Everyone does Pong (but there is still always a leader)

In the first episode of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis' excellent documentary about the rise of technology and its impact over our lives - it tells the story of a giant video game which was being used to expand on a very Californian ideology, as long as you weren't listening to what was happening in front of your face.

A few decades ago, the most simple video game in the world was projected on a giant screen, and was controlled by the whole room, so everyone had to work together to make the pixelated bats move in a certain way to block the ball.

And the people who ran this experiment seemed ecstatic about the results, saying it was a model of a society with no hierarchy, with everyone making decisions out of mutual gain, all acting as individuals but creating an order that emerges in a subconscious driven by rationality.

Which is all well and fine, but what always gets me is that you only have to watch the clip - or more precisely, listen to it - to discover that they're all totally full of shit, man.

You can see it 10 minutes into the episode above, and while the experimenters make it sound like some kind of almost mystical connection through the crowd, you can also clearly hear several people yelling their asses off, and telling everyone else which way to go.

And while they might think they're saying something about individualism and how utopian theories about technology can work, it's always the loudest fuckers who tell everyone else what to do.

Curtis' essay films are ridiculously entertaining, fun and thoughtful - there was a new one out last week! - and I've watched many of them multiple times. And my favourite bits are always these parts, where people who feel they have stumbled across some great secret or truth can't see the obvious in front of them, no matter how loud some people are yelling.