Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
For all their watchability, it's important to remember that these are not straight-up documentaries. They're well-crafted opinion pieces with narratives that (depending on your perception) may or may not be shoehorned into the shape of facts with a blunt instrument. Also the copious library footage, while always tantalizing, tends to be only marginally connected with the subject at hand. They're still worth watching for the presentation alone, and they are great discussion starters.
Personally, I found one of the most disagreeable Curtis projects to be "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", as entertaining as it was. If you ever have a spare weekend and would like to spend it thinking about the trajectory of society, I recommend binge-watching Curtis movies.
One argument, if I remember correctly, was that game theory should no longer be used as a tool because it was largely developed during the cold war, which is over now.
And yet I'm utterly I'm fascinated by his movies. I probably (re)watch one every 2 months. Go figure.
edit: You can't miss this parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
From my perspective the common thread of his arguments is that over-reliance on specific models (generally of how the human mind works, but also of how systems work, e.g. ecology) can lead to unintended consequences. For example, the ways in which British hospitals skirted performance targets under New Labor, or the spectacular failure of the approach taken by the Defense Department in Vietnam.
To take another example, Curtis highlights in 'The Century of Self' the damage done by over-reliance on Freudian models of the mind, and then the subsequent follies of those who borrowed from Wilhelm Reich.
Perhaps stated more generally, I think the core idea behind Curtis' work is perhaps simply that ideas can be extremely dangerous or powerful.
That's as good a description as I'm likely to come up with. Aside from the delivery, which is at once engaging and completely lacking the nuisance necessary for a topic like this, my issue is that the core idea is a truism and I'm not sure he actually makes an interesting point, much less offers alternatives (he'd have to make that point first).
He does however touch on interesting topics. He then attempts to find causal relationships between events, but I believe doing this to arrive at a conclusion is intellectually dishonest. He must know that, which makes me more frustrated. That's personal preference. If I was trying to convince someone of something, this is not how I'd go about it.
Re NHS: ask anyone who designs incentive programs and they'll tell you that it's a cat and mouse game. I fail to see how hospital managers gaming the system implies "KPI + autonomy about how to achieve it" is a dud idea entirely, and that proponents of such systems are paranoid RAND Corp game theory psychopaths stuck in the Cold War.
Incentives need to be tweaked just like anything else, and the rational agent model need not be a complete description of human behaviour for it be useful. It need only be sufficiently descriptive of portions of workplace behaviour that designing incentives raises KPIs. If those KPIs aren't working you tweak them, using those dreaded numbers Curtis despises so much.
Models are useful until they aren't. But as someone said- they're all wrong. We modify them or replace them as necessary. Sometimes that takes longer than we'd like. We'd still be bashing each other with clubs without them. I'm not sure what Curtis proposes, which is perhaps why I watch these movies over and over again- trying to get the point. Or maybe it's just soothing to hear vague thoughts about economics and systems theory set to music and stock footage.
As others have said, perhaps it's more useful as a conversation starter than a thesis. Don't get me wrong. I love the damn movies.
Truth is I would rather not, because this would then have a certain potential to become an unrewarding political exchange of which I would like to see less on HN. Another reason is that, in order to give you any satisfying content to disagree with, I would have to take one or more of his movies and keep a log of my objections as the narrator goes on. There is very little I can object to systemically, it would be on a claim-by-claim basis.
I think there is no value in doing this. Anyone can watch the films and come to their own conclusions, and inducing thought is a real strength of the material.
"They're well-crafted opinion pieces with narratives that (depending on your perception) may or may not be shoehorned into the shape of facts with a blunt instrument."
That's a statement which tends to be rather non-falsifiable. That doesn't make it right or wrong. But it makes showing it to be one or the other to be difficult at best.
If you've got specific cases of facts that are wrong, or can point to specific narratives you find less than credible, I'd appreciate it.
"these are not straight-up documentaries. They're well-crafted opinion pieces"
There's a YouTube link for those outside the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXcpDO8_3qU
The story told is a fascinating one, and links up with a few others I've seen.
There's an alternate telling of the Bitter Lake story in Daniel Yergin's the Prize. See episode 5, at 23m 34s:
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=IIJxBrHcSUo
(The entire series is excellent.)
And while it covers some different ground, Robert Newman's "History of Oil" also covers the petro-politics of the middle east in a highly provocative mannner:
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0
Some have claimed here that Curtis is creating opinion pieces. ThatsThePoint.jpg
The stories we've been told of the Middle East are opinion pieces, with a specific narrative and agenda. The introduction to this piece notes that the stories that narrative is composed of no longer hold together, and no longer make sense. A frame is necessary for understanding (though as I've said, Curtis often removes that entirely), and yes, Curtis is offering an alternative one, but also quite deliberately breaking the conventional frame.
It's a large part of the excellence of the piece.
I'd also like to credit dmschulman for pointing out the documentary to me.
The short story is that during Clinton\Blair era of government, political parties changed from devising policies based on principles which they would then try to popularise to discovering what policies would get them elected from the voters themselves.
They did this by using the new sciences of marketing psychology i.e. demographics, polling, focus groups, psychological profiling etc. to identify what appealed to the whims of the tiny minority of swing voters that truly determine the outcome of elections.
This may not sound too bad but this is the "not believing anything" because any question whether foreign or domestic was answered by carefully designed focus group instead of a leader with a vision of what type of society we want to live in. It won elections but bred inconsistent, short-term, short-sighted, minority desire driven policy.
The rest is raw footage from the country since 2001. While this is also fascinating (and harrowing and distressing in many places) the overall length is only really going to prevent people from getting to the end and understanding the whole story. Given that Curtis's stated aim is to tell the whole story, without the simplifications that modern news media requires, the length seems to counteract that aim.
Well, it happens here. It doesn't happen too much "out there" ..
Good film.