Theo Honohan wrote:
If a cybernetic view is supposed to be more realistic than the
alleged god delusions of self-organization, this idea of changing
the parameters of the entire environment is a steep requirement for
it to satisfy without itself becoming a god delusion.
Well, unfortunately that kind of delusion has been the biggest game in
town for quite some time now (maybe it's some intrinsic human thing,
as you remark later on, the Greek tragedians had a lot to say about
it!).
The case of Google which attempts to internalize the activity of
the entire Internet by archiving it, analyzing it, simulating
interventions to see what they might do, and then performing those
interventions in ways which affect a majority of the users (namely, by
building in a relation between searching behavior and the advertising
that one sees) is just the most obvious example. Interestingly, they
now hope to extend their range into mobile phones, notably by offering
an open-source operating system for VOIP phones (Android, I believe
it is appropriately called!) that includes a GPS function alerting
you if any of your friends or contacts are in the immediate vicinity.
Wonderful app! But if you use it they will track your behavior and
correlate it with other information to make some guesses about what
people like you tend to want to do and to buy in certain places, at
certain times, under certain weather conditions, etc. Considering
that in the US, Google has already internalized entire cityscapes by
photographing them systematically and pasting the results into 3-D
rendered and geocoordinated representations, it gives them a really
powerful tool for performing this kind of environmental analysis and
simulation - and then collaborating with other businesses to change
the parameters of the urban environment. The user remains free in all
this, because the current democratic ethic is to intervene not on the
players but on the rules of the game.
However, there are still some concerns about the coercive nature of
these kinds of interventions, and maybe even about the zombification
of the USA as I once suggested on Nettime. That fourfold logic -
recording, analyzing, simulating, transforming the environment - is
now at the basis of most planning processes where any kind of traffic
flow is at stake, ranging from the web to architecture and urbanism.
Simon Leung usefully termed the results a control environment. My
article Future Map is all about such environments. At the end of
it, I do refer to them as God Machines and I do reflect on the
self-illusory nature of the drive for total control But the drive
is out there.
In the system the diagram portrays, second order cybernetics
replaces the (supposedly reductionist) engineer of first order
cybernetics with the term feedback, while Wiener, Bateson and
Mead appear as fully conscious observers at a higher level of
abstraction. The elitism and narcissism implicit in this depiction
is more than just amusing, it's intrinsic to the fatal direction of
the cybernetic project.
Any mathematician or computer scientist would point out that Wiener,
Bateson and Mead, for all their enlightened holism, could equally
be replaced with the term feedback in a system observed by
others--Holmes, Stalder and Hamilton, say. This is not a discipline
with two distinct modalities, first order and second order, it's a
unitary activity which has a self-referential structure.
Well, anyone *could* have done so, but it seems that a broad majority
did not. If we are to believe Paul N. Edwards, the author of a
great book called The Closed World, the militarized engineering and
computing culture of the 1950s and 60s was not exactly permeated by
this kind of self-reflexivity Rather the dominant belief was that
the world could be controlled by eliminating elements whose did not
conform to the proscribed models. This is very different from allowing
people their freedom and transforming the environment so as to channel
that freedom and capture value from it. In fact, it seems that in
social history, there really was something corresponding to a first
order period. I must admit to being deeply impressed by the opening
chapter of Edwards' book, which describes the Vietnam-era Operation
Igloo White. Perhaps just three paragraphs will give you an insight
into what the second-order cyberneticians were facing, in terms of
an epistemology embodied in everyday practice:
In 1968 the largest building in Southeast Asia was the Infiltration
Surveillance Center (ISC) at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command
center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White. Inside the ISC vigilant
technicians pored over banks of video displays, controlled by IBM
360/65 computers and connected to thousands of sensors strewn across
the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos.
The sensors -- shaped like twigs, jungle plants, and animal droppings
-- were designed to detect any human activity: the noises of truck
engines, body heat,
