I started these essays with a post called “All Watched Over by Heroes of Loving Grace” addressing “Episode 1: Love and Power” and the “heroic” trend that emerged in the 1970s with the philosophies of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and George Gilder. The influence of these philosophies has been acknowledged to have contributed to the emergence of the “personal empowerment” movement of the 1980s and the Californian Ideology, a combination of counter-culture, cybernetics, and free market “neo-liberal” economics. With Reaganmics, these movements became encapsulatd in a worldwide phenomenon contributing to the export of US industrial jobs, the privatization of public assets and the globalization of finance, information, and news.

In the second of the series, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts,” Adam Curtis criticizes the elevation and circulation of natural metaphors and environmental ideas in political thinking. He recounts a history of systems thinking from the introduction of ecology to Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics. He goes on to examine the concepts of “systems” and “the balance of nature” and their relationship to machine intelligence and networks. The documentary continues with networks and perhaps more importantly, the concept of “system” as both a tool and an ideology.[1]

In the 1950s, systems ideas were projected on to nature by scientists such as Jay Wright Forrester and Norbert Wiener. By introducing the idea of feedback and feedforward loops, Forrester framed people, technology, nature, and social dynamics in terms of interacting information flows. He was largely responsible for the investments in the North American early warning defense network in the 1950s called SAGE that created many computer companies like Burroughs and Honeywell and helped IBM transition from a tabulating machine company to a computer company. Wiener saw control and communications as central to a new technical philosophy called “cybernetics” that placed humans as nodes in a network of systems. His Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) was a benchmark book in the area.[2]

All three episodes can be seen at Top Documentary Films.

This second part of the series also looks at how the notion of “systems” emerged and how it conflated nature with machine intelligence. Its major concern is that in systems conceptions, humans become just one cog in a machine, one node in a network, one dataset in a universe of big data. Or to preview Buckminster Fuller, just one astronaut on Spaceship Earth. Systems thinking fundamentally challenged the Enlightenment idea of the human being being separate from nature and master of her destiny.

Adam Curtis starts with Buckminster Fuller (one of my personal favorites), who wrote the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1964. Fuller viewed humans as “equal members of a global system” contained within “Spaceship Earth.” Inspired by the Apollo moonshot, with its contained biosupport system, Fuller stressed doing more with less. The video argues that the concept displaced the centrality of humanity and instead emphasized the importance of the “spaceship.”

Fuller is mostly known for his inventive design of the geodesic dome, a superstrong structure based on principles derived from studying forms in nature. His dome was used for radar installations in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) defensive shield because of its strength in rough weather conditions. It is also used for homes and other unique buildings such as the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Florida. The dome is constructed from triangles and tetrahedrons that Fuller considered the most stable energy forms based on his science of “synergetics.”

This second episode also explores the origins of the term “ecology” as it emanated from the work of Sir Arthur George Tansley, an English botanist who pioneered the science of ecology in the 1930s. He was the coiner of one of Chat GPT’s favorite terms “ecosystem,” and also one of the founders of the British Ecological Society and the editor of the Journal of Ecology. Tansley came up with his ideas after studying the work of Sigmund Freud – who conceived of the brain in terms of interconnecting but contentious electrical dynamics which we know grossly as id, ego, and superego. From these neural psychodynamics, Tansley extrapolated a view of nature as an interlocking system; almost a governing mechanical system, that could absorb shocks and tribulations and return to a steady state.

Later, Eugene Odum wrote a textbook on ecology with his brother, Howard Thomas Odum, a graduate student at Yale. The Odum brothers’ book (1953), Fundamentals of Ecology, was the only textbook in the field for about ten years. The Odum brothers helped to shape the foundations of modern ecology by advancing systems thinking, emphasizing the importance of energy flows in ecosystems, and promoting the holistic study of nature. Curtis crticized their methodology, saying they took the metaphor of systems and used it provide a simplistic version of reality. He called it “a machine-like fantasy of stability,” perpetuating the myth of the “balance of nature.”

The story moves on to Jay Forrester, an early innovator in computer systems and one of the designers of the Whirlwind computers that led to the SAGE computers that connected the NORAD hemispheric defense radar network in the 1950s. SAGE jump-started the computer industry and helped the telephone and telegraph system prepare for the Internet by creating modems and other network innovations. Forrester created the first random-access magnetic-core memory – he organized grids of magnetic cores to store digital information so that the contents of their memory could be retrieved.

Forrester had worked on “feedback control systems” at MIT during World War II developing servomechanisms for the control of gun mounts and radar antennas. After Whirlwind he wrote Industrial Dynamics (1961) about how systems could apply to the corporate environment and Urban Dynamics (1969) about cities and urban decay.

In 1970 Forrester was invited to Berne, Switzerland to attend a meeting of the newly formed Club of Rome. Having been promised a grant of $400,000 by the Volkswagen Foundation for a research project on the “problematique humaine,” future of civilization, the group struggled to find a research methodology until Forrester suggested they come to MIT for a week long seminar on the possibilities of systems theory. A month later Forrester finished World Dynamics in 1971 and contributed to Donella H. Meadows’ Limits to Growth in 1972.

Limits to Growth presented Forrester’s computer-aided analysis and a set of solutions to the Earth’s environment and social problems. It modeled the Earth mathematically as a closed system with numerous feedback loops. The MIT team, including Dennis and Donella Meadows, ran a wide variety of computer-based scenarios examining the interactions of five related factors: the consumption of nonrenewable resources, food production, industrial production, pollution, and population.

The model tested causal linkages, structural-behavioral relationships, and positive and negative feedback loops using different sets of assumptions. One key assumption was exponential growth. They tested different rates of change but stuck with idea of capitalist development and compound growth – as the economy grows, the faster its rate of absolute growth. As they tested their model, they didn’t really like what they saw as it didn’t present an optimistic picture of the future.

A truism that emerged in the data processing era was “Garbage in – Garbage out.” In Models of Doom: A Critique of the Limits to Growth (1973), one author wrote “Malthus in – Malthus out.” Thomas Robert Malthus was an early economist who predicted mass starvation because food production would not be able to keep up with population growth. His idea was that population growth would continue exponentially while the growth of the food supply would only grow arithmetically. In the early 1970s, the world was going through a number of dramatic changes and The Limits to Growth reflected that.

Summary and Conclusion

Adam Curtis’ documentary series, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” delves into the relationship between technology, political ideologies, and human agency. Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s poem, Curtis explores how technology shapes our governance systems and worldview. In “Love and Power,” Curtis examines the influence of thinkers like Werner Erhard (Another of my favorites), Ayn Rand (Not so much) and their role in shaping the personal empowerment movement of the 1980s. The rise of the hero contributed to the decreases of taxes and rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and privatization under Reaganomics.

In “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts,” Curtis critiques the adoption of natural systems thinking in political and technological contexts, tracing the origins of ecological systems thinking back to the work of figures like Jay Forrester, Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and the Odum brothers. These ideas, initially intended to describe natural “ecosystems,” were later applied to human societies and governance, often conflating nature with machine intelligence.
“Systems” is more of an engineering concept rather than a scientific one, meaning that it is useful for connecting rather than dissecting. However, one is left thinking: What is democracy if not a system of human nodes providing feedback in a dynamic mechanism?

This leads us to Curtis’ anti-Americanism and Tory perspective. American democracy was designed with checks and balances reflecting the Founding Fathers’ belief that human nature could lead to abuse of power. By distributing authority across different branches and levels of government, the US Constitution creates a system where power is constantly monitored and balanced, fostering accountability and preventing any single entity from becoming too powerful. This system is intended to protect democratic governance, individual rights, and the rule of law.

The documentary raises questions about the consequences of seeing human and natural systems as mechanistic, potentially leading to a distorted understanding of complex, dynamic realities. Curtis raises concerns about how these systems-based frameworks reduce humans to mere nodes in networks, challenging the Enlightenment view of humanity as autonomous and separate from nature.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2024, Oct 10). All Watched over by Systems of Loving Grace. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/all-watched-over-by-systems-of-loving-grace/

Notes

[1] It addresses Episode 2 (see video) of the series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace called “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”.

[1] Transcript of the poem from Chris Hunt’s blog
[2] 1948, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris, (1948) MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-73009-9; 2nd revised ed. 1961.
[3]

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook Univerisyt. He teaches broadband policy and ICT for sustainable development. From 2002-2012 he was on the faculty of New York University where he taught digital economics and information systems management. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in South Korea.

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Category: books and films, futurists, how IT came to rule the world, space systems
Tags: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace > cybernetics > cyberspace > Jay Forrester > Limits to Growth > Richard Brautigan > Spaceship Earth > The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts > World Dynamics

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