Here's an interesting BBC documentary on a modern economic ideology

[struggle4progress]

[zeemike]

1. Just watched the first one.

And it was important...thanks for posting this.
And it shows just how we came to this dystopian world of today...and the cold people that brought us to it.

[struggle4progress]

2. I found it very informative

[zeemike]

3. And it gets better.

I just watched part two and started on 3...
Kudos to the BBC.

[ancianita]

4. Wow. Adam Curtis. I've seen this before but today it's powerfully relevant. Thank you!

If anyone thinks, as I do, that today's ceremonial promise of a better society could use some balancing outlook on how our 'freedoms' have been historically studied defined.

Artists, altruists, bleakists, cynics and those who believe in committed, dutiful love could use this information, I think.

If 'the public good' has been guided by 'public choice theory' in media and politics...

If we adapt to professionals who pathologize human behavior in psychiatry with 'the power of numbers' through computerized diagnoses based on self reports by Americans...what is the promise behind 'numbers'? Is it freedom?

If we are all alone together, and use checklisted diagnostic disorders to detemine health/sickness, is this the best model, in the long run, for achieving self-guided 'freedom' toward some identity defined by 'normalcy'?

Rational objectivism has guided our military and health care hierarchies to incentivize their internal participants and organization goals...sandbox-y parameters with incentves used to build creatures' capacities.

Freedom FROM and Freedom TO. How will we -- or will we -- define it?

[KurtNYC]

5. Watched the first 2 so far.

Lots of great interview footage and it is well constructed but the way they use the word "freedom" is a bit odd. With respect to the war on Iraq, they seem to accept the idea that we went to "bring freedom" at face value. Similarly they keep coming back to the idea that Clinton, Thatcher and Blair were some kind of mis-guided advocates for personal freedom (then the Documentary flips around and say that their actions brought about less personal freedom, which is true).

I think they are tracing the progress of a different kind of transition -- from loose controls to tight numeric ones. And I don't think anyone, not Clinton, not Blair, believed that setting performance measures was a way to give more personal freedom to the average citizen and certainly not a way to give more freedom to bureaucrats.

Governments are computerizing performance measures simply because they can. They are keeping surveillance video, every email we send each other and every blog, forum, YouTube and Twitter post in a storage system forever simply because they can.

So I disagree fundamentally with the spin of this documentary but if one can ignore that, it is a harrowing story of how we are progressing toward a super-surveillance society and how, as the value of labor decreases, political leaders justify and excuse our steady declines in quality of life.

[Esra Star]

6. Just watched all three in a row.

Thank heaven for The Beeb.

[NoMoreWarNow]

7. Quite a fascinating series

I suppose serious students of political science may know all this, but this was new to me and extremely interesting.