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

[Smári McCarthy]

Sy,

  Thanks for this overview. It's good to see that I'm not the only one
who reached this conclusion.

  It peeved me greatly that in the first part it was strongly suggested
that the school of thought dominant in modern information technology was
more influenced by Ayn Rand than, say, Alan Turing or John von Neumann.
You'd expect that any even half-serious attempt at exploring cybernetics
would've also acknowledged the importance Wiener put on information
encoding (moving from Turing and Gödel) and how Ross Ashby and others
expanded that into the ideas about requisite variety and so on.

  Frankly, Ayn Rand doesn't even factor into this at all, except as a
second rate writer of crackpot sci-fi, the most important use of which
is as a highly accurate sociopath detector. As for Freud, I think Curtis
has had him on the brain for way too long, and might want to see
somebody about that... :P

  If Curtis had studied cybernetics to a sufficient degree (which may
yet be seen though, as part three is still unaired), he'd at least try
to leverage his idea off the ideas Valentin Turchin, Francis Heylighen
and others have put forth about the emergence of a global brain. It's
the kind of idea that Curtis should easily enough be able to manipulate
into a scary narrative about the end of personal freedoms - heck, it's
something even I have trouble not worrying about, and I'm generally
positive about cybernetics as a field.

  - Smári



On 06/01/2011 01:26 PM, Sy 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> 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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>> >
>> > Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> > http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
> 
> -- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
> Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email:
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