great Sy,<br><br>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 ...<br>
<br>Michel<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Sy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sytaffel@riseup.net">sytaffel@riseup.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<pre><div><font color="#000000">I've just been blogging about the 2nd part of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis's new documentary)...
<a href="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/" target="_blank">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/</a>
</font><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><p><font color="#000000">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.</font></p><font color="#000000">Sy</font>
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 01:23:03 -0400
From: Samuel Rose <a href="mailto:samuel.rose@gmail.com" target="_blank"><samuel.rose@gmail.com></a>
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for
sinister means
To: Michel Bauwens <a href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com" target="_blank"><michelsub2004@gmail.com></a>
Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <a href="mailto:p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org" target="_blank"><p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org></a>,
"Paul B. Hartzog" <a href="mailto:paulbhartzog@gmail.com" target="_blank"><paulbhartzog@gmail.com></a>, Andy Robinson
<a href="mailto:ldxar1@gmail.com" target="_blank"><ldxar1@gmail.com></a>
Message-ID: <a href="mailto:BANLkTimhtVSc=tymvo=O8f9dORtVBDH3+w@mail.gmail.com" target="_blank"><BANLkTimhtVSc=tymvo=O8f9dORtVBDH3+w@mail.gmail.com></a>
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 <span title=":)"><span>:)</span></span> As
such, my response was not all that great.
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Michel Bauwens <a href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com" target="_blank"><michelsub2004@gmail.com></a> wrote:
</div></pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<pre><span>> </span>Sam,
<span>></span>
<span>> </span>I hope you survived the tornado?
<span>></span>
<span>> </span>I hope some of our participants can react to this very interesting challenge
<span>> </span>from Adam Curtis in the Guardian,
<span>></span>
<span>> </span>Michel
<span>></span>
<span>> </span>On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Kevin Flanagan <a href="mailto:kev.flanagan@gmail.com" target="_blank"><kev.flanagan@gmail.com></a>
<span>> </span>wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<pre><span>>></span>
<span>>> </span>How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means - Adam
<span>>> </span>Curtis - Guardian
<span>>></span>
<span>>> </span>When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival
<span>>> </span>theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas
<span>>> </span>would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest
<span>>> </span>movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister
<span>>> </span>history
<span>>></span>
<span>>></span>
<span>>> </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts</a>
<span>>></span>
<span>>> </span>Episode 1 of his current documentary is up on youtube
<span>>></span>
<span>>> </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc</a><div class="im">
<span>>></span>
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</blockquote><div class="im">
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</pre>
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<pre><div>--
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Sam Rose
Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
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