Made in 1980 about a man whose political career started in the 1960s, this shows that now, forty five years later, some of Karl Hess’s prognostications about society, “Uncle Sam” and “Big Brother” proved not to be so very wide of the mark for us now in the mid-2020s. Initially a speechwriter for Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, he found polarising politics counterproductive and moved to a rural community where he started to extol the virtues of alternatives to technology and the increasingly corporate entities and policies that were driving it. As he says himself, the process became more about people’s desire to climb the greasy pole rather than concern themself with who is actually making it, or indeed, why. He comes across as a frank and provocative orator with senses of humour and perspective that whilst might be considered naive nowadays, I found to be quite ahead of the curve for the time. It helps that there’s plenty of archive from his campaigning days and of the industrialisation he ended up so scathing about to help illustrate his points. There are few contradictory opinions presented here, so it can have something of the monologue to it - but it’s still quite an interesting half an hour that proves environmentalism and wariness of global tech isn’t just a twenty-first century thing.
