Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a three-part documentary series that examines how computer technologies and cybernetic dreams have shaped politics, economics, and our sense of freedom.
The first part, Love and Power, traces the rise of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and its influence on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, arguing that the pursuit of self-interest combined with networked systems produced not liberation but new forms of instability.
The second, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts (our personal favorite of the three), critiques the idea—borrowed from ecology and cybernetics—that societies and economies are self-regulating systems. Curtis shows how these metaphors of balance and feedback loops masked structural inequalities and crises.
The final part, The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, explores how scientific theories about evolution, genetics, and selfish genes were deployed to naturalize hierarchy and competition, suggesting that biological determinism dovetailed with the political logics of neoliberalism.
From financial crashes to ecological metaphors and evolutionary narratives, Curtis presents a sweeping argument: that our faith in computers and systems thinking has not freed us from power but has locked us into new myths, leaving us “all watched over” by machines that promised salvation but delivered control.
