Words Dept.: entry

According to a tweet by Charlie Brooker, Adam Curtis’ new documentary series is going to be called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

I don’t know what it means but Brooker is a very credible source and the title sounds very Curtis-like. The title is the same as a poem by Richard Brautigan, which begins:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

So it’s almost certainly going to be something about how computers are impacting upon – and perhaps dominating – the human experience (I’m guessing not in a good way). Brooker also mentions that Twitter will feature in the series, which perhaps points to themes around the broadening of the private life into the public/digital sphere. I’m betting Jeremy Bentham’s theory of the Panoptican crops up somewhere.

Brautigan committed suicide in 1984, at the age of 49, by shooting himself in the head. This tends towards the sort of mysterious characters and violent events Curtis favours as a way into his films. Most recently, It Felt Like A Kiss exhibited a fascination with both Rock Hudson and the assassination of JFK. It also used a literary work to suggest an underlying tone – in that case Philip K Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint.

The concept of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), meaning an integration of human-computer interaction into everyday objects and activities, perceived by some as a natural evolution of the world wide web, would seem to be at the centre of the series. The same title crops up on this article on the concept of ubicomp from 2004.

Admittedly this is all pure speculation until Curtis says more on his website, which is probably worth keeping an eye on.