Time and Propinquity

In an interview with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, Adam Curtis describes Jim Garrison as "godfather of modern conspiracy theories" (7:44), and "one of the ideologists of our time" (8:18).

Garrison's method was searching for patterns, following a principle he called Time and Propinquity. As Curtis comments: "Funnily enough, that's exactly how artificial intelligence works." (8:30)

Cut to Jeremy Bentham, whose hedonic calculus also referenced propinquity. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize arousal and excitement, so this can be regarded as a form of hedonic calculus. Whereas Bentham's aim was to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect (greatest happiness, greatest number), social media platforms will try to leverage any affective response that promotes engagement and supports their commercial goals, including outrage.

In an interview with Michael Brooks, Curtis acknowledges that his documentary method also involves making connections and drawing parallels. He regards his role as asking “have you thought about looking at the world this way?”, pulling back a bit and looking at what is happening in a different way. But, he insists, that is not the same as a conspiracy theory.

Curtis spotlights a number of interesting characters from different parts of the world in different decades. Sometimes there are family connections - Afeni and Tupac Shakur, George and Ethel Boole (plus Geoffrey Hinton) - or crossed paths (Michael de Freitas and Stokely Carmichael). Sometimes a character we met in Act One appears back on stage in Act Three (Bernard Kouchner). Are these significant juxtapositions or merely coincidences? Curtis doesn't answer this question directly, but he does claim that this collection of material serves to explain something important about where we are today and how we got here.

The selection of archive material is not dependent not only on Curtis's editorial judgement, but also on what was captured, preserved and available. For some scenes, we might ask - who filmed this, why did these people consent to being filmed, and to what extent are these scenes representative of the vast number of other scenes that were never filmed or properly archived? What conclusions can we draw from the fragments that happened to be available to him?

 

I met a traveller from an antique land ...

 

---

Ben Brooker, The world according to Adam Curtis (Overland, 25 March 2021)

Michael J Brooks, What Does The Future Hold? An Interview With Adam Curtis (The Quietus, 12 February 2021) 

Adam Curtis, Can't Get You Out Of My Head (BBC 2021)

Adam Curtis, From Tupac to Dom Cummings: meet the cast of characters in Adam Curtis's new series (Guardian, 6 Feb 2021)

Kermode and Mayo, Adam Curtis interviewed by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (29 January 2021)

Sam Knight, Adam Curtis Explains It All (New Yorker, 28 January 2021) 

Adam Koper, Thoughts on Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head (26 February 2021)

Adam Koper, A critical conceptualization of conspiracy theory (Constellations, 2023)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion - Jim Garrison the Great Accuser (2020) 

Wikipedia: Chekhov's Gun, Hedonic Calculus

Related posts: All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2021), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021) 

Scissors Paper Stone 3

Discussing #Murdoch, @paulmasonnews argues that the network defeats the hierarchy. Mason tries to argue that the fall of News International represents a triumph for "the network", with particular reference to Facebook and Twitter. He references a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988) (link), and also name-drops Slavoj Žižek.

But of course that's only one possible interpretation of recent events, and only one meaning of the word "network". Reading Adam Curtis's piece from a few months ago, ironically entitled Rupert Murdoch - A Portrait of Satan, we might instead get a picture of News International as (at least until recently) a supremely powerful network, which has now been (perhaps temporally) outmanoeuvred by the establishment hierarchy it for so long tried to subvert.

The establishment probably cares as little about poor Millie Dowler as it does about any foolish and over-sexed footballer. But when her mobile phone turns out to have been hacked, it gives everyone the perfect pretext to express indignation about the scurrilous tactics of a newspaper that has for decades been entertaining the working classes with the foibles of the rich and famous, as well as detailed accounts of crime. (Just read George Orwell on the Decline of the English Murder.)

While we may all deplore the tactics of the News of the World, investigative journalism is one of those activities we all benefit from while turning a blind eye to exactly how it is done. And how are we to hold the establishment to account, if the establishment sets up the rules of the game to make real investigative journalism as difficult and unprofitable as possible? Some moral as well as political dilemmas here.

The Ecosystem Myth

#AWOBMOLG #systemsthinking Adam Curtis outlined the thesis of his second programme in an Observer article yesterday How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means (Observer 29 May 2011).

Curtis makes an association between ecology and empire, which was first mooted by the Norwegian historian of science Peder Anker in a book called Imperial Ecology (Harvard University Press 2001).

The story starts with the origin of the words "ecosystem" and "holistic", which were coined by Arthur Tansley and Jan Christiaan Smuts respectively. Tansley was a Fabian socialist, while Smuts was a Field Marshall during the First World War, and later became the Prime Minister of South Africa. These two men, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are identified as co-founders of the idea of self-regulating systems.

But in 1935, Tansley wrote an academic paper called "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms", attacking the presumption of an ecology as a self-regulating closed system possessing homeostasis. He alludes in the paper to the notion that the ideal society can be based on ecological theory, and suggests that Smuts and his followers are motivated not by science but by an attachment to a view of society involving "less exalted wholes". This may have been a coded reference to the racial doctrines that dominated the British Empire, and were later to be institutionalized as Apartheid (although Smuts's own position on apartheid was complicated, as his Wikipedia entry indicates).

Anker sees the rapid expansion of the science of ecology within the British Empire as evidence that ecology was "objectively" in the service of the imperial powers, thus lumping Smuts and Tansley together notwithstanding the strong disagreements between them. Curtis performs a similar rhetorical trick when he talks about the adoption by left-wing communes of an idea of self-regulating systems.

"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."

Tansley may have coined the word "ecosystem", but he explicitly repudiated the idea of using ecological thinking to design human society. So in what sense is it fair to describe this as Arthur Tansley's idea?

"Although Tansley and Smuts and their argument about power would be forgotten, hybrid combinations of their ideas were going to re-emerge later in the century."

As an extreme example of faith in self-organizing systems, Curtis cites an interview with Lucy Annson of UK Uncut, conducted by the BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis. Maitlis invited Annson to condemn the more extreme incidents that had occurred during the UK Uncut protest, and Annson was determined to evade any notion of collective responsibility.

Lucy Annson insisted again and again to Emily Maitlis that she was only a spokesperson for herself, and under the rules of the network no one could stand back and judge the system. Emily said: "You're not a completely peaceful organisation." Lucy came back with the killer line: "I don't think anyone can make an assessment of that, other than the people involved in the actions themselves."

Both Smuts and Tansley would have regarded Annson's statement as absurd, and certainly not supported by any reasonable notion of ecosystem or holism. Given that the purpose of the protest is largely defined in terms of its journalistic coverage, we can surely regard the protest and the coverage as a connected system, involving Maitlis as well as Annson. That's the same holistic sense of the word "involved" as when Donne says "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind".

Annson's denial of collective responsibility is also not a reflection of the actual behaviour of many communes, which as Curtis points out can sometimes be just as dysfunctional and oppressive as hierarchical organizations, if not worse. So although Curtis can mock the moral confusion displayed by Ms Annson, does this really illustrate a more general phenomenon?


I'll probably blog some more when I've watched the programme. For my review of the first programme, see All Chewed Over By Machines.

All Chewed Over By Machines

#AWOBMOLG Have been watching the first part of the latest Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". @socialtechno reckons "It's like a man writing a love letter to someone he doesn't love."

The documentary is named after a rather soppy 1950 poem by Richard Brautigan, and opens with Ayn Rand. Curtis would like us to believe that everyone in Silicon Valley was inspired and influenced by Ayn Rand (based on the fact that a few people named their children and companies after herself or her works) and he uses the life and works of Ayn Rand to frame a powerful but logically flawed dialectic about technological capitalism.

Thesis,

"Ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers, then together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream, which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabilizing system. The world would be stable, yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires."

This conflates a diverse range of beliefs and theories that were circulating all around the world, certainly not just in California. Those developing these ideas were far more likely to have been inspired and influenced by Karl Marx than by Ayn Rand. (Marx wrote of a world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all"). Or perhaps Hannah Arendt, Norman O Brown, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre or any number of other postwar European and American intellectuals. Meanwhile, cybernetics was emerging from the work of mathematicians and systems thinkers - including Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Jay Forrester, Donella Meadows and Norbert Wiener - who posed a radical critique to the managerial philosophy of Taylorism and Fordism.

Curtis refers to this collection of ideas as "The Californian Ideology". According to Wikipedia, this term was coined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, who wrote an essay with this title in 1995 as a critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism. The essay doesn't mention Ayn Rand, but it does mention some of the writers who appear in Curtis's film, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz and Alvin Toffler. By stringing together short clips from his interviews with these and other worthies, Curtis creates the impression that their opinions can all be lumped together into a common belief system, which he can then attack in the next part of the film.

Antithesis

Meanwhile, one of the most influential followers of Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan, for many years the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Along with other members of the financial elite, Greenspan persuaded President Clinton to abdicate control of the financial sector, and leave financial stability and prosperity to the markets. In some ways this new market libertarianism was a continuation of the economic monetarism that prevailed in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher. During the 1990s, however, people started to tell themselves a story in which the new technology somehow replaced the old economy (boom and bust) with a new economy based on unshakable stability, perpetual productivity growth and a transfer of power from governments to the people. This story (which we now know to have been wishful thinking) echoed some elements of the Californian ideology, but it was overlaid with all sorts of other political agendas.

Greenspan himself observed that there was a puzzling mismatch between corporate profits and genuine productivity growth. If the global economy had been a viable system in the cybernetic sense, designed or emerging according to the principles of Stafford Beer and others, this kind of information would be properly shared and interpreted, and would have had significant regulatory force.

Greenspan's original interpretation of this mismatch was that there was a worm in the apple of new market liberalism: he was soon persuaded to abandon this interpretation in favour of a much more optimistic one. As Curtis shows, using the IMF's intervention into Indonesia as an example, the financial elites leveraged the market system to protect their own interests, even when this ran counter to any notion of stability or general prosperity or natural justice. Ayn Rand would probably have called such behaviour "rational". Curtis gives us a lot of background about Rand's unbalanced sex life, in order to illustrate the mutually destructive nature of Rand's selfish notion of "rationality". He perhaps intended this section of the film as an allegory for the systemic side-effects of the Myth of the Machine.

Greenspan is portrayed in the film as an anti-hero, whose indecision and folly led an unsuspecting world (along with a compliant or distracted President Clinton) into disaster. Curtis also uses the Monica Lewinsky story, a tiny amount of familiar stock footage stretched by slow motion effects, to reinforce the train-crash element of the Clinton presidency. (Although it's difficult to see how Curtis can blame Californian hippies for all that. Might just as easily blame the Cavendish Laboratory.) But this is a fairly conventional version of recent history, which doesn't seem to tell us very much about our changing relationship with technology.

Synthesis

Curtis portrays Clinton as an important pivotal figure in this story, brought down by a series of tragic conflicts. Being as arrogant and selfish as Ayn Rand in his sexual behaviour - but being forced into concealment and deception by his political position. Adoring the old-style democratic politics (says Curtis), but being lured by the evil Greenspan-Iago into the new anti-politics. (Clinton as the glamorous Othello, obviously, who remains handsome even when picking his teeth.)

There is a heroic way of narrating history that concentrates on leaders and their personal strengths and weaknesses. Curtis's previous film, The Power of Nightmares, told a fascinating tale of the leaders of the American Right and the leaders of al Qaeda, and revealed intriguing links and parallels between Bush and Bin Laden.

There is also an "objective" way of narrating history, that downplays leadership and concentrates on the deeper system forces that shape events. George Orwell noted the tendency of Marxists to overuse words like "objectively", but surely nobody can doubt that political activity can sometimes have unanticipated or even counterproductive effects. Systems thinkers including Stafford Beer and Maturana remind us that complex sociotechnical systems may sometimes have a life of their own, preserving their essential characteristics regardless of the espoused intentions and best efforts of the people who are supposed to be in charge. (POSIWID was Beer's name for this effect.) Economists appeal to the "invisible hand", which supposedly creates beneficial outcomes without conscious planning or top-down governance. (By the way, the extreme form of economic liberalism espoused by Greenspan was popular in the 19th century, so it's a bit misleading to credit Ayn Rand with inventing this idea.) And narratives about the power of The Machine tend to belong here.

I've got better things to do with my time than work out how Ayn Rand's version of "objectivism" attempts to reconcile the notion of personal heroism (while steering away from Nietzsche's version) with the notion of system forces (while steering away from Marx's version). But if Adam Curtis believes he can produce a historical account that personalizes how we are watched over by machines, without dealing with the problems introduced by an array of German intellectuals from Marx to Nietzsche, he may be as much a captive of the Ayn Rand camp as the people featured in his film. (See what I did there?)

Notes

Richard Brautigan, "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" (via American Poems). Brautigan was briefly a poet-in-residence at CalTech, so he must have influenced loads of people in Silicon Valley mustn't he? Jarvis Cocker calls him "A Hemingway for Hippies" (Guardian 17 September 2014). See also Alexis Madrigal, Weekend Poem (Atlantic, September 2011).

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1996)
Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx (Chronicle Review, April 2011)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (1994)
Montserrat Tovar, Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace (1994)

Previews and reviews of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

• Adam Curtis (especially comments by Leeravitz and leftnotliberal)
• Chris Applegate (24 May 2011)
• Brainfisch (26 May 2011)
• Andrew Orlowski (The Register 23 May 2011)
• Ashwin Parameswaran (24 May 2011)
• Paul Rennie (24 May 2011)
• Alasdair Thompson (Bright Green 26 May 2011) (via OrgZone 25 May 2011)
• Sam Wollaston (Guardian 23 May 2011)
• Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4, 21 May 2011) 
• Wikipedia

More on Ayn Rand

• Howard Gold, Did Greenspan channel or betray Ayn Rand (MarketWatch June 2010)
• Noah Kristula-Green, Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand (FrumForum, July 2010) via Jonathan Chait (New Republic)
• Evan McMurray, The Stunning Weirdness of Ayn Rand (Salon, 6 October 2014)
  
• Amity Shlaes, Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load (Bloomberg July 2009)
  
• Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Marxist and Bolshevik Roots of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy (Aug 2010)
• Jenny Turner, As Astonishing as Elvis (LRB Vol 27 No 23, 1 Dec 2005) with reply by Chris Sciabarra (6 Dec 2005)
• Slavoj Zizek, The actuality of Ayn Rand pdf, (Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol 3 No 2, Spring 2002)

More on Alan Greenspan

• Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work - Introduction (trans Daniel Ross, via La Deleuziana 2015)
  

More on Adam Curtis

• Brian Holmes, NEOLIB GOES NEOCON: Adam Curtis, or Cultural Critique in the 21st Century (June 2007)
• Adam Curtis: Cognitive Deterrorization (Politics of Knowledge, Feb 2008)
• Adam Curtis Alarm Clock Films (Diagonal Thoughts, March 2008)

Related posts

• The Ecosystem Myth (May 2011)
  
• Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017)
  

 

Updated 17 September 2014. Links added 19 August 2020.

Terrorism

After an appalling series of events in London, the British media have been full of assertions about the purpose of terrorism, from which various conclusions for action are derived - usually striving to do the exact opposite of what the terrorists are supposed to want, apparently based on POSIWID-style arguments.

• the purpose of terrorism is to foster division, therefore we must remain united ...
  
• the purpose of terrorism is to undermine our democratic traditions, therefore we must preserve and protect ...
  

For my part, I am happy to go along with a general preference for unity over discord, and for democratic rights over authoritarian reaction. But I think it is absurd to argue for this preference simply in order to frustrate the imagined wishes of some constructed entity.

In the London Times, Matthew Parris (July 23rd, 2005) suggests that an image of the terrorists, as belonging to a tightly coordinated yet agile global enterprise, is the result of an unwitting conspiracy between four separate powers: news media, Government, security services and the terrorists themselves. Even if this image is untrue (and Parris is careful not to say it is), each of these powers benefits, in different ways, from promoting this image.

(Parris has written about conspiracy before: Oct 19th 2002, Feb 1st, 2003).  update  Adam Curtis made a similar point following the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, : "Neoconservatives, 'terror journalists' and Osama bin Laden himself all had their own reasons to create a simple story of looming apocalypse." Guardian May 3rd 2011)

Talking about the purpose of terrorism only makes sense if we conceive of terrorism as a reasonably coherent system. But this conception is itself subject to various agendas. POSIWID may be a useful analytical technique for working out what is going on (WIGO). But it does not justify a simple response to a complex situation.

Power of Nightmares 2

John has already mentioned the Power of Nightmares. This is an extraordinary documentary on BBC2, showing alarming parallels (if not co-evolution) between the rise of the US NeoConservatives and the rise of the Islamic extremists. Former allies against the Soviet empire in Afghanistan, sworn enemies since well before September 11th, but sharing a common belief in the decadence of liberalism.

Four days before the US election, a videotape is released of a recent speech by Osama Bin Laden, attacking America and attacking George W Bush. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is the videotape likely to have any effect on the result of the US election? If so, what effect is it likely to have?
  
• Is the videotape intended to have an effect on the US election? If so, what effect is it intended to have?
• If Bin Laden wanted to ensure Bush's reelection, how would he go about it? If he preferred Kerry, what would he do?