Adam Curtis – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Arriving today—and barely surviving the postman’s attempts to cram it through the letterbox—is the latest volume from Strange Attractor, Welcome to Mars by Ken Hollings. I’m really looking forward to reading this since it touches on areas of interest which span the development of Cold War technologies to pulp science fiction, examining the interconnections between these disparate zones; most histories of the period prefer to stay in one area or the other. A glance at the chapter titles immediately pushes my buttons: “1947 Rebuilding Lemuria”, “1951 Absolute Elsewhere”. If all that wasn’t enough there’s an intro by Erik Davis and the first 250 copies come with a CD of “classy analogue Outer Space exotica” by Simon James. Order from the SA Shoppe and get a free postcard!

‘Welcome to Mars is a map of the post-war Zone, a non-fiction Gravity’s Rainbow that follows the arc of Germany’s V2 rocket to the end of the rainbow – to America.’ Erik Davis

Welcome to Mars is an iconoclastic, penetrating and darkly humorous history of America from 1947-1959, the decade in which the nation defined its image and created the blueprint for the world we live in today.

Welcome To Mars draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified government archives, old movies and newsreels from this unique period when the future first took on a tangible presence. Ken Hollings depicts an unsettled time in which the layout of Suburbia reflected atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously indeed.

Seamlessly interweaving developments in technology, popular culture, politics, changes in home life, the development of the self, collective fantasy and overwhelming paranoia, Hollings has produced an alarming and often hysterically funny vision of the past that would ultimately govern all of our futures.

“Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings. Welcome to Mars offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots of the strange humanoid culture we live in today.” Adam Curtis

‘Ken Hollings has placed his critical focus at the precise point where the high technologies of information control and social manipulation intersect the passionate search for scientific ways to probe the human mind. Welcome to Mars is a searingly accurate and deeply disturbing exposé of the fantasies of American modernism that have inspired the many nightmares and the few hopeful visions of our new Millennium.’ Dr Jacques Vallée

Previously on { feuilleton }
• SAJ again
• Strange Attractor Journal Three
• How to make crop circles

Adam Curtis, producer of brilliant documentary series such as Pandora’s Box, The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares, has a new series starting on BBC 2 next week. The Guardian profiled him and his work today. The Power of Nightmares is available to download here.

Cry freedom
In the cold war paranoia made sense, but a bold new documentary argues that the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human. By Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Saturday March 3, 2007

IN THE MID-1950s, with the cold war growing chillier, paranoia seeped through the corridors of the Rand Corporation, the fabled military thinktank in California. After all, to the hotshot young analysts paid to devise America’s strategy in the nuclear standoff with Moscow, paranoia seemed to make perfect sense. If you assumed that you couldn’t trust your enemy—and you assumed that your enemy felt the same about you—then whatever noises you made about disarmament, you’d always stockpile weapons, because you’d assume your enemy was doing the same. Nobody would dare attack, and an edgy stability would result. Act with trust and co-operation, on the other hand, and you risked a situation where both sides would claim to be willing to disarm, but then only you actually did so, spelling instability, then doom.

This was what the thinktank’s logicians called the “prisoner’s dilemma”, and the more ambitious among them—inspired by John Nash, the mathematical genius and Rand Corporation scholar portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind—had high hopes for their newborn theory. Could it be, they wondered, that stability in everyday human relations was achieved by the same kind of self-centred suspicion and distrust? To test their ideas, they recruited the nearest everyday humans they could find: the Rand Corporation’s secretaries. In experiments, they posed various dilemmas for pairs of secretaries, in which they could co-operate or betray each other. (A typical question involved the purchase of a Buick; one imagines women in knee-length dresses, gamely tolerating questions from clipboard-wielding men in horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved shirts.) The theory predicted they’d choose betrayal, because they couldn’t trust the other one not to. Every single time, however, they chose to co-operate.

Perhaps if the analysts had paid more attention to their secretaries, the history of the past half-century would have proved very different. Instead, according to a new documentary series beginning on BBC2 next weekend, the paranoid theories hatched during the cold war would come to inspire a peculiar, cold-hearted idea of personal freedom—one that helps explain everything from the rise of Prozac and Viagra to Labour’s obsession with healthcare targets, from the military crusades of George Bush and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency to the rampant diagnosis of attention deficit disorder in children.

Continue reading “The Trap by Adam Curtis”