Wednesday 25 May 2011

The Rise Of The Hive

Andrew Orlowski has a semi-interesting interview with filmaker Adam Curtis at the Register over the latter's new documentary: "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace":
"Behind all this... is the idea that you're nodes in a system, and 'our job' is to keep things stable..."
What he is talking about there is the collectivist view held by technocratic pragmatists on the Left like Turton; that the State exists to "manage" society, which necessarily presupposes "market failure" just as Christian theology presupposes "the fall", which pressupositions themselves depend on a view of human nature as inescapably corrupt, rather than contingently corruptible.
"Ever since the 1990s we've had this idea of connectivity - we're all connected. You meet [it] in all sorts of areas. You meet it in talks about the global economy, we're all connected in a global world. You meet it in talks about nature - we're all interconnected in our world. And you meet it in utopian theories about the web... So I decided to trace those ideas back to their source. It leads you back to an absolutely fascinating area, which you can loosely call cybernetics, and also information theory."
More specifically, tracing those ideas back leads to Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey: they lead you back to American Pragmatism. That is why someone so apparently committed to the people of Taiwan as Michael Turton, may nonetheless show no compunction at all about publicly playing with the hypothetical idea of selling out the people of Taiwan in order to prevent further PRC expansionism. It is because he is a pragmatist. It is the sort of mindset which conceives of its' own existence as a nodal point within a collective community hive, all whilst clamouring for the further and further concentration of political power (which must not be confused with the mere quantity of law and regulation). Here is the trailer...

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