Richard Brautigan Poem Inspires BBC Documentary Series

As Ron Silliman pointed out yesterday, a new documentary series has been developed by the BBC (created by filmmaker Adam Curtis) titled after a Richard Brautigan poem, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." Written in 1968 and reprinted in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, the poem serves in this instance to encapsulate "how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built." As the BBC site notes: "This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems - without hierarchy." Episode one concerns Ayn Rand and Silicon Valley, and episode two is about "the use and abuse of vegetational concepts," telling "the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy."

Watch the trailer for "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" below.