[En-US]
My dearest friends asked me why I refuse to buy an iPhone. The quickest answer at that time was something like "I'm confortable with my phone". But sometimes I go a little further and say "I don't like Apple, they are closed-sourced, care only about money and not about developtment".
My dearest friends asked me why I refuse to buy an iPhone. The quickest answer at that time was something like "I'm confortable with my phone". But sometimes I go a little further and say "I don't like Apple, they are closed-sourced, care only about money and not about developtment".
No, this is not about that kind of traps... nor the other kind. In this post I'll talk about a BBC documentary called The Trap.
PLOT (click to read it)
#1 - F**k You Buddy
In the first episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought. Game theory during the Cold War is a subject Curtis examined in more detail in the To The Brink of Eternity part of his first series, Pandora's Box, and he reuses much of the same archive material in doing so. Curtis uses as main references two psychiatrists. John Nash, who invented system games (one of them called Fuck You Buddy) in which the only way to win was bestraying you parter. R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. Both of them believe that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions.
All these theories tended to support the beliefs of economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, whose economic models left no room for altruism, but depended purely on self-interest, leading to the formation of public choice theory. In an interview, the economist James M. Buchanan decries the notion of the "public interest", asking what it is and suggesting that it consists purely of the self-interest of the governing bureaucrats. Buchanan also proposes that organisations should employ managers who are motivated only by money. He describes those who are motivated by other factors—such as job satisfaction or a sense of public duty—as "zealots".
>Well, fuck you, Buchanan
The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modelled society is run on performance targets, quotas, statistics and that it is these figures combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness that has created "a cage" for Western humans. The precise nature of the "cage" is to be discussed in the next episode. Of which I'll talk about in a later post.
Watch the video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085