Gandhi said it, but he was a focused person seeking a focused goal; yet today we have a QC calling Twitter-users “nerds”, and Adam Curtis doing what Adam Curtis often does, viz: stitch together some groovy music and graphics whilst oversimplifying some very complex issues to the point of error.

I’m watching the first two episodes of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace back to back, and it’s all:

• Ayn Rand was weird
• Greenspan was a Rand acolyte and wannabe philosopher
• The Silicon Valley community made a promise (whaaaaa…?) that everyone would be a Randian hero
• Free markets are an instrument for rich people to keep their money safe
• Whether the collapsing free markets cited were truly free is left uninvestigated

…and I’m like “this makes no sense, I’ve never read Rand and have made a point of not reading her, and I don’t remember promising anyone anything like that…” – but that’s unimportant because it gets in the way of a good hero-with-a-thousand-faces-type story:

• elite conceives master plan to replace A by B
• plan fails
• elite hides in caves to return again some day
• in the meantime you might want to be worried about what A has left behind

In Curtis’ case the plan is to replace centralised governance and regulation with decentralisation, coordinated by networks of computers… and he’s greatly enjoying telling the stories of everyone who’s used a computer to achieve this end in the small and where it went wrong; all apparently with the unstated suggestion of throwing the computer baby out with the bathwater.

Curtis is making a dog-wagging-tail error; people do what they do, and maybe they achieve good, evil, or nothing at all – but blame their thinking, motives and actions, don’t blame their tools, even if the people concerned were foolish enough to pedestalise those tools.

Oh, and the programme? I found out about it via Twitter and watched it via iPlayer. Both episodes to date. Wouldn’t have been able to do that 10 years ago.

So I’m a nerd, Macdonald QC?