[LINK] Adam Curtis on the continued hierarchical society

[rfmcdonald]

Via Bruce Sterling's blog post "Network Society as 'high decadence'", I found, in the Guardian, an interview with British filmmaker Adam Curtis. Curtis' contention--one that I fully believe--is that the paradigm of the flat network associated with the Internet is false, that inequities and hierarchies still exist and the Internet does not flatten them.

"In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states." What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, "The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world."

The counterculture of the 1960s, the Californian hippies, took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics and believed this alternative way of ordering the world was based on some natural order. So they formed communes that were non-hierarchical and self-regulating, disdaining politics and rejecting alliances. (Many of these hippy dropouts later took these ideas mainstream: they became the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who decided that computers could liberate everyone and save the world.)

Another, rather different kind of fan of the network society was Alan Greenspan, for many years the world's most important central banker. "Greenspan believed that networks of computers, like networks of nature, could stabilise themselves," Curtis says. "And technology could turn everyone into heroic individuals, completely free to follow their own ideas." In his individualism, Greenspan was inspired by Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist who abhorred altruism, praised the "virtues of selfishness" and still has a massive following in the US 29 years after her death.

[. . .]

That stability was, of course, an illusion; it was followed by the greatest economic crash since 1929. But, as Curtis says, the price of the bailouts was paid by ordinary people, via the state, rather than by the wealthy financiers who lost all the money in the first place. That's because, despite the illusion of ordered non-hierarchy, some people have vastly more power than others, and in many cases have had it for centuries.

Go, read the whole thing.