1. Love and Power
May 24, 2011
This is the story of the dream that
rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of
stable world. They would bring about a new kind global
capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the
past.
They would also abolish political
power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet
where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in
cybernetic systems - without hierarchy.
2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
May 31, 2011
This is the story of how our modern
scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is
actually a machine fantasy.
It has little to do with the real
complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were
projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists.
A
static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything
else on the planet, as components - cogs - in a system.
3. The Monkey in the Machine and the
Machine in the Monkey
June 6, 2011
This episode looks at why we humans
find this machine vision so beguiling.
The film argues it is
because all political dreams of changing the world for the
better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into
machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions
because they excuse our failure.
