All watched over by machines of loving grace.

[Exit Stage Left]

A critique of techno-utopianism by Adam Curtis, starts tonight at 9pm on BBC2.
Have computers taken away our power? | Television & radio | The Guardian

[Rhys W]

I'll be watching. The trailer for that is strangely compelling, and I enjoyed what I saw of his Power of Nightmares (?) stuff.

He seems to be one of these people who's clearly understood the modern world, while the rest of us are just plodding along blindly.

[Rhys W]

I wasn't disappointed. There was so much to take in I felt I should be taking notes just to keep up. Sci-Fi, mid-20th century Californian techno-utopianism, neo-liberal free market economics, property bubbles, Monica Lewinsky and the bankers' bail-out... the guy is a genius.

[Deano]

Yes, it was great.  Incredibly thought-provoking, and far more than I could absorb.  The connections he makes are astonishing. 

[Exit Stage Left]

The main omissions seemed to be the dot-com bubble and mobile phones. Mobiles really did increase productivity and facilitate ad-hoc networks. It reminded me that I was taking a course in social cybernetics as early as 1978, so I was primed for a lot of this stuff a long time ago. I thought that the way the Far East economic collapse generated the Chinese policy that caused sub-prime was an interesting idea.

[Deano]

There was quite a good interview with Adam Curtis on Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service.  Starts at about 40 mins.

BBC - BBC 6 Music Programmes - Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service, 22/05/2011

[Jaded]

Hopefully it will be repeated.

[Mr Larrington]

Please tell me it's worth persevering with...  It started badly, which is to say it contained Ayn Rand.  There are a Several of reasons why this may be deemed a Bad Thing.  Then we get a fistful of breadheaded geeky 1990's bell-ends who openly admit to naming their children after Ayn Rand (this in itself is almost sufficient to remove any credibility they may possess) and describe themselves as "Randian heroes".  At which point I switched off the haunted fish tank and started drinking heavily.

"The Power Of Nightmares" was utterly compelling.  This, from what I've seen so far, was the opposite.

[clarion]

I am 100% in favour of people naming their children after Ayn Rand.  It makes the parents easy to pick out for lining up against the wall come the revolution.

The children will, of course, be placed with loving families and given a choice of a more reasonable name.  Therapy will help them.

[Rhys W]

That programme made me want to check out some of Ayn Rand's books, despite what I've been hearing about them as bibles for neo-liberal Chicago School laissez faire right wingers. But only in the same way that I might pick up a discarded Daily Mail to try and understand the enemy.

[clarion]

It isn't far different.

[Mr Larrington]

Apparently the kinematic celluloid of Atlas Shrugged is teh suxx0r as well.

[Exit Stage Left]

It wasn't so much about Rand as about Alan Greenspan. It sought to explain how Greenspan came to adopt an atomistic worldview that allowed him to believe that the new economy was a self-regulating and benign system. The feedback provided by the models embedded in the hedge funds' algorithms were seen as an adequate replacement for actual regulation. Although Greenspan had to be leaned on heavily to adopt that view.
Next week's show would seem to be about feedback loops in nature.
Systems thinking is so embedded in modern culture that we need a programme like this to stand back and look at that big picture.

[RJ]

Just caught up with this on i-player.  Very clever; rhetorical/polemic television. Not sure I necessarily agree with the premise of the next programme (computers invented the ecosystem) ...

[Exit Stage Left]

Just caught up with this on i-player.  Very clever; rhetorical/polemic television. Not sure I necessarily agree with the premise of the next programme (computers invented the ecosystem) ...

One of the examples of feedback in my A Level Nuffiield Physics course was Lynxes and Prong-Horned Antelope. So I'm expecting some revelation that the causal links were fudged, and that example of nature returning to a natural steady state is idealised. I could well be wrong though.

[DrMekon]

I am 100% in favour of people naming their children after Ayn Rand.  It makes the parents easy to pick out for lining up against the wall come the revolution.

The children will, of course, be placed with loving families and given a choice of a more reasonable name.  Therapy will help them.

Indeed. I spent a good portion of my first couple of years on teh internets arguing with people who had Rand quotes as their sig.

[Rhys W]

Adam Curtis has an article about his next episode in today's Observer. I haven't read it yet, but I bet it'll be worth five minutes of my time. There's also a full page review of last week's programme (search for that yourself).

[andygates]

That's a weird attack on Biosphere.  We learned from that experiment just how complicated it can be to manage enclosed environments: that's good, valuable (if painful at the time) science. 

Where does that "machines of loving grace" phrase come from, anyway?

(and when does he burn Iain Bank's Culture books for being techno-utopian porn? )

[pcolbeck]

Where does that "machines of loving grace" phrase come from, anyway?

It's the title of an apposite poem by Richard Brautigan.

[RJ]

Sounds like a fairly wilful misinterpretation of what ecologists mean by an "ecosystem".  Few ecologists of my acquaintance expect stasis as a desirable norm  ...

I'll watch (later), but expect to get annoyed.

[andygates]

A layman's interpretation, Dunning-Krugered into nonsense.   

[RJ]

A layman's interpretation, Dunning-Krugered into nonsense.  

Thanks Andy:  succinct and (for me) educational, as ever  

[Exit Stage Left]

Ecosystems work best with diversity. What the thesis of these shows seems to be is that what is missing in self-regulating social systems is an appreciation of what influence power has. So a collective might have thousands of component members, but very few of those members might be active in the system, leading to instability. Curtis uses the example of 60s communes.

Thirty years later, thousands of young Americans who were disenchanted with politics went off instead to set up their own experimental communities – the commune movement. And they turned to Arthur Tansley's idea of the ecosystem as a model for how to create a human system of order within the communes.

But they also fused it with cybernetic ideas drawn from computer theory, and out of this came a vision of strong, independent humans linked, just like in nature, in a network that was held together through feedback. The commune dwellers mimicked the ecosystem idea in their house meetings where they all had to say exactly what was on their minds at that moment – so information flowed freely round the system. And through that the communes were supposed to stabilise themselves.

But they didn't. In many communes across America in the late 1960s house meetings became vicious bullying sessions where the strong preyed mercilessly on the weak, and nobody was allowed to voice any objections. The rules of the self-organising system said that no coalitions or alliances were allowed because that was politics – and politics was bad. If you talk today to ex-commune members they tell horrific stories of coercion, violent intimidation and sexual oppression within these utopian communities, while the other commune members stood mutely watching, unable under the rules of the system to do anything to stop it.

How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means | Environment | The Observer

It's possible that Curtis is finding a ready audience in the BBC establishment, and indeed the political establishment, where people have power as office holders and distrust less structured forms of organisation. Because it does them out of a job to which they feel entitled.

[RJ]

Ecosystems work best with diversity. What the thesis of these shows seems to be is that what is missing in self-regulating social systems is an appreciation of what influence power has.

The problem with that comparison is that ecosystems (multi-species) are not social systems (single species); human communities should not be confused with ecological guilds.

[Exit Stage Left]

Ecosystems work best with diversity. What the thesis of these shows seems to be is that what is missing in self-regulating social systems is an appreciation of what influence power has.

The problem with that comparison is that ecosystems (multi-species) are not social systems (single species); human communities should not be confused with ecological guilds.

The Observer article has the same cadences as Curtis's script, so it's probably an adapted version of Monday's show. Natural Science and Social Science have long influenced each other, and Curtis is good as teasing out these syntheses. That's what makes the shows enjoyable. What kills any appreciation of them is picking up on stray points of fact before you've let the whole programe wash over you. They are 'infotainment', and are best argued about when you've absorbed them.
I like the winning combination of the arguments of 'Connections' by James Burke, and the editing style of 'Pump up the Volume' by MARRS.
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