Latest news with #Taylorism
Spectator
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The vicious genius of Adam Curtis
In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn't understand his films because they aren't interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it's true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel. The other kids were in bands, you were in a reading group. When political freaks grow up a bit they often get very performatively into social binge-drinking, as if to prove a point, but it's all hollow. The joy isn't there. There are important things about the world that will always be closed off to the political obsessive, because political obsessives don't understand music. Adam Curtis considers himself to be a political journalist, and he definitely used to be one. His BBC documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s are thorny and thematically dense attempts to grapple with the condition of the present. Pandora's Box (1992) was about how human reason bumps up against the inherent messiness of reality, and how projects for rationally governing the world end up collapsing into bizarre forms of unreason. Over six episodes, Curtis talks about von Neumann's game theory, Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Kwame Nkrumah's dream of African self-sufficiency, the cult of Taylorism and how it overrode Marxism in the early Soviet Union, nuclear physics, insecticides, and the way our social biases are repackaged for us in the form of a supposedly neutral science. There are a lot of words in there. Plenty of interviews with experts and significant figures, but also Curtis's clipped, precise narration, set to a collage of footage dug out of the BBC archive. Street scenes, offices, factories, politicians getting out of cars, but sometimes more abstract shots of industrial infrastructure and spaceships exploding in the sky. According to Curtis, most of that footage was there because he needed to finish the film on time and couldn't find anything else. But since then, this stuff has become his stock in trade. You know you're watching an Adam Curtis film when you hear someone talking about how plans to rationally control society fell apart to a Burial track and lots of black-and-white archive footage of people dancing at Butlin's. He was convinced he was simply illustrating his ideas. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he was unleashing forces that he could neither control nor understand. And then something strange happened. His style has become very easy to parody, which might be why Curtis has spent the last few years steadily paring it down. Shifty is his most abstract, imagistic film yet. His narration has now vanished entirely; instead, there are a series of sparse title cards that flash up over the archive footage, saying things like 'The Concept Of Privatisation Had Been Invented By The Nazis' or 'Underneath There Was Nothing.' All in all, over five episodes and five-and-three-quarter hours, Adam Curtis gives us significantly fewer of his own words than are contained in this review. They are sparse and stony, less like an argument than propaganda signs glowing in the night. The story he tells with them is – if you've seen any of his previous work – a familiar one. Every episode begins with the same words. 'There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things become SHIFTY.' In Britain, that moment came at the end of the 20th century. Before Thatcher, Britain was about strong communities, solidarity, labour unions, and a productive industrial base. But during the Thatcher and Blair eras, all of that was emptied out, and we became a society of cynical, self-interested individuals, trapped in a fantasy of the past, and led by politicians who no longer believed in anything at all. This story is not necessarily untrue, but it's also not really groundbreaking. To the extent that this country does still have a unifying national myth, it's this one – about how Thatcherism tore all our unifying national myths apart. But it doesn't really matter, because Curtis is doing something different to ordinary political journalism. His constant rummage through the BBC's archives has yielded a lot of good stuff, and he has a real vicious genius for putting it together. At the start of the very first scene, we see Jimmy Savile ushering a group of angelic blond children into Thatcher's office. Once they're inside he gives a chortling thumbs-up to the camera, and then closes the door. Alongside the stories of monetarism and shots of fox hunters riding in front of huge hazy steelworks, there are weirder threads. A dog owner is concerned that their pet seems to have spontaneously switched sex. At the London Zoo, which can no longer rely on state financing, zookeepers now have to be personable and cheerful, play-acting for a public who have become the only source of income. A kid plays with the effects pedal on his guitar. A woman shows off her designer handbags. In the planning meetings for the Millennium Dome, they try to pin down the values of modern Britain, but discover that they don't really have any. In the 'Spirit Zone,' instead of endorsing any particular religion, they've decided to fill the room with fog and write the words 'How shall I live?' on the wall. They're very proud of it. 'I think the question 'how shall I live?' is anything but banal. In fact, I think it's the biggest single question, probably, that's begged in the entire dome.' None of this really coalesces into a single point, but trying to make things coalesce into a single point is part of the rationalist, sense-making project Curtis has been critiquing his entire career. Our world is shifty now, and things will not make sense. You won't understand them with facts, but music. There's far less actual music here than in any of Curtis's previous films. Instead of Kanye or Nine Inch Nails or Aphex Twin, a lot of the shots of decaying industry are set to the sounds of static or howling wind. But music is one of the threads here. In one episode, we're introduced to the Farlight CMI digital sampler, a machine that can take any sound, convert it into data, and digitally reproduce it. The first song to be recorded entirely using samples was 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is then banned from the BBC for being too flagrantly gay, but it's already self-replicating around the world. People start using the Farlight CMI to switch out samples in the track and create their own remixes. Which is, of course, what Curtis is also doing. Later, we meet a bedroom producer called DJ Fingers, playing around with turntables in his south London home. 'Basically you're just making music out of other people's records. You know the record inside out when you're cutting up this break.' Once again Curtis has found a vision of himself in the archives. But it's not exactly celebratory. He was one of the first people to point out that in recent decades newness seems to have vanished from the world: we just repeat old fashions, old music, old fantasies about how to live. What does it mean, then, when one of our greatest and most popular documentarians does nothing but rearrange the past? At the end of the final episode, there's a kind of Adam Curtis auto-parody, of the type I just did above. A Bowie song, paired with clips from old films. 'Will People Come Together As They Did In The Past And Fight Back?' his stark title cards ask. 'Or Is This Just Another Feedback Loop Of Nostalgia? Repeating Back Sounds Dreams And Images Of The Past, Which Is The Way The System Controls You, And Is The Way This Series Was Made.'
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Y Combinator Pulls Support for AI Startup After Video Emerges of Boss Barking at Human Worker, Calling Him "Number 17"
Scientific Management, sometimes called "Taylorism" after its founder, Frederick W. Taylor, is the idea that human workers can be fine-tuned to be more efficient. If a garment factory worker could make a shirt two seconds quicker by standing instead of sitting, then a Taylorist boss would have them stand, because those two seconds per shirt add up over time. That was back in the 1880s, but lately Taylorism hasn't just been surviving — it's thriving, as wireless gadgets and management software allow bosses to monitor workers in ways Taylor could only dream of. For examples, look at Amazon's tracking wristbands for its warehouse workers, UPS fitting its trucks with cameras — but not air conditioning — and monitoring software that follows remote workers at home. Add to that list a startup called Optifye, a Y Combinator-backed venture that's "building AI performance monitoring for factory workers, boosting line efficiency for manufacturing companies." The company is founded by two undergrads from Duke university who brag that their families "run manufacturing companies." The surveillance platform caused a firestorm on the internet this week after a demo video surfaced showing a supervisor use the software to hone in on a worker who he referred to as "Number 17" instead of a human name, berating him for poor performance on the factory line. According to the demo, Optifye represents each worker with a numbered rectangle, colored green if performance is up and red if performance is down. "Hey Number 17, what's going on man?" Optifye's co-founder Kushal Mohta asks his theoretical sweatshop pawn. "You're in the red... You haven't hit your hourly output even once and you had 11.4 percent efficiency. This is really bad." The worker responds that he's just been having a rough day. Mohta zooms out onto number 17's day-by-day profile, showing a calendar of red squares. "Rough day? More like a rough month," he retorts. The video was panned across the web, including on Y Combinator's own Hacker News blog. "Basically modern slavery," wrote one user there. "They were missing a whip robot there as well, and maybe a drum playing robot." "I want to see the rest of the story where the boss fires him and is visited by three ghosts," one user posted on X-formerly-Twitter. The backlash was so fierce that Y Combinator — a startup incubator that's backed ventures like Reddit, Doordash and Instacart — pulled its announcement and demo video down, and deleted some Optifye videos on social media. Y Combinator still lists the panopticon-as-service startup as active on its website, though, where it refers to the factory floor — a place where workers trade huge chunks of their lives to earn a living — as a "black box," meaning a system producing products for unknown reasons. It's a dehumanizing sales pitch, to say the least. Unfortunately for workers around the world, public backlash only goes so far when profits are on the line. "Software like this already exists, is being used, and factory managers want this," wrote Vedant Nair, a founder whose robotics startup was backed by Y Combinator. He's not far off. Indeed, corporations like Walmart, Delta, Starbucks, and Chevron are already partnering with AI monitoring companies like Aware to surveil workers for thought crimes like talking about unions, wages, and working conditions. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor and his boys weren't afraid to brag that scientific management would bring about the "degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under the direction of a small body of experts — into men debarred from creative participation in their work." (see page 461 of Scientific Management in American Industry, basically the Taylorist manifesto). In 2025, their spirit lives on — now embodied by 20 year old startup bros backed by millionaire venture capitalists. Oh, how the times change. More on AI and labor: AI Hype Will Plunge America Into Financial Ruin, Economist Warns
