Little Private Governments appropriates images and text from a diverse range of documentaries, collapsing the historical narrative of New York’s economic and democratic adventure into a series of metaphysical camera sweeps, hard edits and a transcendental-style textual narrative, which entangle the idealistic language of democratic poetry (such as Walt Whitman) with the corporate mantras of the dot-com venture capitalist boom. Through equating the representational work of documentary realism with the idealism and force of the documentaries’ subject matter in a movie-trailer/MTV-style vignette, the work sweeps us along in a crude and relentless sensory journey. In this way the video makes explicit the pleasure, instability and violence of identifying the languages of truth and idealism as Darwinian-style competitors in the social sphere.