A provocative British intellectual argues that technology is making us slaves. Independent thought, he says, is being destroyed by our love of machines.
Turn off the technology! says filmmaker
A provocative British intellectual argues that technology is making us slaves. Independent thought, he says, is being destroyed by our love of machines.
We all love our gadgets. Whether it's a mobile phone, games console, MP3 player, or humble television, we seem always to be plugged into something or glued to a screen, either at work, at school, or in our time off.
But a new series of short films wants us to question this obsession. We have become accustomed to instantly and easily accessing the words, music, games - even the people - that we want. We feel 'connected' to our nearest and dearest and to people on the other side of the world. Has this opened up a world of free choices, or is it making us passive, or even slaves to technology?
The popular uprisings in the Middle East have shown how social media like Facebook and Twitter can help an entire population throw off dictatorship and lay the groundwork for a new, free society. Ordinary people, fired up by political anger, were made powerful through their use of the internet to organise revolutions.
But Adam Curtis, the documentary maker whose series about technology begins next week on the BBC, says that in the developed, democratic world the effects of all this tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, and internet surfing are very different.
Our online activity encourages us to be self-centred, he argues. We create a virtual image to impress others and obsess about our own emotions, likes, and dislikes.
'This is the driving belief of our time: that "me", and what I feel minute by minute, is the natural centre of the world.'
Instead, he says, we should be analysing the bigger picture and exercising our political muscles.
Curtis, a former politics tutor at Oxford University who likes to provoke debate with his work, says we immerse ourselves in technology, and this blinds us to the nature of the society in which we live and how it operates: he calls us 'disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine.'
Enslaved to technology?
'On Facebook and Twitter you are performing to attract people,' Curtis explains. 'You are dancing emotionally on a platform created by a large corporation.'
In Ancient Rome, the rulers kept the masses amused, satisfied, and peaceful with 'bread and circuses'. In the 19th Century, Karl Marx complained that religion, 'the opiate of the masses' sapped political anger and action.
Adam Curtis believes we are being tamed in a similar way. But why should we resist what we enjoy?