Adam Curtis

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

by John Brockman  · 5 Oct 2015  · 481pp  · 125,946 words

, director of International Projects, Serpentine Galleries, London; author, Ways of Curating In his poem of the same name (which also serves as the title to Adam Curtis’s seminal documentary), Richard Brautigan portends a future “all watched over by machines of loving grace” or, by implication, “thinking” machines. In what follows, I

In the Company of Heroes

by Michael J. Durant and Steven Hartov  · 1 Dec 2006  · 402pp  · 123,199 words

driver hit the gas pedal and the Panamanians opened fire, killing Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz. It hadn’t ended there. An American Navy lieutenant, Adam Curtis, had witnessed the shooting incident along with his wife. Both of them were dragged off to the Commandancia for interrogations. While Mrs. Curtis was forced

Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford  · 1 Jan 2007  · 544pp  · 168,076 words

draws on the exasperated Gosplan witness in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V

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voice draws on the exasperated Gosplanperimess in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V

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.com/2008/02/khrushchev-isnt-he-russian-novelist. html [sic] Unrealised Moscow http://www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/index_e. htm Film and television Adam Curtis, dir., ‘The Engineers’ Plot’ (TV documentary), programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992 Georgii Daniela, dir., Ya shagayu po Moskve (‘I Walk around

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

by Yasha Levine  · 6 Feb 2018  · 474pp  · 130,575 words

identity crisis. By the time Whole Earth won the National Book Award, the commune movement it served and celebrated lay in ruins. Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis interviewed former members of communes in his BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. He discovered that the cybernetic structures that these

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few years, and some less than that. “What tore them all apart was the very thing that they were supposed to have banished: power,” explained Adam Curtis. “Strong personality came to dominate the weaker members of the group, but the rules of a self-organizing system refused to allow any organized opposition

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, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc. 19. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 71–72. 20. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (London: BBC, 2011), documentary series. 21. The founder of Synergia would go on to lead the Biosphere

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

the United States but also in Britain.37 The idea for the Institute for Economic Affairs came from Friedrich Hayek. According to the documentary-maker Adam Curtis, after the Second World War Fisher paid a visit to Hayek at the London School of Economics, where the Austrian was an economics professor.38

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Commission finds’, openDemocracy, May 2018. 35 Catherine Neilan, ‘IEA poaches Legatum’s top Brexit adviser Shanker Singham and team’, City A.M., March 2018. 36 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 37 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

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(London, 2018), p. 80. 38 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 39 Ibid. 40 Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–83 (London

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, 1995), p. 166. 41 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 42 Peter Clarke, ‘Serial Evangelists’, London Review of Books, June 1994. 43 Felicity Lawrence, Rob Evans, David Pegg

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of Books, June 1994. 51 ‘Commanding Heights’, PBS. See also www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/prof_keithjoseph.html; accessed 23 Jan. 2020. 52 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 53 George Monbiot, ‘A rightwing insurrection is usurping our democracy’, Guardian, October 2012. 54 David Parker, The Official

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and entrepreneurship’, University of Buckingham, November 2018. See also www.buckingham.ac.uk/news/buckingham-launches-new-centre-for-entrepreneurship/; accessed 23 Jan. 2020. 104 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. Chapter 8: Digital Gangsters 1 Stephanie Baker, ‘Cambridge Analytica Won’t Be Revived Under New Company Name’, Bloomberg

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

fun.” Some players really do enjoy hunting down endless chests and cockades, or at least they find it relaxing (in a Vice interview, the filmmaker Adam Curtis argued it can be calming and liberating).22 And when games are being criticised for their high prices of seventy dollars and above, they don

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3, 2015, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/772633-assassins-creed-unity/70945009. 22. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis,” VICE, February 11, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. 23. If you take into account inflation, 2020 games still cost

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.com/jobs/view/sentiment-trader-at-quant-hedge-fund-at-cindicator-2410397759. 76. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis,” VICE, February 11, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. 77. Ryan Broderick, “‘down so bad im 3rd wheeling an e

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World

by Yancey Strickler  · 29 Oct 2019  · 254pp  · 61,387 words

drafts. To Alex Taborrak, thanks for being willing to share not just what you loved, but what you hated about the book. To my friends Adam Curtis, Ian Rogers, and Simon Russell, thanks for lending an ear and your brains to these ideas. To Michael Walzer, the philosopher who wrote Spheres of

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Inheriting Medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates FURTHER WATCHING The Adam Curtis films The Trap, The Century of Self, and HyperNormalisation NOTES INTRODUCTION front page of China Daily: The China Daily headline ran on October 27, 2017

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the RAND Corporation secretaries is taken from Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back, and Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Trap. rational thing to do: Game theory wasn’t literally suggesting people should turn their friends into the police. These strategies

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society—can really afford gives rise to endless confusion. Another compelling line of thought on this comes from the filmmaker Adam Curtis in an interview I did with him for The Creative Independent (“Adam Curtis on the Dangers of Self-Expression,” March 14, 2017): If you want to make the world a better place

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

by Philip Mirowski  · 24 Jun 2013  · 662pp  · 180,546 words

your flagging sense of humor, or to aspire to the status of he who laughs last. Levity might not be a universal nostrum. The filmmaker Adam Curtis has written in disgust, “Despite the disasters we are [still] trapped in the economists’ world.”15 Yet it will become necessary for us to differentiate

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Red Nightmare 1 For those with access to a film library, I would suggest The Descent (2006); or for something closer to the current topic, Adam Curtis’s The Trap (2007). Just when I had begun feeling proud of my little trope, a friend pointed me to Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare

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_n_2862195.html 14 Tabulated and graphed at www.dailystaghunt.com/markets/2012/1/12/the-correlation-of-laughter-at-fomc-meetings.html#entry14562168. 15 Adam Curtis,“The Economists’ New Clothes,” www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/02/the_economists_new_clothes.html. 16 Tkacik, “Journals of the Crisis Year.” 17

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and Robinson, Funding Fathers, chap. 6; Burton, “Atlas Research Foundation.” 55 The byzantine politics of the Murdoch empire is discussed in an interesting fashion by Adam Curtis at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/01/rupert_murdoch_-_a_portrait_of.html. 56 Covington, “Moving Public Policy to the Right,” pp. 91

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler  · 1 Sep 2007  · 235pp  · 65,885 words

thinking did contribute to commerce and industry — and spectacularly so! (For historical details on this, see the BBC television documentary series “Century of Self ” by Adam Curtis, and the books of Stuart Ewen.) In politics, the 20th century saw battles between the quasi-religious ideologies of the left and right — Leninism, Stalinism

Lurking: How a Person Became a User

by Joanne McNeil  · 25 Feb 2020  · 239pp  · 80,319 words

went by “humdog,” posted a manifesto to the internet, “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace.” It has been widely shared and reblogged ever since. Adam Curtis even quoted the manifesto in his miniseries All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and talked about the prescience of this text on a

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her words in 1994 has been realized. The text has been posted to VC-backed blog platforms and GitHub. The clip of Jarvis Cocker and Adam Curtis is available on YouTube. Links to this content are shared on Facebook and Twitter regularly. Decentralization isn’t much without a noncommercial mission, but now

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Carmen Hermosillo, was included in the anthology High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (ed. Peter Ludlow, MIT Press, 1996). It is also widely available online. Adam Curtis appeared on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on May 22, 2011, to discuss his documentary program All Watched Over by Machines with Loving Grace, which

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot  · 2 Feb 2010  · 370pp  · 114,741 words

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr  · 14 Jun 2017  · 431pp  · 129,071 words

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

by Michiko Kakutani  · 17 Jul 2018  · 137pp  · 38,925 words

Stuffocation

by James Wallman  · 6 Dec 2013  · 296pp  · 82,501 words

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson  · 12 May 2011  · 274pp  · 70,481 words

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari  · 1 Jan 2018  · 428pp  · 126,013 words

Badvertising

by Andrew Simms  · 314pp  · 81,529 words

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 1 Jun 2009  · 422pp  · 131,666 words

Vassal State

by Angus Hanton  · 25 Mar 2024  · 277pp  · 81,718 words

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson  · 9 Mar 2015  · 229pp  · 67,869 words

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

by Kariappa Bheemaiah  · 26 Feb 2017  · 492pp  · 118,882 words

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

by Sabine Hossenfelder  · 11 Jun 2018  · 340pp  · 91,416 words

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

by Frank Pasquale  · 17 Nov 2014  · 320pp  · 87,853 words

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer  · 19 Jan 2016  · 558pp  · 168,179 words

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission

by Steve Gibson  · 2 Mar 2012  · 377pp  · 121,996 words

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum  · 19 Sep 2011  · 821pp  · 227,742 words

Them: Adventures With Extremists

by Jon Ronson  · 1 Jan 2001  · 341pp  · 87,268 words

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger  · 15 Jul 2019  · 382pp  · 114,537 words

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 22 Jan 2019  · 196pp  · 54,339 words

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby  · 22 Nov 2013  · 165pp  · 45,397 words

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy  · 30 Apr 2013  · 452pp  · 134,502 words

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery

by Stewart Lansley  · 19 Jan 2012  · 223pp  · 10,010 words

The Disappearing Act

by Florence de Changy  · 24 Dec 2020

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 29 Sep 2013  · 464pp  · 127,283 words

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back

by Guy Shrubsole  · 1 May 2019  · 505pp  · 133,661 words

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

by Timothy Ferriss  · 6 Dec 2016  · 669pp  · 210,153 words