Here's the front of today's Vancouver Sun. If the extreme violence of the Vancouver hockey riots shocked many people, the sight of Vancouverites ganging together to clean up the city and its image has been equally strange. After a city's sports obsession dangerously tipped over, the residents of Vancouver have become determined to take back the city's image on their own terms. They've created websites called IdentifyRioters.com imploring people to out rioters. They've launched their own clean-up organizations, with thousands of volunteers pledging to help online.
I find these efforts more disturbing than the wanton if predicaible attacks on capitalism that marked the riots.
This collective desire to self-police to me, at least, raised eerie echoes of the first episode Adam Curtis's new BBC documentary "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace". A major part of the documentary deals with a cybernetic vision for the future where nation-states are superfluous and a digitally-connected global consciousness governs society. Curtis deals with some of the negative consequences of that vision, especially its echoes of Ayn Rand's philosophy, in the doc. (Jump to around the 8 minute mark below to learn more).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c&feature=related[/youtube]
That this all happened in Vancouver - a city deep in the North American west and philosophically close to Silicon Valley - is not a coincidence.
