So it was Ayn Rand's fault all along, this fine mess we're in. And there was me thinking it was Fred the Shred, or Gordon Brown, or the American money lenders anyway. Turns out it goes way further back, to the 50s.

This Ayn Rand lady, a Russian with a big brain, a crooked mouth and funny flitty eyes, wrote a book – Atlas Shrugged, and so did the critics. But later, in the 90s, in Silicon Valley in California, a bunch of nerdy entrepreneurs began to adopt some of Ayn's ideas. They freed themselves of political control and lived their lives guided only by selfish desire. Computers helped them create order, a self-stabilising utopia, and they became heroic. At the same time, a man called Alan, who used to be in Rand's reading group as it happens (though it's hardly a coincidence), was becoming the most powerful man in the world, because his second name was Greenspan.

Bill Clinton turned up, and he wasn't happy about this new world system where citizens – and computers – held the power. He liked the old way, where politicians were in charge. But he was living his life guided only by sexual desire; so while he was off not having sex with that woman, other people actually ran the world.

Government spending and interest rates were cut and this led to boom time again but a different kind of boom time from previous ones because this time computers brought stability. Or did they?

The markets were overvalued, it was overexuberance rather than increased productivity that was causing the boom, the bubble burst, in America, in Asia, everywhere. Rand's lover meanwhile – actually some time earlier – went off with someone else. And perhaps machines, and the internet, weren't the great democracy after all, but something altogether more complicated.

OK so far? Good, because it now gets a little tricky. Indonesia and a bunch of other places went into freefall, the IMF bailed them out, which stabilised them for a while, but then they totally collapsed. Had the bail-out really been about rescuing western investors?

The promise of the new economy had been about giving the financial markets the power without the corruption of politics, but in reality power had gone to the bankers, and they had used it to rescue themselves. Now there was chaos.

I get a bit hazy here, but Asia – China especially – said it wouldn't put itself at the mercy of the US any more, and took control. Fred the Shred bailed himself out and went to bed with a premiership footballer I'm not allowed to name but you can see who it is on the internet (though don't forget that it might not be the great democracy after all). And Richard Curtis has made a film, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2), explaining it all. No, not Richard Curtis (though that would have been interesting – with Hugh Grant as Clinton, perhaps, and Rowan Atkinson as Greenspan, and maybe a lump in your throat, against your better judgment, when Lehman Brothers collapsed). Adam Curtis, who did The Power of Nightmares.

It's the same kind of deal, though this is more about the nightmare of power. The earlier film was about the rise of radical Islamism and the parallels with neo conservatism; this tackles the world economic situation and the rise of computers and the internet (and just about everything else). Curtis takes a Big Thing, and goes back to someone in the 1950s (Sayyid Qutb, Ayn Rand), and you think: how the hell is he going to get from there to here? And he only goes and does just that. He's got some tricks up his sleeve – a calm persuasiveness, a lovely choice of archive film and music, he understands the power of television. So even if you can't quite get your head around how President Suharto's downfall is connected to a mass game of pong, you can still marvel at it, and at the extraordinary face of the wife of the man who did the pong experiment. Or laugh at Clinton picking his teeth. And there's nothing like a haunting track by Leonard Cohen, or the Kills, to add both credibility and poignance.

I have no idea really how much of what Curtis says is right, whether there is a connection between where we are now – with the world economy and the rise of China – and the philosophy of a cult novelist from the 1950s. The ride is certainly fun, though. Television that bombards you in waves and leaves you feeling bewildered and a little bit giddy.