Adam Curtis

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This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

What man-as-producer can afford is one thing; what man-as-consumer can afford is quite another thing. But since the two are the same man, the question of what man—or society—can really afford gives rise to endless confusion. Another compelling line of thought on this comes from the filmmaker Adam Curtis in an interview I did with him for The Creative Independent (“Adam Curtis on the Dangers of Self-Expression,” March 14, 2017): If you want to make the world a better place, you have to start with where power has gone. It’s very difficult to see. We live in a world where we see ourselves as independent individuals. If you’re an independent individual, you don’t really think in terms of power.

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To Tristram Stuart and Simon Smiles, thanks for using your incredibly valuable time to help make this book better. To my friends Elisabeth Holm, Jason Butler, Rafael Rozendaal, Haden Polseno-Hensley, and Justin Kazmark, thanks for reading early drafts. To Alex Taborrak, thanks for being willing to share not just what you loved, but what you hated about the book. To my friends Adam Curtis, Ian Rogers, and Simon Russell, thanks for lending an ear and your brains to these ideas. To Michael Walzer, the philosopher who wrote Spheres of Justice, and Elizabeth Anderson, the philosopher who wrote Value in Ethics and Economics, thank you for your brilliant ideas. I hope this book takes them a significant step forward into the public consciousness.

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Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Financial Independence Retire Early Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart, Prosper! How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting Medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates FURTHER WATCHING The Adam Curtis films The Trap, The Century of Self, and HyperNormalisation NOTES INTRODUCTION front page of China Daily: The China Daily headline ran on October 27, 2017. a healthy society: Tucker Carlson’s monologue was delivered on January 3, 2019, on Fox News. poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics: Harvard’s Institute of Politics poll about young people and capitalism was reported in Time magazine (“American Capitalism’s Great Crisis,” May 11, 2014).

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Now He’s Suing The Man He Says Is To Blame’, Buzzfeed, October 2018. 33 Dan Bloom, ‘Founder of Brexiteer Legatum Institute think tank “was suspected of working for Russian intelligence”’, Mirror, May 2018. 34 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Legatum breached charity regulations with Brexit work, Charity Commission finds’, openDemocracy, May 2018. 35 Catherine Neilan, ‘IEA poaches Legatum’s top Brexit adviser Shanker Singham and team’, City A.M., March 2018. 36 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 37 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (London, 2018), p. 80. 38 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 39 Ibid. 40 Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–83 (London, 1995), p. 166. 41 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 42 Peter Clarke, ‘Serial Evangelists’, London Review of Books, June 1994. 43 Felicity Lawrence, Rob Evans, David Pegg, Caelainn Barr and Pamela Duncan, ‘How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party’, Guardian, November 2019. 44 Ibid. 45 Lee Fang, ‘Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics’, The Intercept, August 2017. 46 Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London, 2010), p. 274. 47 Ibid., p. 276. 48 Ibid., p. 48. 49 Ibid., p. 276. 50 Peter Clarke, ‘Serial Evangelists’, London Review of Books, June 1994. 51 ‘Commanding Heights’, PBS.

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In the guise of a research institute, it would be a covert weapon to change political and public opinion. In doing so it would spawn a multibillion-dollar industry that would change the shape of politics, particularly in the United States but also in Britain.37 The idea for the Institute for Economic Affairs came from Friedrich Hayek. According to the documentary-maker Adam Curtis, after the Second World War Fisher paid a visit to Hayek at the London School of Economics, where the Austrian was an economics professor.38 Like Hayek, Fisher feared that communism and socialism would overwhelm the West and believed that government should have almost no role in people’s lives.

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., March 2018. 36 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 37 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (London, 2018), p. 80. 38 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 39 Ibid. 40 Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–83 (London, 1995), p. 166. 41 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 42 Peter Clarke, ‘Serial Evangelists’, London Review of Books, June 1994. 43 Felicity Lawrence, Rob Evans, David Pegg, Caelainn Barr and Pamela Duncan, ‘How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party’, Guardian, November 2019. 44 Ibid. 45 Lee Fang, ‘Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics’, The Intercept, August 2017. 46 Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London, 2010), p. 274. 47 Ibid., p. 276. 48 Ibid., p. 48. 49 Ibid., p. 276. 50 Peter Clarke, ‘Serial Evangelists’, London Review of Books, June 1994. 51 ‘Commanding Heights’, PBS. See also www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/prof_keithjoseph.html; accessed 23 Jan. 2020. 52 Adam Curtis, ‘The Curse of Tina’, BBC, September 2011. 53 George Monbiot, ‘A rightwing insurrection is usurping our democracy’, Guardian, October 2012. 54 David Parker, The Official History of Privatisation Volume 1: The Formative Years 1970–1987 (London, 2009), p. 42. 55 Jonathan Gornall, ‘Big tobacco, the new politics, and the threat to public health’, The BMJ, May 2019. 56 Stian Westlake, ‘The strange death of Tory economic thinking’, Capx, April 2019. 57 Mark Littlewood, ‘The next Tory leader must be a bullish libertarian, not a bland managerialist’, Telegraph, March 2019. 58 Stian Westlake, ‘The strange death of Tory economic thinking’, Capx, April 2019. 59 Nick Cohen, ‘Brexiters never had a real exit plan.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Kyle Hilliard, “Activision Badges—The Original Gaming Achievement,” Game Informer, October 26, 2013, www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/10/26/activision-badges-the-original-gaming-achievement.aspx. 20. u/jasonpressX, “The Unity map gives me mini panic attacks every time I look at it,” r/assassinscreed, Reddit, November 15, 2014, www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/2mdae2/the_unity_map_gives_me_mini_panic_attacks_every. 21. “Too much grinding in this game,” GameFAQs, GameSpot, Red Ventures, January 3, 2015, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/772633-assassins-creed-unity/70945009. 22. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis,” VICE, February 11, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. 23. If you take into account inflation, 2020 games still cost less than those in the ’80s and ’90s. 24. Vikki Blake, “Assassin’s Creed Fans Hit Out at Valhalla’s ‘Extremely Overpriced’ Microtransactions,” Eurogamer, updated February 7, 2021, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-02-07-assassins-creed-fans-hit-out-at-valhallas-extremely-overpriced-microtransactions. 25.

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“Sentiment trader at quant hedge fund,” Cindicator Capital, LinkedIn, accessed November 28, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210301034620/https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/sentiment-trader-at-quant-hedge-fund-at-cindicator-2410397759. 76. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis,” VICE, February 11, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. 77. Ryan Broderick, “‘down so bad im 3rd wheeling an e-couple,’” Garbage Day, January 4, 2021, https://www.garbageday.email/p/down-so-bad-im-3rd-wheeling-an-e. 78. Georgia Wells, Jeff Horowitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739. 79.

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I like this game and franchise but when I saw that map I thought what have they done to me, it is taking forever to get everything, so many chests and it does feel like a grind as you need items or money to get better in the missions as they get harder and harder. this game is not easy thats for sure if you dont grind.”21 Sure enough, one of those die-hards pops in to reply, “I love it. I can pick up the game for like 30min to an hour and just fool around and have fun.” Some players really do enjoy hunting down endless chests and cockades, or at least they find it relaxing (in a Vice interview, the filmmaker Adam Curtis argued it can be calming and liberating).22 And when games are being criticised for their high prices of seventy dollars and above, they don’t mind a bit of padding if it lengthens their potential play time; if you think that one hour spent playing a game is as good as any other hour, then a game with eighty hours of notional gameplay is twice as good as one with forty hours.23 Most would recognise this as a gross oversimplification that ignores quality and variety, yet gamers continue to praise or criticise games for their length and supposed value.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring. 7. THE RIGHT SORT OF MADNESS It was a week after I returned from Florida. I was sitting in a bar in North London with a friend—the documentary maker Adam Curtis—and I was animatedly telling him about Al Dunlap’s crazy sculpture collection of predatory animals and his giant oil paintings of himself and so on. “How’s Elaine dealing with your new hobbyhorse?” Adam asked me. Elaine is my wife. “Oh, she likes it,” I said. “Usually, as you know, she finds my various obsessions quite annoying, but not this time.

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My wife, Elaine; William Fiennes; Emma Kennedy; and Derek Johns and Christine Glover at AP Watt therefore deserve my biggest thanks. There were four or five pages in the chapter “Night of the Living Dead” that were boring and I needed someone to tell me. Ben Goldacre was happy, maybe a little excessively happy, to do so. Adam Curtis and Rebecca Watson were brilliantly clever sounding boards, as were my editors Geoff Kloske at Riverhead and Paul Baggaley at Picador, and Camilla Elworthy and Kris Doyle. I’m very grateful to Lucy Greenwell for helping to research and set up my Gothenburg trip. I recorded an early version of “The Man Who Faked Madness” for the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life.

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by Colin Stagg and David Kessler (Greenzone, 1999). Research into DSM-IV and the chapter “The Avoidable Death of Rebecca Riley” took me to four brilliant sources: “The Dictionary of Disorder: How One Man Revolutionized Psychiatry,” by Alix Spiegel (The New Yorker, January 3, 2005); The Trap, by Adam Curtis (BBC Television); “The Encyclopedia of Insanity: A Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for Everyone,” by L. J. Davis (Harper’s, February 1997); and “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: An Object of Study in the Creation of an Illness,” by David Healy and Joanna Le Noury (The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, vol. 19, 2007).

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

A short-term result of this might be a decentralized commercial internet, as it was in the nineties—better but still no paradise. In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo, an internet user who went by “humdog,” posted a manifesto to the internet, “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace.” It has been widely shared and reblogged ever since. Adam Curtis even quoted the manifesto in his miniseries All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and talked about the prescience of this text on a 2011 radio show hosted by Jarvis Cocker. “[When] i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction,” Hermosillo began, tearing down The WELL’s self-mythologizing as a utopia, and instead painting a picture of cyberspace as large as a vampiric spectacle: i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

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“i suspect that my words have been extracted and that when this essay shows up, they will be extracted some more,” she concludes. She passed away in 2008, and since then, the prophecy of her words in 1994 has been realized. The text has been posted to VC-backed blog platforms and GitHub. The clip of Jarvis Cocker and Adam Curtis is available on YouTube. Links to this content are shared on Facebook and Twitter regularly. Decentralization isn’t much without a noncommercial mission, but now we’re back to the demand, beneath the gloss of social internet, from cyberspace to social media: How does society dismantle hierarchies, bring about progressive social change, and negate corruption, bias, exploitation, and injustice—problems born online or there all along?

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Darius Kazemi, writing for the Dat Foundation’s blog, has explained how internet architecture continues to make decentralization possible (“Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet,” March 22, 2019). The piece “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace,” by Carmen Hermosillo, was included in the anthology High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (ed. Peter Ludlow, MIT Press, 1996). It is also widely available online. Adam Curtis appeared on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on May 22, 2011, to discuss his documentary program All Watched Over by Machines with Loving Grace, which quotes humdog’s manifesto. Kim Stanley Robinson defined utopia in an interview with Amazing Stories (R. K. Troughton, “Interview with Award-Winning Author Kim Stanley Robinson,” September 25, 2013): “One point I’ve been making all along is that even in a utopian situation, there will still be death and lost love, so there will be no shortage of tragedy in utopia.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

In Goetz’s Wired magazine story - ‘Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops’ - he calls them ‘a profoundly effective tool for changing behaviour’. And I’m all for people slowing down in school zones. But maybe in other ways feedback loops are leading to a world we only think we want. Maybe - as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me - they’re turning social media into ‘a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing’. We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this - for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.

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I learnt about the drink-drivers Mike Hubacek and Kevin Tunell from reading ‘A Great Crime Deterrent’ by Julia Duin, published in Insight on the News on 19 October 1998, and ‘Kevin Tunell Is Paying $1 a Week for a Death He Caused and Finding the Price Unexpectedly High’ by Bill Hewitt and Tom Nugent, published in People magazine on 16 April 1990. I loved piecing together the history of group madness from Gustave Le Bon through to Philip Zimbardo. Five people were incredibly generous with their time and expertise - Adam Curtis, Bob Nye, Steve Reicher, Alex Haslam and, especially, Clifford Stott. Clifford kindly talked me through the perils of deindividuation in two long Skype conversations. I recommend his book, Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots, co-written with Steve Reicher and published by Constable & Robinson in 2011.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Gales of merriment apparently rocked the meetings of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, as revealed by a tabulation of all the recorded instances of stipulated “[laughter]” in meetings transcripts from 2001 to 2006, reproduced in Figure 1.1.14 Figure 1.1: Hilarity at the Federal Reserve * * * * * * Source: Federal Reserve FOMC Transcripts, Graph created by Daily Stag Hunt Sometimes the best response to crisis fatigue is not an injunction to recover your flagging sense of humor, or to aspire to the status of he who laughs last. Levity might not be a universal nostrum. The filmmaker Adam Curtis has written in disgust, “Despite the disasters we are [still] trapped in the economists’ world.”15 Yet it will become necessary for us to differentiate the world of the economists and the world of the neoliberals. This conflation is an affliction of many on the left. A major sticking point here is that neoliberals themselves generally do not believe in the comic-book version of laissez-faire sometimes promoted by the economists.

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Andrew Lo lecture: “Are Mathematical Models the Cause for the Financial Crisis in the Global Economy?” (2009). Nolan, Christopher. Memento (2001). Oldham, Taki. (Astro)Turf Wars (2010). Notes 1. One More Red Nightmare 1 For those with access to a film library, I would suggest The Descent (2006); or for something closer to the current topic, Adam Curtis’s The Trap (2007). Just when I had begun feeling proud of my little trope, a friend pointed me to Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization.” Originality is an overrated virtue. 2 Video recordings of much of the proceedings are available on the Web at www.ineteconomics.org. 3 Kay, “The Map Is Not the Territory.” 4 Tankersley and Hirsh, “Neo–Voodoo Economics.” 5 Tiago Mata, at History of Economics Playground, at http://historyofeconomics.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/inet-bw-of-history-repeating/#more-2002. 6 Stephan Richter, www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?

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This point is reprised in chapter 6, which proposes that this was a conscious outcome. 13 This story is still developing: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/12/aig-hank-greenberg-lawsuit-bailout_n_2862195.html 14 Tabulated and graphed at www.dailystaghunt.com/markets/2012/1/12/the-correlation-of-laughter-at-fomc-meetings.html#entry14562168. 15 Adam Curtis,“The Economists’ New Clothes,” www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/02/the_economists_new_clothes.html. 16 Tkacik, “Journals of the Crisis Year.” 17 The quote is from Ezra Klein, “What ‘Inside Job’ Got Wrong.” Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com immediately responded to this attack on the movie with a riposte that will be expanded upon in this book: “This is worse than useless, since Klein incorrectly throws up his hands and effectively says no one can understand what happened and therefore there’s no answer.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

In 1971, a special issue of the magazine topped best-seller book lists and won a National Book Award. Yet, despite the cultural and financial success, Brand faced an identity crisis. By the time Whole Earth won the National Book Award, the commune movement it served and celebrated lay in ruins. Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis interviewed former members of communes in his BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. He discovered that the cybernetic structures that these groups imposed on themselves, rules that were supposed to flatten and equalize power relations among members and lead to a harmonious new society, produced the opposite result and, ultimately, ripped many of the communities apart.20 “We were trying to create a society based on understanding eco-systems, a society based on interrelationships and balance—a man machine biological system working in combination,” recalled Randall Gibson, a member of the Synergia commune in New Mexico that ran on a cybernetic notion he called eco-technics.21 The community had strict rules against collective action or organization.

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A founding member who called himself Lord Byron presided over the group and reserved the right to have sex with any woman in the commune.24 Most communes lasted only a few years, and some less than that. “What tore them all apart was the very thing that they were supposed to have banished: power,” explained Adam Curtis. “Strong personality came to dominate the weaker members of the group, but the rules of a self-organizing system refused to allow any organized opposition to this oppression.” In the end, what were supposed to be experiments in freedom and new utopian societies simply replicated and magnified the structural inequality of the outside world that people brought with them.

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(New York: Grove Press, 1994), 155–156. 15. Ibid., 109. 16. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4. 17. Ibid. 18. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc. 19. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 71–72. 20. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (London: BBC, 2011), documentary series. 21. The founder of Synergia would go on to lead the Biosphere, a project to create a self-sustaining ecosystem inside a giant glass bowl, which was financed by Edward P. Bass, an oil heir from Texas who had been a member of Synergia in the 1970s.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Air Force in 1943, and then spun off as a nonprofit corporation in 1948. The official Rand site is http://www.rand.org/. 151 They tested their ideas on Oliver Burkeman, “Cry Freedom,” The Guardian, March 3, 2007. 152 “It is understood not to be” John Nash spoke to filmmaker Adam Curtis in the BBC documentary The Trap, dir. Adam Curtis (United Kingdom: BBC Two, 2007). 152 The Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing Laing had some evidence on his side. In the infamous “Rosenhan Experiment,” fake patients went to psychiatric institutions and managed to get faulty diagnoses as suffering from mental disorders.

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(New York: Random House, 1998), 46. 136 “tailored more than any” William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 201. 136 Instead, everyone should just avoid Ibid., 204. 138 “We want to live a life” Century of the Self, dir. Adam Curtis (United Kingdom: BBC Four, 2002). 138 To this end, in 1962 For a detailed history of Esalen, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 139 The Brooklyn-born psychologist’s Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd ed.

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods was a real job, but the relationship I have suggested between professional-bureaucrat deputies and political-appointee sector directors is conjectural, and I have no knowledge of anyone being called up from the middle ranks to serve in a ‘kitchen cabinet’ for the Minister, as Mokhov does here. He is acting in this book as a confabulated embodiment of the institution. His tone of voice draws on the exasperated Gosplan witness in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V chapter 2, on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. There’s also useful material on official attitudes (at different levels) to property, in Hachten, Property Relations. 2 When he handed out the traditional bouquets on Women’s Day: International Women’s Day was celebrated (and still is in present-day Russia) on 8 March, with this flower-giving tradition by men as a kind of courtly grave-marker for the early Soviet Union’s feminism. 3 For chemicals were a vital sector at present: for the rapid build-up of the chemical industry, see Theodore Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 4 ‘Suppressed inflation’ or a ‘permanent sellers’ market’: two linked phenomena, though the first chiefly affected the Soviet Union’s perpetually low-priority consumer sector, and the second was true of the cherished industrial sector too.

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Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods was a real job, but the relationship I have suggested between professional-bureaucrat deputies and political-appointee sector directors is conjectural, and I have no knowledge of anyone being called up from the middle ranks to serve in a ‘kitchen cabinet’ for the Minister, as Mokhov does here. He is acting in this book as a confabulated embodiment of the institution. His tone of voice draws on the exasperated Gosplanperimess in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V chapter 2, on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. There’s also useful material on official attitudes (at different levels) to property, in Hachten, Property Relations. 2 When he handed out the traditional bouquets on Women’s Day: International Women’s Day was celebrated (and still is in present-day Russia) on 8 March, with this flower-giving tradition by men as a kind of courtly grave-marker for the early Soviet Union’s feminism. 3 For chemicals were a vital sector at present: for the rapid build-up of the chemical industry, see Theodore Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 4 ‘Suppressed inflation’ or a ‘permanent sellers’ market’: two linked phenomena, though the first chiefly affected the Soviet Union’s perpetually low-priority consumer sector, and the second was true of the cherished industrial sector too.

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Ziegelbaum, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Astronautics Information Translation 22, 1 May 1961 (JPL, Calfornia Institute of Techology) – Gagarin’s first flight Life Magazine vol. 47 no. 6 (10 August 1959), pp. 28–35 – pictures of the American exhibition Literaturnaya Gazeta no. 27 (1969), p. 10 – trial of deputy director of pig farm New York Times vol. 108 no. 37,072 (25 July 1959), pp. 1–4 – Khrushchev and Nixon’s ‘kitchen debate’ at the American exhibition Time Magazine, 12 February 1965, ‘Borrowing from the Capitalists’ – Liberman and economic reform Websites Banknotes http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: Banknotes_of_the_Soviet_ Union,_1961 Russian cars www.autosoviet.com Alexander [Aleksandr] Galich www.galichclub.narod. ru/biog. htm The Jewish Women’s Archive http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/berg-raissa-lvovna Soviet literature www.sovlit.com Michael Swanwick’s blog http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2008/02/khrushchev-isnt-he-russian-novelist. html [sic] Unrealised Moscow http://www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/index_e. htm Film and television Adam Curtis, dir., ‘The Engineers’ Plot’ (TV documentary), programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992 Georgii Daniela, dir., Ya shagayu po Moskve (‘I Walk around Moscow’), 1964 Marlen Khutsiev, dir., Zastava Ilicha/Mne Dvadtsat’ Let (‘Ilich’s Gate’/‘I Am Twenty’), 1961 released 1965 Marlen Khutsiev, dir., Iyulskii Dozhd’ (‘July Rain’), 1967 Mikhail Romm, dir., Devyat’ dnei odnogo goda (‘Nine Days in One Year’), 1962 About the Author Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Joseph Popper, The One-Way Ticket, 2012. Film still. SOCIAL DREAMING The social dimension to big thinking has vanished, replaced by science, technology, and logic. Where can new worldviews be developed, how can they be used to generate new visions for everyday life? Think tanks are supposed to do this, but as Adam Curtis writes, the question is whether most Think Tanks may actually be preventing people thinking of new visions of how society could be organised-and made fairer and freer. That in reality they have become the armoured shell that surrounds all politics, constantly setting the agenda through their PR operations which they then feed to the press, and that prevents genuinely new ideas breaking through.13 Other organizations such as The Seasteading Institute try to develop new possibilities within existing systems by identifying legal loopholes for establishing new economic zones.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

marketing psychologists saw in [television] a way to mirror a consumer’s mind W. R. Simmons, “Strangers into Customers,” marketing study prepared for National Broadcasting Co., New York, 1954. Television told people they could choose their own identities David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine, 1993). The Century of the Self, film, directed by Adam Curtis (2005; United Kingdom: BBC Two, RDF Television). Stuart Ewen, All-Consuming Images (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Television was widely credited as the single biggest contributor to the desocialization of the American landscape Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 19.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Eric Wanner, the former president of the Russell Sage Foundation, summed it up, saying, “The AEIs and the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the progressive faith that social science should shape social policy.” According to one account, it was Hayek who spawned the idea of the think tank as disguised political weapon. As Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker with the BBC, tells the story, around 1950, after reading the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, an eccentric British libertarian named Antony Fisher, an Eton and Cambridge graduate who believed socialism and Communism were overtaking the democratic West, sought Hayek’s advice about what could be done.

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Leaders of conservative foundations such as William Simon might have perceived themselves as merely providing political balance and copying the activism of liberal foundations, but the political scientist Steven Teles pointed out in an interview with the author that there were key differences. The boards of the earlier establishment foundations such as Ford tended to be centrist, while those at the new conservative foundations like Olin tended, he says, to be “ideologically-aligned” and more likely to embrace grant making as a form of movement building. “a scholarly institute”: Adam Curtis, “The Curse of Tina,” BBC, Sept. 13, 2011. The Sarah Scaife Foundation: Martin Gottlieb, “Conservative Policy Unit Takes Aim at New York,” New York Times, May 5, 1986. “As you well know”: L. L. Logue to Frank Walton (Heritage Foundation), Nov. 16, 1976, folder 16, Weyrich Papers, University of Montana

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Meanwhile, at the business end of economic theory, masters of advertising, marketing, and public relations have learned deftly to manipulate symbols and images for emotional effect, sculpting the public’s aspirations for comfort and prestige. This new kind of magical thinking did contribute to commerce and industry — and spectacularly so! (For historical details on this, see the BBC television documentary series “Century of Self ” by Adam Curtis, and the books of Stuart Ewen.) In politics, the 20th century saw battles between the quasi-religious ideologies of the left and right — Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and Maoism, along with British “it’s-for-your-own-good” colonialism and equally benevolent Yankee imperialism. In recent years, the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and his followers has come to the fore via the neoconservative members of the current Bush administration.

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson

Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, disinformation, friendly fire, Jon Ronson, Livingstone, I presume, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the market place, Timothy McVeigh

I would also like to thank Janey Walker, Tim Gardam, Janet Lee, Janis Hadlow, Steve McCarthy, David Malone, Emily Fielden, Natasha Fownes, Mike Whine, Vivienne Clore, Sam Bickley and Emma Forrest. I would say that my wife, Elaine, possessed all the patience and understanding of a loving wife, etc., but in fact she just said to me: ‘Oh, will you just shut up about it and finish it.’ The loving wife in this situation was Adam Curtis. All the words within are my own, except for the paragraphs I have appropriated from Neal Gabler’s An Empire Of Their Own (How The Jews Invented Hollywood). Shorter versions of A Semi-Detached Ayatollah and Dr Paisley, I Presume were published in the Guardian Weekend magazine (in 1997 and 1998).

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Because of changes in definitions, the series before and after 1970 are not strictly comparable. 88 For the 1950s to the 1980s, Social Justice, Report of the Social Justice Commission, Vintage, 1994; for the 1990s and 2000s, ONS; http://www.statistics.gov.uk/elmr/03_10/downloads/Table2_09.xls. 89 P Edwards, Non-standard work and labour-market restructuring in the UK, Warwick Business School, 2006. 90 R Taylor, Britain’s World of Work, ESRC, 2002. 91 TUC, Hardwork, Hidden Lives, Report on Commission on Vulnerable Employment, 2008. 92 Ibid. p 17. 93 Interview in Adam Curtis, The League of Gentlemen, BBC2, 1992. 94 See, eg, R E Rowthorn & JR Wells, De-Industrialisation & Foreign Trade, CUP, 1987, ch 10. 95 Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, op. cit. p 98. 96 The New York Times, 11 November 1984. 97 H Perkin, The Third Revolution, Routledge, 1996, p 37. 98 Glyn op. cit. p 135. 99 Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain, 1981, p 392. 100 I Gilmour, Dancing With Dogma, Pocket Books, 1993, p 71. 101 RW Johnson, The Politics of Recession, Palgrave Macmillan, 1985, p 29. 102 Quoted in Gilmour, op. cit., p 70. 103 ONS Workforce Jobs, by industry: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_labour/LMS_FR_HS/WebTable05_2.xls; there was also a rise in the size of the workforce over the period. 104 If business services are included (legal, accountancy and business consultancy), the figures for 2007 and 2006 rise to 14.5 per cent and 13.8 per cent respectively. 105 S Lansley, Do The Super-Rich Matter?

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The scene from Hoover’s life was inspired by “Happiness Machines” and “The Engineering of Consent”, A Century of the Self, Adam Curtis, BBC, 2002, television. It was informed by “Hoover Sees Prosperous Era”, Houston Post Despatch, 11 May 1925, and “Advertising Is a Vital Force, Says Hoover”, Boston Daily Globe, 11 May 1925. Thank you to the “Quote Investigator”, Garson O’Toole, and to Spencer Howard, archives technician at the Hoover Presidential Library, for making sure the quotes in Stuffocation are correct.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Highly recommended: Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012); Managed by Q, “Managed by Q Stock Option Program Press Conference,” (March 18, 2016), vimeo.com/159580593. 18. See platform.coop for the conferences and the consortium, and ioo.coop for the directory. For my use of “ecosystem,” apologies to Adam Curtis (dir.), All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC (2011). 19. E.g., selfhosted.libhunt.com and ioo.coop/clouds. 20. Anand Sriraman, Jonathan Bragg, and Anand Kulkarni, “Worker-Owned Cooperative Models for Training Artificial Intelligence,” CSCW ’17 Companion (February 25–March 1, 2017). 21.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

“Rencontres avec A. Einstein.” Revue des Questions Scientifiques 129:129–132. Cited in Nussbaumer H. 2014. “Einstein’s conversion from his static to an expanding universe.” EPJH 39:37–62. 30. Obituary, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle. Telegraph, August 22, 2001. 31. Curtis A. 2012. “A mile or two off Yarmouth.” Adam Curtis: the medium and the message, February 24, 2012. www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis /entries/512cde83-3afb-3048-9ece-dba774b10f89. 32. Vortex theory has been covered in: Kragh H. 2002. “The vortex atom: a Victorian theory of everything.” Centaurus 44:32–114; Kragh H. 2011. Higher speculations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 33.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

“A new cybernetic communism, itself one of these options, would, we have seen, involve some of the following elements: use of the most advanced super-computing to algorithmically calculate labour time and resource requirements, at global, regional and local levels, of multiple possible paths of human development; selection from these paths by layered democratic discussion conducted across assemblies that include socialized digital networks and swarms of software agents; light-speed updating and constant revision of the selected plans by streams of big data from production and consumption sources; the passage of increasing numbers of goods and services into the realm of the free or of direct production as use values once automation, copy-left, peer-to-peer commons and other forms of micro-replication take hold; the informing of the entire process by parameters set from the simulations, sensors, and satellite systems measuring and monitoring the species metabolic interchange with the planetary environment.” Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Red Plenty Platforms,” Culture Machines, July 28, 2013, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/511/526. 58.  As well as a partial corrective, perhaps, to Adam Curtis's tendentious narrative All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC Productions, 2011). 59.  This is drawn on our white board as a syncretic thought experiment because of, not in spite of, the complexities and contradictions it makes visible. Among the two most salient are, first, that no actual platform ever functions in an ideal manner and so simply transposing state or corporate governance into platforms does not guarantee specific outcomes, and, second, that the data with which any platform might govern do not merely exist in the world to be gathered and then presented to political systems for their application; rather the identification, sensing, sorting, application, revelation, and instrumentalization of data is the political system in this context.

…

A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power. Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred.” A. Curtis, “How the ‘Ecosystem’ Myth Has Been Used for Sinister Means,” The Guardian, May 28, 2011. See http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts. 7.  Even though the UN's 1967 Outer Space Treaty stated that no country could claim the moon, Dennis Hope sold pieces of it anyway. Hope is the owner of the “Lunar Embassy Corporation” and has sold plots of moon land to 3.7 million people since 1980. The Nevada entrepreneur believed that he could claim the moon under the guise of a galactic government that he created.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

But there were also other consequences. As interest rates rose massively, this decimated the manufacturing industries of these countries. Highly paid skilled jobs were replaced by low-wage jobs in the service industries. These socioeconomic changes were best reported by English journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis in the documentary series The Mayfair Set and Bitter Lake (see Note below). In the process of finding a solution, governments once again turned to the commercial banks and relaxed lending restrictions. If wages could not rise any more, then the banks could lend money. The result was a wave of borrowing that spread through these countries.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, Linda Tirado Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, Louis Hyman Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, Simon Head Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu HyperNormalisation (film), Adam Curtis On workplaces in this book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life, Robin Leidner The Furniture Wars: How America Lost a Fifty Billion Dollar Industry, Michael K. Dugan Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, Cathy N.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

23andMe, Adam Curtis, air freight, company town, desegregation, index card, indoor plumbing, life extension, medical malpractice, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, white picket fence

It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta’s cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures—they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered. 28 After London The story of Henrietta Lacks eventually caught the attention of a BBC producer in London named Adam Curtis, and in 1996, he began making the documentary about Henrietta that I would later watch in Courtney Speed’s beauty parlor. When Curtis arrived in Baltimore with his assistants and cameras and microphones, Deborah thought everything would change, that she and the rest of the world would learn the true story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells, and she would finally be able to move on.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

It’s time for our thinking machines to grow out of an adolescence that has lasted now for sixty years. THE FUTURE IS BLOCKED TO US HANS ULRICH OBRIST Codirector of Exhibitions and Programmes, director of International Projects, Serpentine Galleries, London; author, Ways of Curating In his poem of the same name (which also serves as the title to Adam Curtis’s seminal documentary), Richard Brautigan portends a future “all watched over by machines of loving grace” or, by implication, “thinking” machines. In what follows, I use the term thinking to refer to machines that think on purely algorithmic and computational lines—machines coded by engineers rather than machines that might, or could be, truly sentient.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

See: Book of Woe (New York: Penguin, 2013), 6, 158–60; Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 246–8; John Read and Pete Sanders, A Straight-Talking Introduction to the Causes of Mental Health Problems (Herefordshire, UK: PCCS Books, 2013), 60, 88–91. But once you’ve conceded that One of the leading authors of the fourth edition of the DSM, Robert Spitzer, tacitly admitted this. See The Therapy Trap, p. 49, and my friend Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Trap. “we don’t consider context.” Other key figures in writing the DSM have admitted this. See William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (New York: Verso, 2016), 174. There’s just the checklist of symptoms See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 155–189.

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov

Adam Curtis, back-to-the-land, friendly fire, job satisfaction, no-fly zone, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, trade route, urban sprawl

When members of the Policia Na-cionale began beating on the car with batons and hauling on the door handles, the young Americans concluded that they were about to disappear into one of Noriega’s notorious dungeons—forever. The driver hit the gas pedal and the Panamanians opened fire, killing Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz. It hadn’t ended there. An American Navy lieutenant, Adam Curtis, had witnessed the shooting incident along with his wife. Both of them were dragged off to the Commandancia for interrogations. While Mrs. Curtis was forced to “assume the position” against a prison cell wall and repeatedly threatened with rape, her husband was gagged, pistol-whipped, and kicked in the groin right in front of her.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Elahe Izadi, “Exclusive: AHIP Gave More than $100 Million to Chamber’s Efforts to Derail Health Care Reform,” National Journal (blog), June 13, 2012, http://www.nationaljournal.com /blogs /inf luencealley /2012 /06 /exclusive -ahip -gave -more -than -100 -million -to -chamber-s-efforts-to-derail-health-care-reform-13. 30. Shane Richmond, “Eric Schmidt: Google Gets Close to the ‘Creepy Line,’ ” The Telegraph, October 5, 2010. 31. Magazines like McClure’s paved the way for muckrakers and reformers like Brandeis. Adam Curtis, “What the Fluck?” BBC Blog, December 5, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk /blogs/adamcurtis/posts/WHAT-THE-FLUCK. Curtis also observes the need for such exposure and explanation in our day, explaining that scandals “range from the NSA [U.S. National Security Agency] and GCHQ [Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters], to global banks, private equity . . . and parts of the media-industrial complex. . . .

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

Today, Western politics is being hollowed out in exchange for the stability of what Isaiah Berlin famously called ‘negative liberty’ – a freedom from restrictions rather than a positive freedom to change things for something better. It is this negative ideology that has set the attitude today for decision-making across all aspects of society, let alone intelligence. Recognising this context at all might be an intelligent intelligence function’s most useful role. The Real Cold War Legacy Adam Curtis, in The Trap, describes how the 1950s presented an opportunity for Western governments to release their societies, not only from the tyrannical spectre of fascism abroad, but also from the greedy self-interest of capitalism at home. Political elites, in those early years of the Cold War, determined that this vision – individual freedom for all – could be delivered through the central regulation and management of the economy.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

They began to see themselves as pioneers whose pursuit of Rand’s vision of ‘virtuous selfishness’ would dismantle the calamitous Great Compression, and replace it with a world of small government, minimal taxation, deregulation and free markets in which ‘man’ would be free to compete with ‘man’. ‘We thought of ourselves as being the instigators of a revolution that was coming,’ one member recalled, in a 2010 interview with the filmmaker Adam Curtis. ‘We were so enthusiastic about what a difference this was going to make to the world.’ When Curtis asked what they hoped to achieve, she replied, ‘A totally free society.’ Rand claimed that the only thinker to have ever influenced her was the father of individualism, Aristotle. It was he who, more than two millennia earlier, had decided that a state of ‘ennobled self-love’ was a precondition for the successful pursuit of perfection.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

registered offshore in Jersey Land Registry overseas and offshore company dataset, first released November 2017, records that Elveden Estates Limited, a Jersey-based company, registered numerous land titles making up the Elveden Estate between 2000 and 2002. around £1.2 million DEFRA farm subsidy data for Elveden Farms Ltd and its subsidiaries shows that they received £1.4 million in 2015 and £1.2 million in 2016: http://www.cap-payments­.defra.gov.uk­/ A BBC interview Archival footage featured in Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary ‘The Mayfair Set’, Episode 1: Who Pays Wins, 42 minutes in: https://www.youtube­.com/watch?v­=234H8X1­-JiA­ You can hardly David Hirst, Guardian, 27 September 1976; see also Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (Penguin, 2012), p. 93. Beirut-on-Thames Abdel Bari Atwan, A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page (Saqi Books, 2007), ch. 7.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

v=uBYsSFbBeR4. 76Justin Cook, telephone interview by author, September 11, 2012. 77Zehnder, interview, August 29, 2012. 78Cook, interview, September 11, 2012. 79Cook, interview, September 11, 2012. 80Zehnder, interview, August 29, 2012. 81Zehnder, interview, August 29, 2012. 82Michael Batty, “Building a science of cities,” Cities, 2011, doi:10.1016/j.cities.2011.11.008, 1. 83All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, directed by Adam Curtis (2011; BBC). 84Jay Forrester, “System Dynamics and the Lessons of 35 Years,” in Kenyon B. De Greene, A Systems-Based Approach to Policymaking (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 202. 85Alfeld, “Urban dynamics—the first fifty years.” 86B. Raney et al., “An agent-based microsimulation model of Swiss travel: First results,” Networks and Spatial Economics 3, no. 1 (2003): 23–42. 87Michael Batty, telephone interview by author, August 19, 2010. 88“Heisenberg-Quantum Mechanics, 1925–1927: The Uncertainty Principle,” American Institute of Physics, n.d., accessed February 26, 2013, http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm. 89Asimov, Foundation, 14. 90Lee, “Requiem for Large-Scale Models,” 167. 91Harrison, interview, May 9, 2011. 92Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 217, Gelernter’s italics. 93“SimCity and Advanced GeoAnalytics,” SpatialMarkets blog, March 16, 2012, http://www.spatialmarkets.com/2012/3/16/simcity-and-advanced-geoanalytics.html. 94Lee, “Requiem for Large-Scale Models,” 169. 95Banavar, lecture, April 10, 2012. 96Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 222.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

But a substantial sub-portion of tech tends towards an anarcho-capitalist economic vision whereby an optimal society is one in which perfectly networked people-points engage in frictionless commerce, with very low taxes and a minimal social safety net, and in which unions—were they ever useful—are endemic to the ossified industrial structures that governed the Old Economy, and whose agitation unduly protects incumbents and generates economic inefficiencies. This is, in fact, much of the essence of the so-called California Ideology, an influential strain of Cyber Utopianism. (For a detailed historiography of these tendencies, watch any—ideally all—of Adam Curtis’s wonderful films, especially All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.) I am not a Cyber Utopian. I think the Internet is critically important and has, and will continue to, improve peoples’ lives the world round—but only so long as we fight to make sure it remains a force for the democratization of society, rather than a tool that the already-powerful can use to entrench themselves.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

” ✸ One of Edward’s recommended essays “The Catastrophe of Success” by Tennessee Williams. TF: One of my favorite lines from this piece is: “For me, a convenient place to work is a remote place among strangers where there is good swimming.” ✸ Edward’s favorite documentaries Bennett Miller’s The Cruise and Adam Curtis’s films. “He’s got a four-part film called The Century of the Self, and then a three-part series called The Power of Nightmares. I think those are absolutely brilliant films, dense but really eye-opening.” TF: The Century of the Self has been recommended to me by several podcast guests. ✸ Three favorite recent films?

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

Clash Classix Nouveau Clawson, Tim Clay, Andrew Dice Cliff, Jimmy Clinton, Bill Cobain, Kurt Cocks, Jay Cohen, Lyor Coldplay Coleman, Lisa Coleman, Signy Coleridge, Tanya Coletti, Alex Collen, Phil Collins, Phil Combonation Commodores Conner, Bruce Copeland, Miles Copeland, Stewart Coppola, Sofia Corbijn, Anton Corgan, Billy Cornyn, Stan Corradina, Linda Corrao, Lauren Cortese, Dan Costello, Elvis Coverdale, David Cox, Courteney Crawford, Cindy Creme, Lol Cribiore, Alberto Critchley, Eric Cronin, Kevin Crosby, David Crosby, Robbin Cross, Christopher Crowe, Cameron Cruger, Roberta Cuesta, Michael Culkin, Macaulay Culture Club Cure Curry, Adam Curtis, Bill Cutting Crew Cutting Edge, The Cypress Hill Dajani, Nadia Dall, Bobby Danforth, John Danger Danger Daniels, Charlie Danzig, Glenn Dargis, Manohla Davies, Kathy Davis, Clive Davis, Maria Davis, Martha Davis, Tamra Davola, Joe Dayne, Taylor Dayton, Jonathan Dead Milkmen Dean, Paul Decouflé, Philippe Def Leppard De La Soul DeMann, Freddy DeMartini, Warren Demme, Jonathan Demme, Ted Dempsey, Don Dempsey, Patrick De Niro, Robert De Palma, Brian Depeche Mode Depp, Johnny Deutch, Howie DeVille Devo DeYoung, Dennis Diamond, Brian Diamond, Jim Diaz, John Dick, Nigel Dickerson, Ernest Dickinson, Bruce Dickinson, Janice Dike, Matt DiLeo, Frank Diller, Barry Dillon, Matt Dio, Ronnie Di Palma, Carlo Dire Straits DiSanto, Tony Disney, Lillian Divinyls Dixie Dregs Dixon, Jerry Dixon, Willie DJ Hurricane DJ Jazzy Jeff DJ Red Alert DMC Doebler, Margaret Dokken, Don Dolby, Thomas Dole, Kevin Donovan, Terence Doors Dors, Diana Dougherty, Peter Drake, Bill Dr.