[P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means

Wed Jun 1 15:26:33 CEST 2011

I've just been blogging about the 2nd part of All Watched Over By 
Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis's new documentary)... 
http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/the-use-and-abuse-of-cybernetic-concepts-where-part-two-of-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace-went-wrong/ 

Generally I quite like Adam Curtis's documentaries. I admire the fact 
that at a time where expository documentaries presenting wide scale 
socio-cultural arguments are hugely out of fashion he makes films which 
probe big issues around power, politics and history. I hugely enjoy the 
aestheitc of his work, the heavy usage of archival material to visually 
illustrate the points the narration makes. In All Watched Over by 
Machines of Loving Grace I also particularly enjoyed the soundtrack (it 
was mainly a collection of Nine Inch Nails material) which combined 
excellently with the visual material to provide an affectively potent 
piece of media.

However while I found the argument made in part one of the documentary 
to be somewhat partial and lacking, I was immensely disappointed by the 
contents of the second part. The central argument the documentary makes 
is that from the 1950?s onwards there was a movement which began with 
cybernetics and sought to reduce humans to mere nodes in complex 
networks of matter and energy rather than following the enlightenment 
view that humans were distinct from the rest of the world, and unlike 
the determinate automatons of nature, that humans and humans alone 
possessed free will. Curtis appears to regard this idea as a dangerous 
proposition which de-emphasised the sanctity of individualism, and which 
undermines analyses of power and politics presenting instead the notion 
that systems can self-organise without a command and control hierarchy 
being in place.

Now the first thing which is crucial to point is that the Enlightnement 
view of humans as being ontologically distinct from the rest of the 
natural world as championed by Curtis is of course complete nonsense. It 
is based on on the nature/culture dualism which has roots in 
monotheistic theology and has no basis in fact. The notion which stemmed 
from the cyberneticists that humans, other living creatures, and 
machines could be understood as complex systems governed by circular 
causality -- that is, feedback -- is not a dangerous ideological myth, 
it is factually correct. The utility of the cybernetics movement, and 
indeed the disciplines which grew out of it such as systems biology, 
complexity theory, autopoiesis, connectionist AI, cognitive sciences etc 
all did so because the basic premises that feedback is a crucial process 
in dynamic systems was correct.

One of the places where Curtis goes hopelessly wrong was his definition 
of feedback. Curtis explored negative, or self corrective feedback, 
which was one of the two types of feedback loop discovered by the 
cyberneticists but completely omits positive feedback from the film. 
While the majority of the early cybernetics was dominated by issues 
around reducing noise through negative feedbacks, positive feedback has 
played a crucial role in contemporary understandings of how change 
occurs in dynamic systems, particularly within the domains of chaos 
theory, complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics. Indeed, current 
understandings of open systems, systems which are dynamically balanced 
at a point far from equilibrium, and maintain this dynamic balance 
through taking in flows of energy (such as food for many living systems) 
are largely predicated on knowledge which can be traced back to 
cybernetics. Yet Curtis's film fails to mention anything about this. 
Probably because it totally undercuts the narrative he portrays.  What 
makes this ironic is that while claiming that the natural world is too 
complex for the analyses derived from cybernetics to provide useful 
models, we see images of swarming creatures to illustrate this argument. 
Swarming is of course an emergent behaviour which can be simulated and 
replicated using just three very simple rules; 1) Keep moving in the 
same direction as your neighbours 2) Keep close to your neighbours 3) 
Avoid colliding with your neighbours. This is a classic example of the 
kind of self-organisation which Curtis is trying to argue does not occur.

Similarly Curtis goes on to argue that unlike humans, who have free will 
and so can make choices, machines are purely determinate automatons, 
whose every action can be predicted. Which is true of many kinds of 
simple, linear and closed machines. But which is clearly not true of 
cellular automata, artificial neural networks or other systems which are 
based on emergence. Presumably the reason these types of system are not 
mentioned is that they would undercut the nature/culture dualism Curtis 
seeks to maintain which imbues humans with special properties not found 
elsewhere in the universe.

While the majority of the film presenting a very misleading picture of 
the legacy of cybernetics, the final section then deals with alleged 
examples of contemporary self-organising systems and protest movements. 
Which was so utterly woeful that it actually made the rest of the film 
appear competent. I was expecting to see the Zapatistas, the alternative 
globalisation movement, the Peoples Global Assembly, the World Social 
Forum or a range of other organisations who have organised in 
non-hierarchical ways to present a political alternative to the 
discredited radical politics of Leninist vanguardism, whereby a small 
elite violently seizes power in order to then create an egalitarian 
democracy. The motivation behind the movements which have used these 
types of democratic, grassroots organisation to mobilise pro-democracy 
movements has largely been to organise in a way that reflects the kind 
of politics a group seeks to achieve, rather than to attempt to create 
an egalitarian society via dictatorship.

So what did Curtis have to say about this? Sadly the answer was nothing. 
Instead of focussing on the methods of these types of movement we 
instead were told that the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was an 
example of self-organisation and a leaderless nonhierarchical movment. 
The Orange movement was in fact a movement heavily funded by groups such 
as the US State Department, who according to the Guardian had spent $67 
million in the Ukraine in the two years before the disputed Presidential 
run off. It was a 'leaderless' 'self-organising' movement which was 
centred around trying to get one particular corrupt political candidate, 
Viktor Yuchenko, elected over a rival, corrupt political candidate, 
Viktor Yanukovich. Largely it was a struggle between the western half of 
the country, aided by western governments who wanted Yuchenko to prevail 
pitted against the eastern half of the country and Russia who wanted 
Yanukovich to prevail. In other words it had nothing to do with 
spontaneous self-organisation, non-hierarchy or systems thinking. It was 
a great example of corrupt politics as usual.

The only reason I can muster for Curtis to use such a ridiculously awful 
example to illustrate the point is that using a more relevant example 
would have undercut the epic narrative he sought to explicate. Which 
ultimately is a big part of why the kind of grand narrative based 
expository documentary is so out of fashion, while its easy to make a 
compelling argument based on affective manipulation through audiovisual 
means, an hour (or even three one hour parts) just isn't enough time to 
really explore complex issues in any amount of depth. Which means that 
documentary filmmakers end up creating narratives which are hugely 
misleading, which is exactly what Curtis does here.

Sy Message: 2 Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 01:23:03 -0400 From: Samuel Rose 
<samuel.rose at gmail.com> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth 
has been used for sinister means To: Michel Bauwens 
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list 
<p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>, "Paul B. Hartzog" 
<paulbhartzog at gmail.com>, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> Message-ID: 
<BANLkTimhtVSc=tymvo=O8f9dORtVBDH3+w at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: 
text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I made it out alive. We lost power for a 
couple of days. I just sent a response even before I read this request 
that I send a response :) As such, my response was not all that great. 
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Michel Bauwens 
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> >  Sam,
> >
> >  I hope you survived the tornado?
> >
> >  I hope some of our participants can react to this very interesting challenge
> >  from Adam Curtis in the Guardian,
> >
> >  Michel
> >
> >  On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Kevin Flanagan<kev.flanagan at gmail.com>
> >  wrote:
>> >>
>> >>  How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means - Adam
>> >>  Curtis - Guardian
>> >>
>> >>  When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival
>> >>  theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas
>> >>  would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest
>> >>  movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister
>> >>  history
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts
>> >>
>> >>  Episode 1 of his current documentary is up on youtube
>> >>
>> >>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc
>> >>
>> >>  _______________________________________________
>> >>  P2P Foundation - Mailing list
>> >>  http://www.p2pfoundation.net
>> >>  https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >
> >
> >
> >  --
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> >
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >

-- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation 
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email: 
samuel.rose at gmail.com http://futureforwardinstitute.com 
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is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan

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