The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, 22 May 2011 updated 27 May, 31 May 2011, 3 June 2011, and 17 June 2011

Adam Curtis describes himself modestly as “a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead” but that understates his unique approach to employing visual imagery to help the viewer construct and deconstruct. Those open to having their comfort zone regarding the digital world we are creating made somewhat less comfortable may be interested in his latest three part documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which explores “the idea that humans have been colonised by the machines they have built”. Given Curtis’ provenance, system and managerialist ideologues may be too discomfited to watch.

For everyone else it starts tomorrow (23 May 2011) on the UK’s BBC 2 television channel and should be available on the BBC iPlayer thereafter. A streaming video taster is offered on Adam’s own The Medium and the Message blog. Non UK readers may be interested in the OLDaily reference in the Further Reading/Viewing section at the bottom of this posting.

Memorably, the British author Bryan Appleyard describes Curtis as the BBC’s “in-house video philosopher and archive-crawler” who believes “that ideas change the world … but they don’t have the consequences people expect”.

Curtis’ latest documentary series should perhaps be followed by reading Dan Gardner’s Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe them Anyway and then Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Follow that aperitif with a revisit to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) in which the right-wing neocon Fukuyama and champion of rugged individualism asserted that the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union evidenced “western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. Twenty years later the realities of the turbulent world we now live in and the rise of authoritarian capitalism has led to a new more left-leaning Obama-supporting Fukuyama revising his views. His change of perspective is perhaps hinted at in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) which acknowledges the limitations of self-interest as the underlying model of human social development (see also Fukuyama’s own web site at Stanford).

And the obscure title of Curtis’ documentary series? That comes from a poem contained in a 1967 collection of the same name by Richard Brautigan in which cybernetics has restored nature’s balance and human labour is no more. Read it and shiver, read it and shiver!

“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

——— Update 27 May 2011 ————-
Curtis’ first episode managed to build an impressive visual network of associations which deftly wove Ayn Rand, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Robert Rubin, Clinton’s then Chief Secretary to the US Treasury, Alan Greenspan, and Gordon Brown into the mix. Of particular note was that Rubin had led Goldman Sachs the bank, Curtis asserts, that created most of the computer models that underpinned the then boom. Curtin highlights the thinking that Rubin and the US Treasury has effectively become agents of the financial world embedded in the heart of government. But Curtis was only beginning to develop his cyberpower polemic:

“What some people were begining to see was that the computer systems and the global networks they had created hadn’t distributed power. They had just shifted it and, if anything, had concentrated it in new forms. And some of the computer utopians from Silicon Valley were also beginning to realise that the World Wide Web was not a new kind of democracy, but was something far more complicated where power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways.”

One of these doubting utopians was Carmen Hermosillo. Her loss of cyberfaith in 1994 was quoted:

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality. This is not right. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I started to see that I had commodified myself. Commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money value. In the 19th century, commodities were made in factories by workers who were mostly exploited. But I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board I was posting to, like CompuServe or AOL. And that commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment. Cyberspace is a black hole, it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion. And we are getting lost in the spectacle.”

The concluding seconds of episode one ends with the unsettling:
“The orginal promise of the Californian ideology was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. Instead, today we feel the opposite, that we are helpless components in a global system, a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”

Commentary

Curtis’ skill is in exploiting the power of the visual image in support of his own narrative as exemplified by his slow motion and repeated focus on the Russian/American Ayn Rand’s darting, almost manic, eyes and the all American Monica Lewinsky’s deep idolising gaze upon ex US President Bill Clinton; that idolising gaze which gave no warning of the power they would eventually draw away from him and so leave the coast clear for others to fill the void. But Curtis certainly leads us to a reflection on what our technocrats, managerialists, objectivists, systems fundamentalists and “quants” have done and are doing. For Randian accolytes it’s always best to remain rational and objective – or at least appear to be so in pursuit of their own agendas and ends. Perhaps a few more tweaks of the algorithms will fix the problem next time? Perhaps not. Consider this memorable quote from the London School of Economics’ Professor of European Political Economy:

“During the years that led up to this crisis, a new complex financial instrument could be cobbled together in the morning by a few quants in London, wrapped in a legal contractual structure during the afternoon in New York City and sold to unsuspecting but greedy investors from small towns just inside the polar circle in Norway the next day.” Lessons from the global financial crisis for regulators and supervisors (Willem H. Buiter, 2009, National Bureau of Economic Research p12) [PDF].

In Curtis’ view Ayn Rand seems to have had a disproportionate almost malign influence on the thinking of corporate and political leaders and I was almost expecting him to include the speech from that other charismatic Gordon Gekko until I remembered he was only a fictional character played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street. So I’ve included the pinnacle of Gekko’s speech here.

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

Ouch! Uncomfortable stuff. Then again, look what happened to Gekko? But then again, look what happened in the real world with truth being yet again stranger than fiction, i.e. 2000-2003 (Dotcom bust) followed by a credit and financial sector boom from 2003-2007 followed by the disastrous “sub-prime bust” of 2008 and all the negative consequences that are still playing out from that.

——— Update 31 May 2011 ————-
Episode 2 continued using Curtis’ trademark visual collage in support of his central argument that the underlying model of social and physical worlds as self-balancing feedback driven adaptive systems, or more accurately ecosystems, is deeply flawed and damaging – the world is, and the reasons for change are, much less predictable, even chaotic. The last few minutes of this episode summarises his case well and would justify serious pause for thought from those who feel that the various manifestations of social media such as Twitter, Facebook et al are investing the world’s citizens with a new and permanent way to change how they are governed. In Curtis’ analysis their optimism may be somewhat premature.

“The failure of the commune movement and the fate of the revolutions show the limitations of the self organising model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human society – politics and power. The hippies took up the idea of a networked society because they were disillusioned with politics. They believed that this alternative way of organising the world was good because it was based on the underlying order of nature. But this was a fantasy. In reality, what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines. Now in our age, we are all disillusioned with politics and this machine organising principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age. But what we are discovering is that, if we see ourselves as components in a system, that it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organising things, even rebellions, but it offers no ideas about what comes next. And just like in the communes, it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.”

Depressing stuff indeed. But consider that we are now starting to see how the assumed technologies of liberation can also be exploited by those in power to maintain or amplify their positions, e.g. using national firewalls to restrict/block access to content and information, or the monitoring, spoofing or “honey trapping” of Twitter and Facebook sites et al which makes identifying those guilty of “thought crime” easier to identify so that they can be managed (rationally and objectively of course). Current turbulences, however, evidence how the management of “thought crime” tends to be more subtle in some contexts than in others. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) reports on the use and abuse of internet filtering and surveillance technologies on a global basis. They have identified how often it is products originally produced for use in business, schools, or other contexts by companies based in western liberal democracies such as the US, Canada, and the UK can – and are – being employed for more socially repressive purposes. Such repurposing identified by ONI reports has included products or product ranges such as NetSweeper, Fortinet, WebSense, and SmartFilter. And even open source software intended for benign purposes and with no commercial driver is not immune. The ONI report West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011 identifies a less benign repurposing of the originally innocuous Squid caching proxy which speeds up web page response times; a piece of software originally funded by the National Science Foundation. Proving again the adage that it is humans that can find infinite ways of employing the technologies we invent in multiple contexts sometimes for the good and sometimes for the ill; goodness and illness is of course defined by those in power at the time.

Update 17 June 2011
I delayed my post-match analysis of the third and final episode of Adam Curtis’ All Looked Over by Machines of Loving Grace because the number of online commentators has grown since episode one and so there seemed little point in repeating stuff already out there. For example, Stephen Downes’ OLDaily (10 June 2011) provides a pretty cogent summary and he also links to other sources. But in Auricle postings I try to add some further value either via commentary or by establishing linkages to – and with – other material or ideas.

On a first viewing I thought episode three had somehow lost its impetus and that it might have been better to collapse this material into the first two episodes and not have a third one. A second viewing left me more sympathetic to what Curtis had attempted to do, but some stamina was necessary to keep engaged with the arguments being put forward. What stands out for me was how the power of “memes”, promulgated by sometimes the most unlikely figures, can have the most profound effects on beliefs, behaviour and national/foreign policies. In episode one we had memes originating from Ayn Rand and in episode three Curtis identified a meme chain which included Bill Hamilton > George Price > John Von Neumann > and Richard Dawkins interspersed with Western (particularly Belgian and American) government influences in Central Africa with Tutsi <> Hutu strife becoming the most awful contemporary manifestation. In essence, in episode three, Curtis seem to be suggesting the dominant meme that gained such destructive traction was that of the selfish gene with even this becoming an explanation for altruism as well as, at times, nearly genocidal violence; an argument reinforced In the final seconds of the programme when Curtis’ voiceover states:

“But Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society. Above all, the ideas that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programmes written in their genetic codes. And the question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions that have helped to cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo. Yet we have not idea what to do about it. So instead, we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world” MACHINES WITHOUT LOVING GRACE

Whether we agree with some or all of Curtis’ arguments or not I think his All Looked Over by Machines of Loving Grace series provides a worthy stimulant to discussion about the power of thought leaders (not necessarily the same as formal leaders) to influence human beliefs and behaviour; for good or ill.

I created a techno-dysfunctions category in Auricle some time ago because I think it is necessary that we constantly reflect on what thoughts and abilities the technologies we invent and use are influencing; for good or ill. What is being amplified? What is being accelerated? What is being modulated? What is being distorted? What is being supressed? What is being made so complicated that only the machines (or their algorithm designers) can understand it? I want Curtis’ rather pessimistic view to be unfounded and for Brautigan’s poem to be viewed in the way that Matt Senate in his comment to this posting suggests Brautigan intended but let’s finish with an association that Curtis didn’t make:

“That Delphic Oracle is a grim reminder of how easily we shape belief around ambiguous predictions. Like Macbeth the moment we accept any prediction we take the first step towards making it come true. We need to very careful what fortune cookie we read” (closing extract from the University of Houston’s Engines of our Ingenuity, podcast number 1697, titled Delphic Oracle).

Further Reading/Viewing
OLDaily (31 May 2011 edition) – Stephen Downes adds further value to my posting including links to the Adam Curtis documentary for non UK residents.
Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power? (Guardian, 6 May 2011)
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace Dissects Techno-Utopia (Wired, 22 May 2011)
Adam Curtis: TV’s great documentary maker (Sunday Times, 28 June 2009)
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon (Slate, 2 November 2009)
Was software responsible for the financial crisis? (Guardian, 16 October 2008).
The Flaw (documentary about the causes of the financial crash of 2008 – UK Cinema release June 2011).
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (Tim Harford, 2011) – read also the Washington Post interview with Tim Harford (27 May 2011). Harford’s own The Undercover Economist blog is also worth a read.
The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You (Eli Pariser, 2011)