The Trap

Last night, we watched the second part of Adam Curtis's documentary about the concept of freedom in modern society, The Trap. It was really very interesting and while naturally polemical in its structure, still worth watching even for those who still think James M. Buchanan has all the answers (you're wrong: he doesn't). Curtis basically condemns the adoption of 'game theory' as a system of social management, because of its flawed classification of humans as simple, mechanical computing machines.

I'm sorry to say that we missed the first part in the series. Reviews of it were very good, though, so I'll have to see if I can't hunt down a copy.

In other news, my colleague, Eric and I met up with web2.0 professional, John Bell on Thursday evening. He said a lot which opened my eyes and got me thinking about new ways of approaching social media, specifically in Barcelona and Catalonia. Anyone who wants to be at the bleeding edge of web technologies could do worse than bookmarking his blog (and then reading it at regular intervals). He wrote a very kind blurb about this blog here.

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March 19, 2007 | Filed Under Catalonia, Internet computer, Politics, Site news 

Comments

2 Responses to “The Trap”

  1. Nick on March 20th, 2007 4:11 pm

    Thanks for reminding me about this series. I'm sure it will be available via torrent soon. I really enjoyed his last series The Power of Nightmares although didn't agree with all of it. I'm looking forward to watching his first series Pandora's Box too.

  2. the pillion passenger on March 20th, 2007 9:19 pm

    yeah i was watching too. particularly liked how they showed the way the NHS has been priviatised (for the public good, of course!). hope that doesn't happen here in ireland. saw the first episode. really just explained the origins and effects of game theory as well as some of the psychiatry stuff. i thought he linked the two episodes very well. depressing watching optimistic clinton get elected…only to be told there was no money to do what he wanted. felt he over-complicated/repeated the same point a little bit too often but overall well worth a look.

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