In Love and Power, aired May 23 in the UK on BBC, British documentarian Adam Curtis links the Objectivist philosophy from the 1950s — which promoted rationality and an individual’s pursuit of happiness — with a belief in the infallibility of computers, which he argues brought about the economic booms of the 1990s as well as the recent catastrophic economic collapse.

The show is the first episode in a new TV series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Curtis suggests that the pervasive belief that the route to a better future lay in radical individualism, coupled with a naive faith in the computer’s power to perform flawless economic calculations, led Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to advise Presdient Bill Clinton in the early 1990s that cutting government spending and interest rates would result in economic growth off the back of “risk-free” lending.

He also shows that computers, rather than being the hoped-for facilitators of individual autonomy, were used to divert power from politicians to investors.