'Marcuse said that you could never break the spell. That however much you took American culture and played rebelliously with it, you would always remain possessed by it. But this would set in motion a terrible logic within the New Left that would lead to a creeping distrust of all dreams of the future. ...in 1964 Marcuse became pessimistic. He wrote another book called One Dimensional Man. He had realised, he said, that capitalist society was far more manipulative than he had imagined. It had learnt how to take those desires and feed the masses spurious, addictive pleasures that enslaved them. This wasn't liberation – it was a dark world of what looked on the surface like an entrancing modern culture in which sex was discussed and portrayed openly, but really it was all cheap gratifications and stupefying pleasures that blotted out true human needs. Marcuse gripped the student left because he describe the revolution in a completely new way. The struggle was in your heads as much as in the streets. It was summed up in a slogan - There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads. He must be Destroyed.'

'Elections were due in Syria in 1947, and the Americans decided to give "a discreet nudge here and there". This involved warning landowners, employers, ward bosses and police chiefs not to intimidate the voters. The American oil companies were paid to put up big posters telling the Syrians to "vote for the candidate of your choice" (apparently this baffled all the Syrians because the posters didn't mention any candidates by name). Hundreds of taxis were hired to take voters to the polls free of charge. And the Americans brought in automatic, tamper-proof voting machines. It didn't go as expected. The landowners and other elites ignored all the warnings and intimidated everyone. There were massive gun fights and scores of people were killed. The taxi-drivers bonded together and sold themselves to different candidates - promising to make their passengers vote the "right" way.' And worst of all, most of the pro-American candidates defected to other foreign powers.'

'One of the main functions of politicians – and journalists – is to simplify the world for us. But there comes a point when – however much they try – the bits of reality, the fragments of events, won't fit into the old frame. ...the fundamental problem with this simple story of good versus evil is that it does not permit a proper critical framework that allows you to properly judge not only those you are fighting, but also your allies. -- America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy that would allow the country to be ruled by good people. But in the ensuing decade they have been tricked, spun round and deceived by the complex web of vested interests there. And their inability to understand and deal with this has led to the rise of a state crippled by corruption in which it is impossible to know who the "good" people might be any longer.' -- YOU

'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'

'The idea of "humanitarian intervention" which is behind the decision to attack in Libya is one of the central beliefs of our age. It divides people. Some see it as a noble, disinterested use of Western power. Others see it as a smokescreen for a latter-day liberal imperialism. I want to tell the story of how this idea originated and how it has grown up to possess the minds of a generation of liberal men and women in Europe and America. It is the story of a generation who became disenchanted with traditional power politics. They thought they could leap over the old corrupt structures of power and connect directly with the innocent victims of war around the world. -- Out of Srebrenica came a strange new hybrid – a humanitarian militarism. And in the 1990s it rose up to capture the imagination of a generation on the left in Europe. It even had French philosophers behind it. But ... they had no critical framework by which to judge the "victims" they were helping.'

'And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked - but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure. As one of the AEC scientists says in the film: "We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn't have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn't admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good" And again the warnings were ignored by senior members of the Agency and the industry. That was the same year that the first of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's reactors came online. Supplied by General Electric.'

'Pandora’s Box, subtitled A fable from the age of science, is a six part documentary series by Adam Curtis that examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.'

'[Tyler Kent] was a rabid anti-communist who believed that the Jews had been behind the Russian Revolution. He was convinced that Germany should be allowed to destroy both Communist Russia and the Jews. And America should not get in the way of that being allowed to happen. Looking back, most people now feel that Daniel Ellsberg was right in 1971 because the Vietnam War had become a horrible disaster that needed exposing. Today, we are not sure of Bradley Manning’s motives (and it hasn't been proven that he is the source of the leak), but again there is a general feeling that it was good thing because the cables have exposed an empty nihilism at the heart of America’s foreign policy. But the perspective the Tyler Kent story brings is the realisation that diplomatic leaks are not automatically a good thing. It just depends on who is using them. And why.'

'Here is a lovely documentary made in 1969 about that year's Christmas office party at a London advertising agency. Not boutique.'

'The idea of "nudging" citizens to do the right thing sounds cute. But in reality it marks the return of a powerful psycho-political theory that rose up in the mid-20th century. It was called Behaviourism. ...who decides what is "good" behaviour, and what happens when others decide it is bad[?] These are questions that the Nudge enthusiasts seem to be blithely unaware of. ...the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally – the machines we have built. The computers. In our age of individualism we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours. And from that they can predict what choices and decisions we will make. And they do it solely through our observed behaviour.'

'Colin is convinced that it is the unions and the Communist party committee that really control the plant. Not the managers. The managers, he tells us, in both commentary and questions, have no power any longer. This is because they have become trapped by the growing absurdities of the Soviet Plan. But in reality the very opposite was true. The absurdities of the plan were actually beginning to allow the managers to become much more powerful. They were using the chaos and incompetence of central control to construct their own alternative economic systems. Which they controlled for their own benefit. In the case of Togliatti, senior managers were running an ever-growing shadow economy selling spare parts and even cars on the black market. It was supplying the needs that the Plan couldn't. And the "Red Directors" as they were called, were beginning to make a lot of money.'

'"Taliban" is a generic term here. Any guy that's a criminal is called "Taliban." -- Tony said that they should bring in independent guards from Kabul. But another manager pointed out that they would be killed either by Mr Pink or Mr White II. So that wouldn't work. Bit by bit the ArmorGroup managers were finding themselves trapped by people they had employed. And then the American military got involved.'

'"When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future. The stories can be enchanting or frightening. But they make sense of the world. But when that power ebbs, the stories fall apart. And all that is left are fragments which haunt you like half-forgotten dreams."' -- "He locked his wife in a cupboard and watched Citizen Kane over and over." -- Rosebud. Mother.

'It is the story of how, with the rise of individualism, we all stopped defining ourselves by politics and being part of collective groups, and believing in collective ideas. And instead we started to define ourselves by culture - both popular and high-brow - because music and style and art allowed us to give expression to our individual identities, rather than supressing them in the greater interest of the group.'

'The American military was convinced there was a giant secret bunker hidden in Cambodia from which the North Vietnamese were directing their attacks. The bombing, followed by an invasion, was going to destroy it. But the bunker was never found. It seems never to have existed. But it became a vision that was going to possess Haig, and others, in the years to come. That somewhere there is a hidden central control where the enemies of America are co-ordinating their attacks. They know this secret place exists. Even if there is no real evidence. And you can do bad things and cut corners in order to prove it exists.'

Norman B. Norman: "The philosophy of our agency is... empathy." -- 'The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today. As we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history. The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be.'

'...the machinery of credit was used politically to try and manage and retain control the structure of power in the world. It was not a conspiracy, it was simply those in power taking the line of least resistance. -- I thought I would put up some of the films from the BBC archive from the time when there was moral disapproval by those in power of the "lower orders" wanting to "live beyond their means". The programmes are quite extraordinary and riveting in their tone of patrician sniffiness about people borrowing on the "Never Never" and Hire Purchase. And not just from the bankers who are interviewed - it is also in the commentary. But if you peer through that, you can see something else emerging in the ordinary people interviewed. It is a powerful desire to borrow money - so they can have what those above them in society have. The good life. And beyond that there is a growing envy and resentment.'

'"America: Democracy on Trial" -- ...set within the confines of the world of a real young family in the Bay Area in California in 1968. But their daily lives are played out against a backdrop of mounting uncertainty. Their country is fighting a war in a faraway place that more and more people don't believe in. And they are beginning to lose faith in politics and its power to change the world. And starting to question what democracy really means. The film is about the relationship between the everyday experience of the family - especially the wife, who is a fascinating and enigmatic character - and the big story they are told about the world. But it is made at a moment when that story no longer makes sense and the fragments that it is made of are beginning to fall apart.'

'Lots of westerners came out to Afghanistan to help the Afghans become a modern democracy. Here is an art expert who has come to teach them about Conceptual Art. It starts with a group of young Afghan artists watching film of an installation in a western gallery, then she shows them Marcel Duchamp's 1917 urinal. She is very keen to get them to say that if anyone did what Duchamp did in today's Afghanistan then they would be put in prison. It is interesting that the Afghans in the room, though they are polite, seem to disagree.'

'BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history you find that BP did something even worse to America. They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini. ...the British persuaded the Americans to mount a coup by telling them that Mossadegh was leading Iran towards communism – represented in Iran by the communist Tudeh party. This was not true. But the CIA, led by Allen Dulles, believed it. The coup succeeded and Mossadegh was overthrown. In 1965 the white minority Rhodesian government declared Independence from Britain... A number of countries broke the sanctions – including Iran. But so did some British companies – notably two of the big oil companies – Shell and BP. ...the BBC had decided to make an epic 9-part documentary series about British Petroleum. The films were pretty sycophantic. At that time BP was still owned by the British government – and what you see is one large state-run organisation paying its respects to another.'

'...it was in Vietnam that anthropology, along with many other academic disciplines, truly became the handmaiden of power. Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists designed vast programmes of social engineering and psychological manipulation. The aim was to change the way the Vietnamese peasants saw the world - and out of this create a new loyalty to the American vision of building a capitalist democracy in South Vietnam. And out of that came Project Camelot. It was an attempt to build a system that could be applied anywhere in the world, inside any developing country that was fighting an insurgency. In 2005 Montgomey McFate saw these ideas as the model for what anthropology could do for American foreign policy in a war zone. And that is what she re-created in the Human Terrain System.'

'Here are some extracts from a fascinating Panorama made in 1968 - about how there are massive spending cuts on the way and asking where they will happen. It is called Where Will the Axe Fall? The Labour government was in the midst of a terrible economic crisis. Harold Wilson had devalued the pound and announced that Labour was about to bring in big cuts to all its public spending. They had to reduce the deficit he said, otherwise there would be disaster. There was a frenzied reaction. Bankers, economists, and much of the press agreed that the cuts were inevitable. Many Labour MPs said it would destroy the very fundamentals of the party. Panorama debated the issue. And it is just like today. As if time has stood still.'

'The solution was to reform Islam and take it away from the dead hand of the traditional Ulema. The modernised Islam could then be used as the guiding principle for the new scientific and technical society, and its new economy. It would also be a moral guide for the new political class running the state. All this should be done by a new vanguard - the rawshanfikran - of enlightened intellectuals (like Mahmud Tarzi) whose ambition should be to educate the masses.'

'...perhaps the economists are the problem? That they themselves cannot see the full dimensions of the project of which they have been a part. But still we listen to them, and still our journalists use their language and assumptions. Which means that despite the disasters we are still trapped in the economists' world. But the moment you pull back and look at that world from a wider perspective strange things start to emerge. -- Over the past 15 years the idea of the "market" has been extended to practically every area of society - education, health, even the arts. But to make this happen those running the neoliberal project had to enforce it by creating vast and intricate performance indicators and feedback systems (which in many cases led to wide scale absurdities). And to do this they used the mighty power of the state. -- We think it was the resurgence of capitalism. But maybe it was something very different?' -- Mercantilism. State(ists) as rentier middlemen collecting fees/bribes.

'I think it raises a really interesting question. If people don't heckle any longer is it because they no longer believe in politics, or is it because they no longer believe in themselves? Is it that they have come to see their politicians as creatures who no longer have any ideas or vision, and who have absolutely no idea or understanding of what is happening in the world, so there is no point in heckling them any longer? Or is it that we, the people, have no ideas and no understanding of the world ourselves? That we have no vision any longer of what the world could be like, or what changes we would like made - so we have nothing to say? And thus nothing to heckle about. So however angry we are we remain mute and sullen. Or maybe we do still heckle?'

"This is a film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon. Just like him, we've all become paranoid weirdos. It's the story of how television and newspapers did this to us and how it has paralyzed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better."

'But then it went wrong. The force that Benazir Bhutto had helped create would mutate and in the end kill her. While Gaidar would find himself haunted by the political force that had been defeated in Afghanistan - the Red Army. It had defined his family's life for 80 years and it would return to destroy his dream.'

'I have tried to find out whether the British government and army were planning for an attack by Cold War Soviet sleeper cells, or the IRA. Or whether they were training to do sabotage themselves. But no one seems to know.'

'What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history – as if it is a conflict happening outside time... -- Stirling believed that selling arms and planes to the Saudis would not only help fight the war, but would also re-establish Britain's influence in the Middle East in a new way – through the arms trade. And he was right. But it had a terrible price. -- The Islamism that we face today rose up in the 1970s precisely as a reaction to those corrupt regimes and their western backers. It too is an anti-colonial project that is very similar to Nasser's vision of a united Arab world free of western influence – but with religion bolted on. And now, to fight it, we are preparing to send arms and "intelligence advisers" to help prop up a corrupt regime in Yemen. To the Arabs in Yemen it must seem like deja vu. We are the old ghosts who have returned.'

'Blue Peter seems to have had rather an obsession with Afghanistan in the 1970s - not only did they take some Afghan hounds to see the King of Afghanistan when he came to visit the Queen of England, but in Christmas 1976 they found an Afghan hound that could sing. You have to watch the whole thing through to see its version of Land of Hope and Glory. It's wonderful - especially the growl at the end.' -- Barry Manilow?

'In 1970 Wattenberg [a democratic party neoconservative strategist] published an analysis of American voting patterns called The Real Majority. It argued that the country was now divided between a liberal elite preoccupied with cultural issues like race, sexual politics and abortion, and a vast forgotten hinterland who were "unyoung, unpoor and unblack". Wattenberg's heroine was the 47 year-old housewife from Dayton who feared and despised the liberal elite. Harness that power, he said, and you can change the world. But then the Neoconservatives got screwed yet again. Richard Nixon, the Republican President, read Wattenberg's analysis and stole all his ideas. And it worked. Nixon won re-election with one of the biggest majorities ever in American history. At the same time a new conservative force was being unleashed across the Islamic world. And, like in America, it was the mass of the new urban lower middle classes who despised the liberal elites.'

'And the Afghan hound had by now become the most popular dog in Britain. ...the hounds had a terrible tendency not to do what they were told and instead started attacking each other.' -- !!!

'In 1978 a group of Afghan marxists overthrew the royal family who had ruled Afghanistan for 150 years. They set out to turn Afghanistan into a modern socialist utopia but it quickly descended into bloody horror. Many in the West saw it as the Soviet Union trying to turn Afghanistan into another satellite. But if you trace back where the "communist" ideas that inspired the revolutionaries came from you find something very odd. The revolutionary ideas didn't just come from the Soviet Union. They also came from somewhere else. From America.' -- Rudderless.

'Modernization Theory had been invented by an ambitious academic at Harvard called Walt Whitman Rostow. He said that if you put the right technologies in place and educated key elites then the countries would inevitably develop into advanced capitalist societies. Rostow's theories obsessed the American development agencies and they came up with all sorts of ideas about how to turn countries like Afghanistan into modern democracies. One of the oddest was the belief that it was possible to scientifically discover who the crucial "transitional personalities" were in the society. These were people who had underlying "capitalist personalities" that they were unaware of. A psychologist called David McLelland invented a way of discovering who had these traits - and techniques to then develop what he called "the need to achieve". He was convinced you could use behavioural psychology to turn people throughout the world into model Americans.'

'...much of [James Mossman's] reporting of the post-colonial world at the time was driven by his belief that unless we understand the roots of this violence in our own exercise of power through our empires then it will come back to haunt us and corrode our own sense of ourselves.'

Afghan mountains. Never forget.

'Curtis: I'll tell you what I think about the neo-conservatives. In a way, I admire them for nostalgic reasons. They are the last revolutionaries - and some of them actually came out of a Trotskyite revolutionary tradition. They are making an awesome attempt to remake and reshape the world, much as Trotsky tried to do in the Russian Revolution, using military power. It's amazing. It has an epic-ness to it. I feel nostalgic for it, in the face of a managerial politics that just seem to want to tweak and adjust its policies to those of the focus groups and the soccer moms. -- ...when it becomes obvious that a lot of this is a constructed fantasy, based often on idealism and not necessarily on conspiracy, there will be a growing public distrust about the very nature of how reality is described to them. ...the neoconservatives have taken us into a philosophical quagmire, which is, "How do you describe reality, how do you make sense of the world? How do you construct it?"'

'My original aim was to do a series of films about conservative political philosophy and this debate among conservatives over allowing complete freedom or allowing an elite to manage things. -- Kotb was an educated man who had read Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He was examining the same worries shared by many critics of modern individualism. It’s a criticism that somehow consumerist individualism has led to a banal empty society, where nobody really believes in anything any longer and the real feeling at the heart of it is: Is that all there is? Kotb was a literary critic, not some mad mullah in a beard. He understood Western culture and was working within that same pessimistic tradition as the neo-cons. The parallels are in their philosophical roots. I make it clear that what they then set out to do was very different, but I do think that it’s more valuable to look at them as two sides of this same pessimistic conservatism about modern industrial culture.'

Please don't watch this before going to the live experience. Otherwise...

This document is only a spoiler if you're going to a live showing of the theatrical production, else, this is supplementary material to the 50min film. -- "The following is a copy of the handout given to audience members as they exited the Adam Curtis production It Felt Like A Kiss, Manchester, Quay House, 2–19 July, 2009."

"When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future The stories can be enchanting or frightening. But they make sense of the world. But when that power ebbs, the stories fall apart. And all that is left are fragments which haunt you like half-forgotten dreams." -- 'This is the whole of the experimental film, It Felt Like a Kiss. It was the basis of the show I did in Manchester with Punchdrunk. The show may well come to London - but probably not till the end of the year. *SPOILER ALERT* - If you think you might want to go to the show, then you might not want to watch the film. Or you might.'

SPOILER ALERT: Detailed recounting of Adam Curtis' 'It Felt Like A Kiss' experience in Manchester. The show is going to be toured around so don't read this if you're planning to go to see it. -- ‘In 1984, eight people died in a funhouse fire. Their screams were ignored. People assumed they were enjoying themselves.’

'Most journalists have run out of knowing what's going on in the world. And they have embraced this idea of media democracy as a way to disguise that fact. I'm deeply suspicious of it. The whole reason why journalism was invented in the first place is that we have the time, the money, and the power of the organisation to go places, push through doors, find things out, bring it back, and tell you it and allow you to make up your mind about it. ...those who are the promoters of the internet, the boosters, the people who put forward the utopian dream of the internet, and those who basically run silicon valley, are arch individualists, they portray the internet as a playground where every individual can invent their own identity, and it's a new form of democracy without hierarchies of power.' -- On the paradox of the booster dependence on datamining: -- 'it's a completely contradictory view of what human beings are, how they behave, to what these boosters actually portray the internet as.'

'What's happened is you had an idea – which in a way was quite an heroic idea – that each individual could be themselves, could express themselves and become better people. In fact, what happened in that process is that you shifted the idea of risk away from institutions and onto the person themselves, and in that process is what people began to do – far from expressing themselves – began to monitor themselves to see whether they are the correct definition of the individual, whether it's in psychology, how they feel and how they behave; and they begin to search for – and are given – ways of monitoring that as individuals, and that paradoxically leads them to trying to become what they think is the right individual, which actually leads to homogeneity... that idea of total expressiveness... it may be breaking up now as we enter an economic crisis and politicians discover they have power, institutions have power, and that's the way to change the world. The idea of the self may change.'

"What blogging lacks is an enthusiasm for finding out about the world, it has no curiousity, what it actually has is the desire to bully and to shape the world in the way you want it... but it gives people security, you've found your home, here is the part of the internet – and therefore of the world – in which there are people who believe that the Iraq war was all about about oil, over here there are those who believe that actually it was about stopping muslim hordes taking over our culture, and here is the neo-conservative lot who believe it's all about idealism... all these groups are working out how to hold each other up... everyone just establishes their position, the media [inaudible] up, and that's it. -- What marks out all these groups is they're fundamentally negative, they're looking for something to criticise, they don't actually have a political ideal, and what they do is retreat into a simplified – and often very dated – view of the world."

On the internet: his views on its impact, its potential, and what it has come to represent. -- "The new realism will be something that geniunely reflects to people their experience of the world which is complicated, ambiguous, that we are alone in the world..." -- "Facebook is just a victorian public world reinvented, but it's not the new television because it doesn't tell us stories, and people's experience doesn't tell us stories. Our job is take people's experience and make things out of them which then those individuals will go 'Oh, that's fascinating, it responds to me, I feel that's real but it takes me beyond myself.' -- In our world of individualism, the things that people are really concerned about are being trapped by their own feelings: there is growing sense that people want to know whether their feelings are real, if their feelings are right or wrong, do other people feel these feelings? They want to be taken out of themselves and taken into other emotional dimensions."'

AUDIO CONTAINS SPOILERS -- 'Adam Curtis discusses how the show affects its audience and whether it aims to shock: "We wanted to push it because we were trying to make a political point. People are really hungry for experience these days, to actually experience things themselves, it's part of the individualism of our time. ...let's see how far we can take people, frighten them, but then make them reflect on what that fear is really about... the idea that the individual is the central supreme object of devotion of our time might not be the whole truth... its about how you turn 'stuff' into stories and that's how history is made. ...maybe you will stitch it together in different ways yourself and then at the end you turn to having your own experience which is completely fragmentary... ...most people run out screaming."'

Video preview inside. 'The hotly-awaited collaboration between Punchdrunk theatre company, documentary-maker Adam Curtis and Damon Albarn revels in a thrill-a-minute visceral excitement. -- ...whatever spurious empowerment you might have felt has evaporated...' -- Where to begin? Just go see it.

Adam Curtis: "What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It's enchanting, it's liberating, but ultimately it's disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change." -- 'Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.'

'On the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential.'

'How drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines.'

'Explores the concept and definition of freedom, specifically: how a simplistic model of human beings based on mathematician, John Nash's 'Game Theory' as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom.'

'An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology. The episode goes into some detail over attempts to find solutions for the China Syndrome hypothesis.'

'A look at how Kwame Nkrumah, the leader the Gold Coast (which became Ghana on independence) 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 dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialized utopia. A scheme was drawn up together with Kaiser Aluminum, but as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn't control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.'

'On attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a savior to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 60s. It also outlines how the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.'

'On 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 jeopardize against national self-esteem. By the mid 1970s, stagflation emerged to confound the Keynesian theories used by policy makers. Meanwhile, a group of economists had managed to convince Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and other British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain 'great' again. The saga of how their experiments led the country deeper into economic decline, and asks - is their game finally up?'

'Outlines how the US government attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War. The focus is on the men of the on whom Dr Strangelove was allegedly based: Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter and John von Neumann. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear - mathematical analysts employed by the American RAND Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.'

'Chronicles 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 transform the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, and even a social engineering machine, to teach people to behave in a rational way.'

'Follows the story of the cells of Henriettta Lacks. She dies in 1951 of cancer, before she died cells were removed from her body and cultivated in a laboratory in the hope that they could help find a cure for cancer. The cells (known as the HeLa line) have been growing ever since, and the scientists found that they were growing in ways they could not control.'

"Imagine walking into a disused building. You find yourself inside a film. It is a ghost story where unexpected forces, veiled by the American Dream, come out from the dark to haunt you…It Felt Like a Kiss tells the story of America’s rise to power in the golden age of pop, and the unforeseen consequences it had on the world and in our minds. Beginning in 1959, the show spotlights the dreams and desires that America inspired during the ’60s, when the world began to embrace the country and its culture as never before. But as this daring production unfolds across five floors, blending music with documentary and the disorientating whirl of a fairground ghost train, the audience is forced to face the dark forces that were veiled by the American dream – a dream that ultimately returns to haunt us all." -- Did I just nab the last ticket??

"I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time...Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn't really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us. The way power works in the world is: they tell you stories that make sense of the world. That's what America did after the second world war. It told you wonderful dreamlike stories about the world...And at that same time, you were encouraged to rise up and 'become an individual', which also made the whole idea of America attractive to the rest of the world. But then this very individualism began to corrode it. The uncertainties began in people's minds. Uncertainty about 'what is the point of being an individual?'" -- Forthcoming doc: "the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet—and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web—out of which can come a new form of democracy."

"It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional way of doing political journalism on TV. I decided to make a film about something that has always fascinated me - how power really works in the world. To show that power is exercised not just through politics and diplomacy - but flows through our feelings and emotions, and shapes the way we think of ourselves and the world." -- Video: "IT FELT LIKE A KISS. When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future. The stories can be enchanting or frightening. But they make sense of the world. But when that power begins to ebb, there are no stories any more. You are on your own. And you have no idea what is coming towards you. Now go into the dark."

Vid: "The Introduction. In 1945 America's solider fought terrible battles and saw the horror of death camps. In Japan a new weapon killed hundreds of thousands in an instant. The soliders came home and were told they had fought a Good War. They created a new world for their children. Safe from the horrors that humans can do. And protected from their parent's terrifying memories. But as America rose to supreme power in the world, feelings of uncertainty began to break through the fragile surface. The CIA masterminded coups and assassinations across the world to protect America from enemies in the world outside. It was done in secret so the children would never know and get frightened. But as they grew up the children realised it was a dream. It was only a story told to them by those in power. And they would want to break free and just be themselves. They would create their own enchanted world. Only then they would be *alone. And vulnerable to something else. Fear. Now go into the dark."

"I have no idea who the people are, but they wonderfully capture a moment of great confidence in American history. The point at which their nation was rising to supreme power in the world. But we all know that family photographs only capture the happy moments." -- (Dark)

"25 Million Pounds a study of Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings Bank. Won the Best Science and Nature Documentary in the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival."

"Because the news had given up reporting them as political struggles, it meant there was now no way to understand why these terrible events were happening. And instead political conflicts around the world are now portrayed to us as simple illustrations of the mindless cruelty of the human race, about which nothing can be done, and to which the only response is, 'Oh dear.'"

'Charlie Brooker sets his satirical sights on news and current affairs, looking at how news anchors and their styles have changed over the years and reflecting on how they do it over in America. Plus, a short film by Power of Nightmares creator Adam Curtis, a look at what's happening with the war against terror and a poem by Tim Key.'

'In this episode, the Imperial aspirations of Margaret Thatcher were examined. The way in which Mrs Thatcher used public relations in an attempt to emulate Winston Churchill in harking back to Britain's "glorious past" to fulfil a political or national end.'

'In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control [is] examined. The angle pursued by Curtis [is] the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control.'

'This episode examine[s] how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period.'

Adam Curtis: "Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don't want to know - that we are not individuals: 'If you like this then you will like that...'. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable."

'"...the main emotion behind most people's politics was hope..." That sentiment has now been replaced, he argued, by indignation. "People are more interested in bearing witness to their personal moral righteousness" than in engaging in open-minded debate.'

Video: "More on youth TV including what the youths themselves actually think" -- Wait for 06:50 for Da Yoot Like Adam Curtis Documentary Shocker!

'Adam Curtis presents an illustrated talk on the ideas behind this unique series and the things that link these episodes together.' -- Adam Curtis: "Ideas have consequences." Indeed. Great talk.

On Facebook, The Big Lump Theory ... and Popbitch Radio [mp3s]

'We should be saying to people: "I'm going to take you out of yourself and show you something you haven't thought of, which is either awesome, or incredible, or will inspire you.'"

Brian Holmes on Adam Curtis