All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series)

[2] In the first episode, Curtis traces the effects of Ayn Rand's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence of Alan Greenspan, who was a member of a reading group called the Collective, which discussed her work and her philosophy of Objectivism.

While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries.

However, after each country agreed to be bailed out by the IMF, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, destroying their economies and leaving their taxpayers with enormous debts.

Alan Greenspan would rise to greater prominence after his handling of the economic effects of the September 11 attacks, later cutting interest rates in the wake of the Enron scandal in a bid to stimulate the economy.

By keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, using the proceeds to buy American bonds.

The money flooding into America reduced the perception of risk in signing loans to lower income clients, permitting lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable.

The high level of loan defaulting that followed led ultimately to the 2007-08 financial crisis, caused by the collapse of a housing bubble similar to that which Far Eastern countries had previously faced.

In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace",[4] and it began to be argued that the use of computer networks had led not to a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to corporations.

The idea of ecosystems was proposed in 1935 by Arthur Tansley, an English botanist, based on his belief that the whole of the natural world operated as a series of interconnected networks.

Taken together with Jay Forrester's work in cybernetic systems, which posited that all networks are regulated by feedback loops, the belief emerged that the natural world is composed of self-regulating ecosystems that tends towards balance and equilibrium.

Communes of people who saw themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, used his geodesic domes as habitats.

Around this time, Stewart Brand filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboard that he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals.

In 1967, Richard Brautigan published the poetry work All Watched Over by machines of Loving Grace, which promoted the idea of a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and organisms living in perfect harmony and stability.

George Van Dyne then tried to build a computer model to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked.

The reason for this lack of stabilisation was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality, whereas the Odums and other ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature."

However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's Tutsis being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race.

In 1960, Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines.

Curtis draws a parallel between Fossey and the colonialists who oppressed the Congolese, describing her as one of many westerners who brutalised and terrorised African peoples for their own high-minded ideals.

In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions, Price decided to start helping poor and homeless people, giving away all his possessions in acts of random kindness.

Richard Dawkins later took Hamilton and Price's equations and popularised them, explaining that humans are simply machines created by the selfish genes.

But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are effectively unable to improve and change the world.

"[8] John Preston also reviewed the first episode, and said that although it showed flashes of brilliance, it had an "infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched.

"[9] Andrew Anthony published a review in The Observer and The Guardian, and commented on the central premise that we had been made to "believe we could create a stable world that would last for ever" but that he doesn't "recall ever believing that 'we' could create a stable world that would last for ever", and noted that: "For the film-maker there seems to be an objective reality that a determined individual can penetrate if he is willing to challenge the confining chimeras of markets and machines.

"[10] Curtis's style is typified by the use of frequent and often incongruous cuts of film and music, often lasting only a fraction of a second, in a technique similar to sampling.