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Comment by r0h1n | Hacker News Reader

Wow! This may be the most brilliant, cheeky, inventive and yet incisive piece of journalism I've come across in recent times. And it's on BBC (I had to check multiple times to be sure).

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This is Adam Curtis you're dealing with, check youtube for some of his other brilliant (& kinda far-out) documentaries

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is pretty incredible!

"Human Resources" will change your life.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/

A documentary that starts with a slightly de-tuned low and flat piano note. Impactful.

Every great song starts with a single note...

Now go watch the darn thing.

It's a shame they don't offer torrents.

Why? Just use http://flashgot.net/ wih Firefox.

Some providers filter flash etc. Torrents allow the site to offset some of the hosting load.

Have you seen "The Loving Trap"? http://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

(spoiler: it's a parody of Curtis's methods)

Thanks for that jn. It really resonates with me after seeing Machines and this latest BBC article.

Even his Manchester International Festival documentary was incredible, and that was at least a third musical collaboration...

This is actually well overdue, Curtis is a genius whose work will appeal to a lot of people here.

It's not considered his best stuff, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is probably most relevant to HN and all three episodes are well worth watching.

IMO his best stuff is on the coincidence and movement of political power. Check out The Trap and The Mayfair Set. The Power of Nightmares is good too.

Really great writing and seemingly the only way to get such information past the censors these days - one more thing I would have loved to see him include would be Tammany Hall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall ) - a reminder how closely politics and mobsters / organised crimes were still interconnected not so long ago (Al Capone started his career with their protection, or Lucy Luciano to name only two)

I admit that I dismissed this article due to the title. Your comment prompted me to give it a second chance, and it's actually a pretty decent read.

Adam Curtis has a lot of interesting pieces. Take them with a shaker full of salt, though. (Especially the "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". That one was very interesting, but also very mislead.)

How so?

He doesn't seem to be aware that computers are universal machines. So the circumnstances and ideologies of their creators do not determine computers' destiny.

The Clinton affair angle was also out of proportion.

You are in for a treat! Watch "The Trap" and "All watched over by machines of loving grace", two documentaries also by Adam Curtis.

All of his films can be watched here: http://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/

You can find them on archive.org too. He tacitly encourages people to share and distribute them.

It's on a BBC blog, anyway. It looks like they have a very small set of blogs, which is nice, but it probably didn't go through the same editorial process as standard BBC articles do.

I agree. I just skimmed it, but it appears to meander. A lot. And it's very long. It probably could have benefited from some "tough love" editing.

That's part of the charm. It draws in the casual reader - perhaps one seeking some cheap sensationalism - and then quite unexpectedly becomes an expansive, relevant commentary on our time. It might be brilliant.

That's his whole thing. His films typically come in three or four 60 minute sections. He occasionally does stuff like stage live action interactive theatre versions of his documentaries in abandoned warehouses. He once did a show with Massive Attack. So when he writes articles like this, it's him being restrained.

See the following brilliantly observed parody for the reasons to take him with a pinch of salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

That said, he is one of my intellectual idols, however much he does enjoy gimmickry.

It's very long? Do you have the patience of a gnat? This is exactly the kind of journalism that should be championed instead of short, fact-less articles about the latest celebrity to accidentally release a sex tape.

Don't most programmers have ADD? Many engineers in general do, and I'm one of them.

E.g. why are you on HN? Is it because you're bored while something is compiling? But you know that you'll spend more time on HN (or slashdot or whatever) than it takes for the compile to finish.

And why is twitter so popular? Isn't 140 characters the antithesis of patience?

I can certainly take the time to read long articles, but I didn't know this author. So that makes him one of literally "thousands" of articles, tweets, etc competing for my time every day. That's why I generally flit thru articles.

Would you prefer a LOLcat?

I'll also chime in here with a recommendation for anything Adam Curtis does.

His documentaries are among the best I've seen (and he has quite a few). Most are available on Youtube (or in a torrent collection, if that's your thing).

I recently watched "It Felt Like a Kiss"[1], and it's quite the piece of art. No narration, all great music.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Felt_Like_a_Kiss

Actually, as soon as I saw Curtis's name on it I stopped reading. His documentaries are egregious narratives with little relation to reality, from past experience.

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