A great watch after those Adam Curtis documentaries. I will say that the documentarians are a little too self-righteous when looking at the characters of the Enron CEOs and traders, as if there wasn't a culture that created them--or better yet, as if a lack of culture didn't create them. It also tends to place too much blame on the people at the top. The smaller traders are even more frightening to me, its as if they have no connection to material reality. Lurking under the surface of this Documentary is also the logic of intellectual property and information privacy. The logic of the current credit crunch can also be illuminated here. To quote McLuhan from Understanding Media: "Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank--that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes.' We have already reached a point where remedial control, born of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted...."
Take the Adam Curtis triology, this, and add to this a recent feature in Harpers about the Numbers Racket in the U.S. Economy, and you've got a interesting and troubling picture America in the early 21st Century.
Take the Adam Curtis triology, this, and add to this a recent feature in Harpers about the Numbers Racket in the U.S. Economy, and you've got a interesting and troubling picture America in the early 21st Century.
