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

Wed Jun 1 16:43:36 CEST 2011

great Sy,

I would add though that cybernetics, however useful as reductionist
methodology which can bear fruit, suffers from what Wilber calls subtle
reductionism, i.e. recognizing systems, but not interiority/intentionality
...

Michel

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Sy <sytaffel at riseup.net> wrote:

>  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> <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> <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org> <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>,
> 	"Paul B. Hartzog" <paulbhartzog at gmail.com> <paulbhartzog at gmail.com>,	Andy Robinson
> 	<ldxar1 at gmail.com> <ldxar1 at gmail.com>
> Message-ID: <BANLkTimhtVSc=tymvo=O8f9dORtVBDH3+w at mail.gmail.com> <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> <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> <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
>
>  >>>> --> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net? - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens>>>>>>
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>  --
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> Sam Rose
> Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
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