Adam Curtis – Pandora’s Box | Fable From the Age of Science (1) Engineers’ Plot + (2) Brink of Eternity + (3) League of Gentlemen + (4) Goodbye Mrs Ant (1992) + (5) Black Power + (6) A Is for Atom

6 september 2020Businessplan, Home, Interview, Locatie, Media, Portretten, Video0

Pandora’s Box A fable in the Age of Science (foto YouTube)

Pandora’s Box | A Fable From the Age of Science (1) The Engineers’ Plot

Published on 14 apr. 2020

Pandora’s Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993.

This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational.

Reacties
https://youtu.be/3a0V2JFh6vY

Pandora’s Box | A Fable From the Age of Science (2) To The Brink of Eternity

Published on 14 apr. 2020

This episode, originally broadcast on 18 June 1992, outlines how the United States government and its departments attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War, and, more specifically, to manage the “loss of control” crises encountered during events such as the Space Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

The focus is on the men on whom Dr Strangelove was allegedly based: Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter and John von Neumann. These were mathematical analysts employed by the American RAND Corporation to examine issues of America’s national security in the nuclear age.

Reacties
https://youtu.be/dcne1wI2Qvw

Pandora’s Box | A Fable From the Age of Science (3) The League of Gentlemen

Published on 14 apr. 2020

This part, originally broadcast on 22 June 1992, focuses on how both the Conservative and Labour governments of the 1960s attempted to use economists to engineer economic growth to specific targets, as well as programme post-war economic management in the United Kingdom, and attempts to prevent relative economic decline and the perception of the 1960s Wilson governments that devaluation would jeopardise against national self-esteem.

Reacties
https://youtu.be/JL4oBv7A5EM

Pandora’s Box | A Fable From the Age of Science (4) Goodbye Mrs Ant

Published on 14 apr. 2020

This part, originally broadcast on 2 July 1992, focuses on attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a saviour to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 1960s. It also outlines how the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.

Reacties
https://youtu.be/Yp8EuKVkcx0

Pandora’s Box – A Fable From the Age of Science (5) Black Power

Published on 14 apr. 2020

The penultimate episode, originally broadcast on 9 July 1992, looks at how Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast (which became Ghana on independence from the United Kingdom in 1957) from 1952 to 1966, set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta River dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialized utopia and focal point of post-colonial Pan-Africanism.

Reacties
https://youtu.be/-xCJghKVycQ

Pandora’s Box | A Fable From the Age of Science (6) A Is for Atom

Published on 7 jul. 2016

The film shows that from very early on – as early as 1964 – US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.

The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.