Computers Stealing Our Dreams

Ah, to be in England now that Adam Curtis has a new documentary series . . .

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace will premiere in a couple weeks on the BBC, and by all accounts is a sort of meta-critique of digital society and its proponents and heroes.  (About time, too.)

The most intriguing of the series’ various theses is that computers have stolen all our big dreams.   Computers and systems theory showed that everything was a component in a system, right?

“ . . . 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.”

Have we traded all our dreamers for managers?  (And, by the way, how are our managers doing?)

I think there’s something in this.  Obama has great intelligence— and more importantly, sanity— and his very presence in the White House is enormously important as a symbol— but his actual program amounted to nothing more than “I can do this better than the other guy.”  No politician has dared to dream anything as magnificent as the Apollo program since, well, the Apollo program.  (In fact, Obama’s the guy who said We’re not going.  He canceled the program that would have returned us to the moon.  And he did this, in part, because NASA didn’t dream big enough— they were just doing Apollo all over again.)

There’s more in the series having to do with the consequences of Randian individualism.

Why don’t we have big ideas or dreams any more? “Because now that there’s nothing more important than you, how can you ever lose yourself in a grander idea? We’re frightened of eccentricity, of loneliness. Individualism just wants to keep the machine stable, leads to a static world and a powerless world. Rand is individualism carried to its most extreme form, yet she’s very popular, and not that far away from how a lot of people, especially the young, feel today.”

(I’m not sure how this fits into the larger thesis.  How can you believe yourself to be a Randian individual and a component of a system at the same time?)

Curtis then goes on to describe social networking as “Soviet realism.”

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality,” [Carmen Hermosillo] wrote. “This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself.” Says Curtis, “On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People’s feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power. It’s like Stalin’s socialist realism.”

Well, now that’s provocation! Randian individuals, all part of a greater Stalinist komputer kollective!

But still, that main thesis has me thinking.   Do societies dream anymore?  Or is it just Western societies that have stopped dreaming?  (I see lots of aggressive dreaming in places like China.  And I see a lot of those aggressive dreams coming true.)

While we wait for the series to premiere on this side of the Atlantic— assuming it ever does— we can at least dream about it.

Tell me your dreams.  Please.