Watching Adam Curtis’ fascinating series Pandora’s Box, subtitled A Fable from the Age of Science. It’s a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. Felipe on bricolabs pointed it out a few weeks ago. It’s a doco of unique style and content (filled with brilliant fragments of BBC archival material). The general subject is the rise of the technocratic society globally — the systems men of the Cold War, colonial technocracies, and so on. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in the Soviet Union; systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War; economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s; the insecticide DDT; Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s; and the history of nuclear power.
Curtis illustrates with great subtlety the connections between politics, economics, technology, and power, not to mention pointing out the obvious causes of much human misery: greed.
Part 5 “Black Power” explores the relationship between development in Ghana, colonial conceits, corporate and general human greed, as it suggests the deep connections between the distortions introduced by large-scale development and the fabric of a human system. Yet another example of the scalar independence of the distortions that organismic life imposes on its surrounds.
The retro feel from Curtis’ exclusive use of archive material always feels relevant rather than stylistic although the opening sequence is a bit annoying. Overall, though, an edifying and profound point of view on the contemporary developed world.