amazing at the time that the fact of the whole Hutu-Tutsis conflict being created by Europeans simply wasn't mentioned by the media. People really do just want to believe (see also Yugoslavia) that 'they just hate each other and have done for a long time'. Which, to come back to my original digression, is a political viewpoint that comes out of years of thinking that people are bad. I don't know enough to trace it all the way back, but the classic work we used was Hobbes, with his memorable summary of mankind's life as "nasty, brutish and short". I don't think there has been an equivalent thinker to put the "banal, cooperative and extending" or something better type of viewpoint.

He did say, 'often shits to each other.' But you're right, there are lots of wonderful people who act altruistically. Unfortunately, they're not running the banks and global corporations that are still out for their own gain above all else. Thus the altruists are swamped by the shear numbers of selfish bastards.

Of course, Adam Smith in 'Wealth of Nations' noted that selfishness can be harnessed to benefit the public:



But I think most of Curtis' argument deals with layers of abstraction. Micro-economics can be a good predictor of behaviour, and really only uses a few assumptions (of which two that come to mind are that there's no such thing as a free lunch and incentives matter). But they don't scale up very well, and the further away from a simple case you get, the more complexity you're adding.

I think the great failing in modern social science is the idea that all of political behaviour can be modelled and predicted. The leading journals tend to be full of regression analysis of voting patterns or demographics and so on. My view has always been that whilst an individual model might portray useful insights into explaining a particular case or scenario, it is too dangerous to universalise from it (few, after all, thought the USSR would collapse as swiftly as it did). Too much data, too many variables, and, importantly, circumstances which aren't replicable.