To what extent is your love all i think about?

Adam Curtis’ recent documentary is a headfuck. Its opening claim is bold: ’the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’ But does it deliver? Read on to find out.

Part 1.1 Diagnosis

First, we need to sum up the series as simply as possible. At its most basic, the series is about the rise of globalism and its impact on the mind. The answer to the question of whether the world could be made differently depends on how the mind reacts. According to Curtis’ narrative, post-industrial and post-war changes caused a reconfiguring of social relations, where ‘individualism’ was unshackled from social responsibility and allowed to develop unfettered across the world. Curtis ties this individual-level narrative to a social one, in which rising instability in the old supranational empires (the West, China, Russia) results in the transfer of power to the institutions of globalised finance and data extraction. As the interests of global corporations caused populations to separate out and move across the country (and later isolated them further, behind screens), a deep chasm began to yawn in the hearts and minds of a newly scattered man. The old familial bonds that had maintained people’s identities began to erode, and with them the definitional authority of traditional forms of power started to wane. In search of new identities, people found themselves temporarily satisfied by new technologies (like TV and then the internet) that promised to connect them, and new drugs (like valium and later oxycontin) which papered over the psychic cracks. Meanwhile, power was being solidified further at the top levels of the global elite by new surveillance and control techniques. Marshalling science, new theories were developed to suggest that we did not know our own minds as well as we thought we did, and new surveillance and prediction technologies gave the new forms of power the ability to manipulate our environments and so control our lives. So new powers of individualism were emerging, and technology was being used exploitatively to make sure it didn’t challenge the new forms of power. How do these forces interact?

1.2 The society of the individual

What exactly is individuality? Curtis seems to understand individuality as the power to resist authority, or as the power to have authority in the face of, for example, conventional wisdom. He sees this as a good thing gone too far. In the immediate post-war consensus, new dreams of freedom and identity began to emerge. These dreams met ‘the older forces of power…often decaying’, and entered into conflict with them. We can best understand this conflict as a battle over the locus of control with regards to individual autonomy and identity. ‘The older forces of power’, as we typically view them, define autonomy and identity in a top-down manner: one’s status is conferred by their place in the group-structure hierarchy, and it is that position which determines the commands they are able to issue and are subject to. If we take feudalism to embody a former, hence older, configuration of power, we can see the king as powerful only to the extent that he is the king. That this is the case is evidenced by those occasions in history where the autonomy of the individual occupying the position of power clashes with his designated role. Henry VIII’s split from the Church in Rome was a key instance of this. The story is so well known as to not be worth recounting, but what it shows us is that, when individual identities clash with the hierarchical positions their owners occupy, huge cultural rifts emerge which reconfigure international relations and fill books upon books of feverish academic interest. Hence, if we look to history, we can see it through the lens of the autonomy of individuals clashing with the ‘older’ form of power, and sometimes winning in such a way as to change the way we live and relate. What happened after 1945, then, was curious: individualism, exploding at a rate never seen before, met with the old forms of power at infinitely more loci, and yet failed to bring about any meaningful change. Interestingly, the old forms of power seemed to use this emerging individualism to its advantage, warping it and corrupting it to cut us off from the imagined utopia and leaving us in a world geared towards the interests of the powerful. How did this happen?

1.3 Manipulate and control

‘the world could be different, but changing technologies make it look really hard’ As confident new individuals began to question authority and work together to build a new, intelligent world, material power has marshalled changing technologies to support its exploitative regime. Traditionally, we have resisted exploitation through collaboration and protest, but a changing world has made that increasingly difficult. Three key technological developments have helped create this problem: science, communications, and surveillance. Behind all these lie a growing power of computers to create the impression that they are able to predict human behaviour better than we can ourselves. Developments in psychology suggested that we were not as in control of our minds as we thought. Skinner’s behaviourism taught us that we were no better than pigeons, trained to push buttons for rewards; Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments showed us that our concept of a stable and individual self was laughable; Kahnemann’s ‘dual-systems’ approach showed us that our attention, and so our control, was limited. These developments conspired to undermine our self-confidence, to make us doubtful and inactive, and encouraged us to offer ourselves up for diagnosis and, consequently, data extraction and control. Added to this, we now lived in cyberspace. In front of a screen, scrolling alone, private experiences were created which separated people off from their traditional group identities. As new groups began to form, it became clear that something wasn’t quite right: wilful ignorance prevailed, hatefulness erupted, inceldom bloomed. Good things happened too, and perhaps we were focusing too much on the negative, but nonetheless, you just couldn’t shake the feeling that people weren’t quite thinking right. To make matters worse, we now knew we were being watched everywhere we went - inside and out. We were constantly being marketed to, and reminded of power by surveillance cameras and cookies. In our electric cells, this rendered us fearful and compliant. It became difficult to speak or to interact, and the distance we felt was bridged by technological fixes. Taken together, these factors prevented our blossoming individuality from rationalising itself. This new ability to resist authority should have (still should, and probably shall) resulted in the emergence of new forms of intelligent, coordinated action. But it didn’t. Instead, we stopped being able to solve problems, became lumpen and learnedly helpless, and looked to old dreams for comfort. Meanwhile, material demands ground on.

2. Cardiagnosis: The Extraction Imperative

Why would it be the case that the world we live in is so shit? For Curtis, the answer is that material demands are king. Humans orient themselves towards survival, and where this means acquiring resources, we adapt our minds to believe the things that will facilitate this acquisition. Hence, as our attention is captured and controlled by the technologies of culture, our identities change in unpredictable ways. We react, but not in a straightforward way - some things we reject, some accept. What sort of effect, then, does culture have on our minds? The picture presented by Curtis is hardly encouraging - ‘we’ (the audience) are told that we are manipulated, exploited, controlled. Why is this? Why would the world we live in and build as humans be so violently opposed to self-control, to contemplation and the exercise of intelligent judgment? For Curtis, the answer resides in the ‘extraction imperative’. The ‘extraction imperative’ refers to whichever x is the prime economic motivation in the present global arrangement. That motivation is defined by the ‘exploitable niche’ which is constantly emergent at the forefront of human progress. We can best understand this by way of illustration from Roadside Picnic. Roadside Picnic is a meditation on the notion that goodness must be made from badness, on the grounds that there is nothing else to make it from, and it depicts a ‘zone’ of unspeakable horror into which brave men venture, for money and science, to recover the alien trinkets left behind. This represents the idea that there is always a dangerous and dark bit of the world that we don’t quite understand, in which the brave can (for wholly selfish reasons, it is stressed) venture into the ‘zone’ and drive humanity forward. In the real world, this ‘zone’ has moved rapidly over the last hundred years. First coal was the prime extraction, then oil, then finance, and now it’s data. As we’ve moved through these zones, the actions of agents oriented towards these extraction imperatives have structured social relations such that individualism, rather than resulting in a new and harmonious socialist utopia, has been overstimulated and forced to implode on itself, particularly in the places where genuine individual autonomy would require more equitable social relations. This movement can be understood in terms of the exploiter/exploited relation. In each new ‘zone’, there is a limited resource to be gained: to be extracted, and then sold for profit. Over the last half a century, the human ‘zone’ of extraction has moved, metaphysically, further inward, into our bodies and minds. When coal and oil were the prime extraction imperatives, our labour was exploited to acquire it, and the surplus value used to profit the controllers of the means of production. When it moved to finance, it was our money - hence our consuming, as well as our labouring, power - that became exploited. This turned our behaviour, as well as our labour, into the zone. Now, it’s data, and we are turned into producers of content, giving the exploiters the information necessary to ‘predict’ (that is, to channel into median funnels) the mental states which lie behind our actions. As the zone moves inward, more of our identity becomes commodifiable, and we are encouraged to auto-exploit ourselves in the interests of capital. Of course you should post on instagram, says the world: you could become an influencer. Sure, your identity is now a dataset, but look: money, and fame! As the zone moves forward, we ride a knife-edge, trying to get on the right side of the exploiter-exploited relation without ruining it for everyone. We try to get what we want out of social media without giving away more than we’re comfortable. The problem is that technologies of atomisation have made this more difficult than ever before: struggling to find a way to authentically connect in cyberspace, we lack a coherent narrative as to how to optimise the exploitation relation. The thing is, exploitation happens everywhere. Evolution progresses all over the animal kingdom through exploiter/exploited relations: the woodpecker lays its eggs in the reed warbler’s nest, so the reed warbler gets better at detecting cuckoos, and over time these adaptations lead to other possibilities in the evolutionary skill tree which make the creature better able to compete more widely in its ecological niche. Hence, the key aspect to healthy evolution in the exploiter/exploited relation is the adaptation of the exploited, rapidly and effectively, to the activities of the exploiter. As humans we are put in a curious position: we are so able to manipulate our world that it seems as though we can prevent exploitations in real time, by agreement and law, rather than waiting for distant offspring to evolve phenotypic adaptations which make them more able to resist, say, the allure of Pokemon Go. Culture evolves rapidly but we adapt rapidly: hence we should be able to produce healthy results despite this exploitation. Hence, the question of how the world could be different interacts heavily with the question of how much control our minds afford us over the world. Curtis’ argument is mixed, but hopeful: unbridled exploitation creates individuals who manage to restructure power, shifting the locus of control further inward (towards the level of the individual), but it effectively protects itself by creating cultural phenomena which turn individualistic drives back on themselves, separating humans off from true autonomy and driving them into a hole of consumerist auto-exploitation. Hence, the question can be put simply: is the exploitation drive so pure (exploitation is the only goal) and so powerful (nothing will get in the way) that the mind will always warp itself to its service? I don’t think so. Here’s why.

S3.1 Could the world be made differently?

In order to work out how the world could be different, we have to understand the relation between the extraction imperative and the psychologies of the individuals constituted by it. What we need to do is make a careful distinction between the extraction imperative as the prime mover and the extraction imperative as the sole mover, since this bears heavily upon the question of whether any change is possible. Let us take the claim that ‘the extraction imperative is the sole mover [of culture]’ to be identical with the doctrine of capitalist realism: the idea that ‘this is the only way things can be’, the ‘best of all possible worlds’ (where, having seen that this world is not, according to any psychological standard, best, we have revised and deflated our concept of what is possible). If humans are wired to pursue the profitable thing - to be on the right side of the exploiter-exploited relation in the ‘zone’ of material progress - then any ‘ideal’ solution is bound to fail to the extent that it curtails any individual’s ability to be one of the exploiters. Basically, the desire to be on the ‘right side of history’ has the potential to stop us from enacting the best solution, and this potential is positively correlated with the extent to which we view ourselves as isolated or atomised individuals, independent of any of the groups we happen to constitute. So, if the extraction imperative is the prime goal of all living souls, and if humans are bound to believe whatever it is that will put them on the right side of the exploitation relation, then extraction must be the sole mover of culture: no change should ever be attempted, because reality, being what it is, will not accommodate it. Goodness must be made from badness - there’s nothing else to make it from. Alternatively, we can understand the extraction imperative as the prime, but not the sole, mover. On this view, all human behaviour is oriented towards this goal, but our orientation is more complex than the exploitation relation because we don’t all relate to it as individuals. Throughout history, we have resisted exploitation through unionisation, protest and sheer dogged will. In the face of pervasive surveillance technology, and a science that undermines our self-confidence, our hopes of continuing this might diminish.However, there is no reason to be alarmed. The tradition of cultivating mental faculties in order to resist exploitation has a long and distinguished history, and with a little creative thinking the path to truly intelligent human connectivity becomes clear. It is the same as it has always been: think for yourself, and collaborate with others. When this is practiced, the totalising impulse of the extraction imperative reveals itself for what it is - an impulse, held in the hearts of exploiters and fearful exploited and allowed to rip, as a result of our atomisation, unchecked through culture. To have built our psyches and worlds around this impulse, then, is revealed finally as absurd.

S3.2 Schumacher’s roadmap

How can we have control over the world? EF Schumacher gives us an idea. Schumacher draws on a long cross-cultural spiritual tradition to argue that meditative and prayer practices (including yoga, which he calls ‘the applied psychology of religion), afford the individual the ability to consciously and deliberately learn to control their attention. Being able to control your attention is important because it gives you the power to resist the demands of the extraction imperative. This ability is best explained in terms of the distinction between directed and captured attention. Throughout the day (and perhaps increasingly) a lot of your attention is captured: by thoughts, feelings, people, movement, screens. When it is captured, the brain produces chemical responses, and if the behaviour is repeated, it will become learned, such that the brain-haver will seek out that experience, consciously or not, in order to reproduce the chemical effect. Hence, having our attention captured means we forfeit control over the behavioural loops which define us by producing dopamine reward patterns to which we return again and again. To the extent that our attention is captured, Schumacher says, we operate at the level of animals. Schumacher thinks that the difference between humans and animals resides in the fact (which i’d possibly dispute) that humans are self-conscious, whilst animals are merely conscious. He argues that animals respond to the environment, on the basis of consciousness, whereas humans have the ability to respond to consciousness and hence behave in ways that are not available to animals. A human, for example, could resist a marshmallow in the expectation of more marshmallows later, whereas an animal could not, having no concept of it. Humans are able to notice their thoughts, and hence able to respond to the world more effectively. This ability would be valueless if we could not use it to cultivate our ability to direct our attention: to choose which thoughts and which stimuli to respond to, rather than to be guided by adverts and scrolling like an animal by hunger and cold. Hence, the difference between directed and captured attention is the difference between humanity and beasthood, and consequently the ability to cultivate and exercise directed attention appears to be the key to resisting the attempts of the powerful to maximise their exploitative relation to the extraction imperative by capturing the attention of the exploited and predictably controlling their actions.

Where do we go from here?

So, as always, the situation is shit but hopeful: the extraction imperative shapes us in its image, and we - the exploited - resist. New ways are found to capture our attention, but we can always learn to direct our thoughts and make intelligent decisions. Doing this will enable us to resist the atomising impulse of the exploiter dynamic, to find new ways (or, possibly, to revive old ones) of connecting with each other in intelligent networks, to form new bases of power from which to temper the demands of the extraction imperative in ways that allow us to think for ourselves and to choose lives that are pleasant and full. Curtis’ documentary is an invaluable tool for understanding the world we live in, and it shows, through its treatment of the impact of globalism on the psyche of the individual and the connectivity of human networks, that the battle is the same as it always was, and that thoughtful collaboration will win the day (but only the day, for the battle must always go on) against the grim physical forces of extraction and the desire to exploit.