20110530_AC

Source: SACPOP (Vimeo)

URL: http://vimeo.com/73536828

Date: 30/05/2011

Event: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace: 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

Attribution: Adam Curtis

People:

• Peder Anker: Historian of Ecology
• Adam Curtis: Film maker
• Jeff Rulifson: Computer engineer

[Caption: "THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE RISE OF THE MACHINES... AND OUR BELIEF IN THE BALANCE OF NATURE... HOW THE IDEA OF THE ECOSYSTEM WAS INVENTED... HOW IT INSPIRED US... AND HOW IT WASN'T EVEN TRUE".]

Adam Curtis: In the mass democracies of the West, a new ideology has risen up. We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organising networks. From internet utopianism to the global economic system, and above all, the ecosystems of the natural world, today we dream of systems that can balance and stabilise themselves, without the intervention of authoritarian power.

But, in reality, this is the dream of the machines. It reflects how they are organised. It has nothing to do with nature. And as a model for human society and for politics, it is wholly inadequate, in the face of the powerful, dynamic forces that really dominate the world today. This is the story of the rise of the dream of the self-organising system, and the strange, machine fantasy of nature that underpins it.

[Caption: "THE USE AND ABUSE OF VEGETATIONAL CONCEPTS".]

[Clip from the "Mother of All Demos" ("MoAD"), a presentation by Doug Englebart and the staff of SRI's Augmenting Human Intellect group at the Fall Joint Computer Conference on December 8, 1968.]

Jeff Rulifson: The MOL is a, in a sense it's a high level language ... It's also very very close to machine language, 940 machine language. People talk about the actual registers of the machine and you talk about doing indirect addressing...

[Caption: "London at the height of the British Empire. Or so they thought".]

Adam Curtis: At the end of the First World War, a young biologist called Arthur Tansley had a frightening dream. He dreamt he was in an African village. The natives started to come towards him. Then his wife appeared. He picked up a rifle, aimed it at her and pulled the trigger. Tansley wanted to know what the dream meant, so he started to study the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and he became fascinated.

And in 1922 he even went to Vienna, to be analysed by Freud himself. What caught Tansley's imagination was an obscure part of Freud's theory that said that the human brain was actually an electrical machine. But the sense data, that came in through the eyes and the ears created bursts of energy that flowed around networks inside the brain, just like electrical circuits.

Tansley was fascinated by this. And he made an extraordinary conceptual leap. He decided that he could take this model of the mind and apply it to the whole of the natural world. He became convinced that underneath the complexity of nature were systems, vast interconnected circuits that linked all animals and plants, through which energy flowed. He invented a name for them - he called them "ecosystems".

Peder Anker: Tansley's idea of the mind was that of networks - see, you have energy going through tubes into a new sort of [explosive sound] explosion, then to a new tube [explosive sound] explosion, and the way to create this explosion would be sense perception. So these energy tubes would go out of the motor mechanism of the mind, creating a network, a system within the mind. Now this he would just transfer - one to one, almost - into his description of the natural environment, in which energy between species and a moment [?] of species, would constitute a system, an ecosystem, of energy flowing between these different species. So the grasshopper eating the grass will then be energy transforming through the tube into the [dung?], where the beetle would do his or her job.

Adam Curtis: It's a very mechanical idea.

Peder Anker: It's very mechanical indeed.

Adam Curtis: But Tansley went much further. He said that if these ecosystems were disturbed, they would always try and return to an original balanced state.