Pedro Palatnik
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2021–2024
6:19 · 1M views · Mar 26, 2014
A six-minute clip of the famous speech from the 1976 film Network in which the world is described as a corporation. It portrays a world run by corporate interests.
HN posts it as an enduring, still-relevant artistic depiction of corporate power when discussing finance, tech lobbying and ethics.
4 comments from Hacker News
I will take the risk and give an explanation. The are two first principles that few fully understand: The first is that we are creatures of commerce - that is how we sustain ourselves. The economy is the total FLOW of all concurrent commercial transactions, and this is conducted via cash & money. For an artistic, but accurate image of the world we live in see this scene from Network (1976): this video . The second first principle is that you are a sovereign spirit in this universe, and so is everybody else. There are no behavioral rules in the natural reality, only in the social reality. The rules, symbols, ideologies, religions, and institutions exist to manipulate other people's behavior and concentrate cash flows in the great system that is the economy. But in the pure state of nature, it really is only you. The cash flows concentrate as the more capital you start with the more you can acquire. The precious few people who reach the "Center of Cash Flows" ultimately do so with force; they kill people over money, embezzle public funds, and so on because they are sovereign in their selfish minds. They are not "above the law," the law is simply for other people, not them. That is and has always been the true nature of "government." But we have governments now that are sophisticated enough that we don't even know their true nature. It's like a laundromat owned by the Triads. You don't ever see the Triads, you don't know who owns the place, you simply go in and put your quarters in
this video is as relevant as ever > Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
> "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old. > The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [0] this video
Somehow that makes me think of the memorable (and ambiguously villainous) speech from The Network (1976) [0]. [0] this video