Here's an interesting BBC documentary on a modern economic ideology

[KurtNYC]

5. Watched the first 2 so far.

Lots of great interview footage and it is well constructed but the way they use the word "freedom" is a bit odd. With respect to the war on Iraq, they seem to accept the idea that we went to "bring freedom" at face value. Similarly they keep coming back to the idea that Clinton, Thatcher and Blair were some kind of mis-guided advocates for personal freedom (then the Documentary flips around and say that their actions brought about less personal freedom, which is true).

I think they are tracing the progress of a different kind of transition -- from loose controls to tight numeric ones. And I don't think anyone, not Clinton, not Blair, believed that setting performance measures was a way to give more personal freedom to the average citizen and certainly not a way to give more freedom to bureaucrats.

Governments are computerizing performance measures simply because they can. They are keeping surveillance video, every email we send each other and every blog, forum, YouTube and Twitter post in a storage system forever simply because they can.

So I disagree fundamentally with the spin of this documentary but if one can ignore that, it is a harrowing story of how we are progressing toward a super-surveillance society and how, as the value of labor decreases, political leaders justify and excuse our steady declines in quality of life.