It was amateur footage of an event involving an early video game called Pong that gave Adam Curtis the idea for his new documentary series.
In 1991, a computer engineer from California called Loren Carpenter organised a mass experiment in a huge shed. Hundreds of people were each given a paddle, and told nothing. But on a big screen in front of them was projected a game of Pong – a very basic computer game, where a ball is knocked back and forth on a screen, like table tennis. Each half of the audience jointly controlled the bat on their side of the screen; they had to operate it together and, spontaneously and without discussion, they successfully played a game of Pong, whooping and cheering at their collective collaboration.
"It was like a switch went in my head," Curtis says. "Carpenter saw it as a world of freedom with order. But I suddenly saw it as the opposite – like old film of workers toiling in a factory. They weren't free – they looked like disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine screen. It was a video game, which made it fun, but it still made me wonder whether power had really gone away in these self-organising systems, or if it was just a rebranding. So we became happy components in systems – and our job is to make those systems stable."
The new series, called All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, takes complicated ideas and turns them into entertainment by the use of the vertigo-inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music with which all Curtis fans are familiar. The central idea leads Curtis on a journey, taking in the chilling über-individualist novelist Ayn Rand, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the "new economy", hippy communes, Silicon Valley, ecology, Richard Dawkins, the wars in Congo, the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory, and the computer model of the eating habits of the pronghorn antelope.
You can see why Zoe Williams once wrote that, while watching one of Curtis's programmes, "I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote."
Perhaps because of these emotionally engaging techniques, Curtis inspires cultish devotion, and not just from viewers – he has won six Baftas. A former politics tutor at Oxford, and a Tiggerish man of 55, it's surprising to learn that he began his career in TV working on the zany magazine show That's Life! ("It taught me two things," he says. "That people who think they are funny aren't funny. And how power really works in television – through fear. One day I went to film a dog that sang to its owner's bagpipes. The dog refused to sing. After three hours, I rang Esther Rantzen and she simply said, 'Darling, don't come back until you've made it sing.' So I made the dog sing.")
But he says he'd always been interested in the idea that you could "fuse high seriousness with popular culture, and cut out the middle bits". The new series can be seen as a continuation of a theme to which he has often returned in his 20 years in films: that power works through many different channels, not just Westminster or the White House. So Pandora's Box, in 1992, was about how politicians had tried to use scientific ideas to control society; The Mayfair Set, in 1999, was about how entrepreneurs such as James Goldsmith paved the way for the resurgence of the markets; The Century Of The Self, in 2002, looked at how Freud's theories of the unconscious were used to promote shopping from necessity to leisure activity; The Power Of Nightmares, in 2005, was about how politicians were turning to fear to try to restore their waning influence in a society disillusioned with them.
Now he has moved on to machines, but it starts with nature. "In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states." What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, "The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world."
The counterculture of the 1960s, the Californian hippies, took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics and believed this alternative way of ordering the world was based on some natural order. So they formed communes that were non-hierarchical and self-regulating, disdaining politics and rejecting alliances. (Many of these hippy dropouts later took these ideas mainstream: they became the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who decided that computers could liberate everyone and save the world.)
Another, rather different kind of fan of the network society was Alan Greenspan, for many years the world's most important central banker. "Greenspan believed that networks of computers, like networks of nature, could stabilise themselves," Curtis says. "And technology could turn everyone into heroic individuals, completely free to follow their own ideas." In his individualism, Greenspan was inspired by Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist who abhorred altruism, praised the "virtues of selfishness" and still has a massive following in the US 29 years after her death.
At first, the vision that machines had created a new stability seemed true. On Greenspan's watch, computers allowed investment banks to produce complex mathematical models that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment. If a risk could be predicted, it could be balanced by hedging against it. Hence, stability. There would be no more boom and bust. It was the "new economy".
That stability was, of course, an illusion; it was followed by the greatest economic crash since 1929. But, as Curtis says, the price of the bailouts was paid by ordinary people, via the state, rather than by the wealthy financiers who lost all the money in the first place. That's because, despite the illusion of ordered non-hierarchy, some people have vastly more power than others, and in many cases have had it for centuries.
He draws a parallel with those 1970s communes. "The experiments with them all failed, and quickly. What tore them apart was the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power. Some people were more free than others – strong personalities dominated the weak, but the rules didn't allow any organised opposition to the suppression because that would be politics." As in the commune, so in the world: "These are the limitations of the self-organising system: it cannot deal with politics and power. And now we're all disillusioned with politics, and this machine-organising principle has risen up to be the ideology of our age."
If you are a component in the system, it is difficult to see how power has shifted, Curtis says. "The power of politicians has been taken by others, by financial institutions, corporations. After the crash, the elite used politicised power to rescue themselves. Politics was seen to have failed, to have been corrupt, empty."
This has cultural expressions, as well as economic. We, and our feelings, are now the centre of everything – from reality TV to confessional memoirs to blogs. "There's no one like, say, Tolstoy, who wrote of both man in his world and the architecture of his world," Curtis says. "Now there is no context, just the feelings of one person. The philosophy of our time is summed up by Bill Murray sitting in a submarine in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic saying, 'We're all a bit shit but that's OK.' We have no grand dreams. So of course we embrace a nice stable order."
Why don't we have big ideas or dreams any more? "Because now that there's nothing more important than you, how can you ever lose yourself in a grander idea? We're frightened of eccentricity, of loneliness. Individualism just wants to keep the machine stable, leads to a static world and a powerless world. Rand is individualism carried to its most extreme form, yet she's very popular, and not that far away from how a lot of people, especially the young, feel today."
All of this, Curtis says, means we're missing the bigger picture. "We never talk about power these days. We think we live in a non-hierarchical world, and we pretend not to be elitist now – which is, of course, an emotionally attractive idea, but it's just not true. And that's dangerous."
He believes that because British politics is now obliged to appear non-hierarchical, it has become managerialist, obsessed with process over vision – a recognisable idea to anyone who lives in this triangulated, professionalised political age. He says this doesn't just affect the political parties (although he singles out Andrew Lansley as managerialist-in-chief), but politics in its widest sense. "Even the 'march against the cuts'," he says, referring to the TUC march in London in March, "it was a noble thing, but it was still a managerial approach. We mustn't cut this, we can't cut that. Not, 'There is another way.' Why are we so frightened of a few bond managers? Why can't we challenge the 'markets'? Why do we treat them as if they're their own precious ecosystem? The idea of proper change, or really shifting things, is alien to us today. We just argue about how to manage a system best. It's a moment of high decadence. And we've forgotten that we do have deep responsibilities to people who really are powerless." (He has fascinating material on this about the west's interventions in Congo, as "a place that generates different kinds of myths about us as human beings, things that the west longs for but that also make us terrified".)
In his films, Curtis draws on recent attempts to overthrow power in autocratic countries, describing the spontaneous revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan as a "triumph of the visions of computer utopians of the 1960s, with their vision of computers allowing individuals to create new, non-hierarchical societies" – just like in that mass game of Pong. "The internet played a key role in guiding revolutions that had no guiding ideology, except a desire for self-determination and freedom." But the desire for freedom itself was not enough, he says. "In all those revolutions, that sense of freedom lasted only for a moment. The people were brilliant at overturning the power – but then what? Democracy needs proper politics, but people have given up on saying that they're going to change the world." The Arab uprisings began after he finished making the films, but he sees these in the same way. "It's as if these people assembled spontaneously on Twitter and they just want freedom. But what kind of society do they want?"
He does not deny that Twitter and Facebook had some impact – at least organisationally. But he has strong views on social networking for anything beyond straightforward organisation; he considers the sharing of emotions online to be the "Soviet realism of the age".
He quotes Carmen Hermosillo, a West Coast geek and early adopter of online chatrooms who in 1994 argued that, although the internet is a wonderful thing, your emotions become commodified. "It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself." Says Curtis, "On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People's feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power. It's like Stalin's socialist realism. Both Twitter and socialist realism are innocent expressions of the ideology of the time, which don't pull back and show the wider thing they are part of. We look back on socialist realism not as innocent but as a dramatic expression of power; it expresses the superiority of the state, which was the guiding belief at the time. I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that 'me' and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be."
Curtis doesn't tweet or Facebook – send him to the gulag! – but he has an excellent blog, "which isn't about me or my feelings, because I don't think I'm as interesting as the stories I'm telling".
Where will the next big idea come from? He wonders about China. "Is it a stable system? Or a mercantilist economy that's gone too far?" Or closer to home. "If things go really bad, they change. If things get really bad, they say, can we have a dramatically different, better kind of society?"
Since the modern world is all about me, me, me, here's a confession: Curtis's ideas have made me run for my life. In 2009, in the course of It Felt Like A Kiss, the sublime theatre event Curtis put on with Punchdrunk about the birth of hyper-consumerism, I was separated from the audience and sent down a long, dark corridor, which I took to represent the apotheosis of individualism. I remember thinking, I must run because my life depends on it – I knew it wasn't real, but I couldn't help myself. It was terrifying. The ideas in All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace are similarly mesmerising and disturbing, but they're also a provocation: have we really given up on the hope of changing the world in our lifetimes? Or is that in itself an idea worth fighting for?