All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Film evenings begin with potluck refreshments and social hour at 6:30 pm,
followed by the film at 7:30 pm, followed by a discussion after the film.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Episode I
by Adam Curtis

This is a series of three documentary films by renown director Adam Curtis about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Adam Curtis will show us that, although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of computers. His film series claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

Today we see Episode I: Love and Power. Adam Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s Objectivist ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Starting by examining our current era of supposed economic, social, and online freedoms, Adam Curtis manages to join the dots between Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, the IMF’s involvement in East Asia, radical Islam, and Silicon Valley’s economic boom. This Episode posits the idea that eccentric Russian-American author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982) is the spiritual grandmother of our modern social and economic system and its global networks, and shows how her ideas and beliefs have indirectly destabilised global financial systems, wrecking economies, and bringing on the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 through the so-called California Ideology adopted by the Silicon Valley IT community.

Ayn Rand espoused a philosophy that decried religion, philosophy, and all other belief systems as forms of control by which elites kept the masses in psychological and physical slavery and which argued that individual pursuit of self-interest and happiness alone would result in stable societies and peace. Ayn Rand’s ideas attracted several followers, known as The Collective, of whom one was Alan Greenspan, the future U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve and finance czar to the Clinton government in the 1990s. Her philosophy appealed to people working in information technology, the finance industry, politics, and economics. And the notion that computer networks could monitor and stabilise financial and economic systems and networks, bolstered by some dodgy human psychology experiments and other research in game theory, probability, and risk management, caught on. With computers controlling and stabilising the global finance industry, people become free to follow their dreams and find happiness as Randian heroes.

Wheelchair accessible around the corner at 411 28th Street

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