Adam Curtis traces how a handful of ideas about self-regulating systems came to shape both computing and politics, using archival footage, news clips, and his own narration across three episodes. The first follows Ayn Rand's objectivism into the career of Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve on the belief that markets, left alone, would balance themselves like a machine. The second turns to ecology, tracing how the idea of a self-regulating ecosystem was borrowed from cybernetics and computer science, then applied back onto nature and society as though it were fact rather than metaphor. The third looks at sociobiology and the claim that human behavior can be explained by genes, following that idea into Rwanda's genocide and the arguments used to justify it. Curtis's throughline is that these borrowed system-models, dressed up as objective and self-correcting, have instead let politicians and financiers avoid responsibility for the outcomes. The Greenspan sections, built from contemporary news footage, are the clearest case study in how an idea about machines ended up running an economy.