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Adam Curtis: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Part 3: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

Or: The Episode You Shouldn’t Bother Watching

I know that quite a few people were disappointed by the first two episodes in Adam Curtis’s series. I rather liked them, but to me the third episode really went off the rails.

The Rwanda Watusi vs Bahutu genocide, caused by an imposed myth, is undoubtedly bad. It brought to mind a much longer lasting—yet in many ways similar—deadly myth: that of the Jewish exile to Egypt, their return to the Holy Land, and their racial separateness from the Palestinians. The idea that Jews and Palestinians are separate races has been a topic of much research, obviously frequently highly controversial. I don’t think it’s helpful to start playing genocide Top Trumps; both myths have obviously had horrific consequences.

The fact that terrorism, murder and genocide make sense from a rational genetic perspective is, to me, another example of the reason why extreme rationality doesn’t work as a source of moral guidance. But Curtis’s interjected comments about the danger of rejecting religion as a source of morality ignore that religion is another system of moral rules (or at least, it is in the West). His entire thesis is that simple systems of rules don’t provide stability. Exchanging The Selfish Gene and Atlas Shrugged for the Old and New Testaments isn’t really solving anything.

In fact, Curtis’s third program struck me overall as being a confused mess. I kept waiting for the threads to weave together, but they didn’t.

Linking it all to the PS2 is weak. The PS2 was a tiny, tiny part of the computer industry’s demand for mineral resources. Blaming aid camps for providing a target for genocide is weak too. The music really goes off the rails as well—party music for African refugee camps? WTF?

I don’t think the view of humans as machines is as widely held as Curtis suggests, either. The John Searle view that there must be an ineffable something-or-other seems to me to be much more widespread.

I also suspect that Curtis misrepresents Richard Dawkins’ position. I don’t think Dawkins really believes that the selfish gene is any more than a model, a way of seeing the world and hence gaining insight. (Dawkins’ followers seem to agree.) And while Curtis presents the idea of the gene as sort of analog of the immortal soul, that really doesn’t work as an idea. Souls, at least in Christian traditions, are eternal, separate from their environment and from other souls. Genes are anything but inviolate, separate or eternal. Your genes don’t survive intact after your death; they don’t even remain intact through your lifespan.

Curtis also takes a hatchet to the reputation of Dian Fossey, charging her with racist and imperialist attitudes towards the African people. It may be true, but it’s the kind of incendiary claim that really needs more evidence. Meanwhile, a thread about the belief that experiments on polio vaccines caused AIDS seems to meander in and out of the show, before Curtis admits at the end that the theory was without foundation, and he apparetly included it just to provide another example of a westerner going to Africa with a western agenda in mind—like that’s a revelation.

All told, it’s a confused mess that fails to present anything like enough background to support its personal attacks, and fails to deliver a coherent message. Watch the first two, but skip this one.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Part 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

In which I continue to post my thoughts about a documentary everyone else watched six months ago.

I thought during this episode that I could see a central point being made in Adam Curtis’s series. He seemed to be attacking the myth that networks are inherently self regulating and stable. I think he’s off-base painting it as a myth promoted by computer scientists or engineers, however. People who build computers know that they only stay stable because they are so simple, with the fundamental simplification being treating everything as digital binary information. There were analog computers, such as the Norden bombsight, but they were ultimately a dead end precisely because it was so difficult to make them reliable.

Today, enormous amounts of engineering go into making computers stable, trying to make them immune to chaotic behavior triggered by noise and unexpected input in their feedback loops. CPUs have to be designed so that their circuits can filter out thermal noise, quantum effects, and other unwanted sources of randomness and unpredictability. Serious business computers use special ECC RAM designed to catch and fix errors and small divergences that would otherwise cause crashes and instability. We’re actually hitting the point where hard drive storage becomes problematic because the error rates are too high to keep big disks from chaotically losing information. Instead, companies like Google have to build their petabytes of storage using multiple distributed storage units. There are new file systems (ZFS and btrfs) which are adding data duplication and error correction techniques to try and make multi-terabyte disks and distributed disk clusters work as if they were reliable single drives.

Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, of course, the problems were different. Then it was ferrite cores cracking, paper tape wearing out, floppy disks going bad, and so on. But the fact that computer-like systems easily end up behaving chaotically is not, I think, something that any engineer would have been unfamiliar with.

Aside #1: When it comes to music, chaotic feedback systems are very much preferred. From the electric guitar to the Moog synthesizer, feedback loops are one of the first things you implement with any new piece of music technology in order to make it sound more interesting.

Aside #2: While it seems quaint now, during the 50s it was seriously considered that the entire universe might be a feedback system that naturally tended towards a steady state.

The thing is… Economies based on perpetual growth really aren’t sustainable indefinitely. We’ve been in an anomalous period of history, effectively cheating by using up finite natural resources. However, human managed stability isn’t workable either, because we don’t have the control we think we have, or the knowledge to work out how to adjust a complex natural system to keep it stable. Wildfires are perhaps the best example. It seems obvious how to prevent forest fires; so obvious that cartoon bears tell children they can do it. But catastrophic wildfires have been getting worse and worse, precisely because the US has attempted to prevent fires.

The truth nobody likes to admit is that we need to live our lives on the assumption that change will happen, including disastrous change. We need systems which keep disaster localized. In economics and political terms, that means smaller markets, smaller countries, smaller companies, less control. Obviously, nobody in power wants to admit that that’s the case.

Not mentioned in Curtis’s documentary is that this view of the world as a place where steady states are possible, even desirable, is a very Western idea. If you look at Chinese philosophy, Taoism teaches that change is inevitable, and to be welcomed; that even catastrophe can be viewed as an opportunity for positive change. (The idea that the Chinese character for crisis is composed of the characters for change and opportunity, though—that’s a myth.) Buddhism, too, teaches that impermanence is inevitable, and that our clinging to a desire for perpetual stability is the root of what makes us unhappy—not just because we are inevitably disappointed, but because our actions in seeking permanence cause suffering.

Personally, it’s not even clear to me why a stable steady-state world would be a good thing. Looking at reality, the only things which are steady state are dead things; life is characterized by constant change and adaptation. So basically, as presented by Adam Curtis, both sides of the debate are wrong: The world can’t be treated as a dumping ground without ill effect, and it isn’t self-regulating—but equally, we can’t turn it into a regulated stable system and prevent ecological disasters.

The scary thing is that the environmental debate today is still dominated by the two same incorrect ideas: the one side insisting that we can carry on without any climate crisis, the other that we can fix the problem and avoid crisis. There’s a Woody Allen quote that’s closer to the truth:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

A final note: It’s interesting that both hippies and Randian Libertarians ultimately have the same mistaken belief, that a simple system with no imposed power structures will end up egalitarian and stable.

Adam Curtis: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

I realize that I am desperately late to this particular party. Everyone has probably already watched the documentary, read the inevitable backlash, and digested the response to the backlash. Nevertheless, here are my notes on the first episode.

Part 1: Love and Power

Barbara Branden’s comments about Ayn Rand being disappointed by the reception of “Atlas Shrugged” are hilarious, yet sad. She reports that Rand was desperately upset when the people in her inner circle who had how much they liked the book, failed to stand up and say what genius it was when it was being excoriated in the press. Well, Ayn, of course they didn’t. They were behaving in their own selfish rational self-interest, exactly the way you yourself had told them they should. That should have been a learning experience for you right there, but somehow it wasn’t, and you ended up alone in a crummy apartment living off Social Security.

I remember when Alan Greenspan buckled under and took back his prediction that the economy was “irrationally exuberant”. I thought at the time that it was patently obvious that there were a lot of incredibly overvalued companies, and that we were likely in a bubble of speculation on Internet stocks. For one project I worked on, Enron was one of the bidders. I did some reading, concluded that they were dodgy, and said so. They were rejected. A few months later, their whole business imploded. Their glossy brochures had been really impressive though.

The idea of treating marriage and relationships rationally, or as business arrangements, is a very bizarre American one. There are lots of articles on the net which put the view across. “What can the corporate world teach us about personal relationships?” — I sincerely hope that the answer is “nothing”, but I’ve read of couples who schedule weekly meetings with each other to deliver “status updates”. There have even been Powerpoint proposals. The latest person to end up miserable because of treating marriage as a business? Kim Kardashian, allegedly.

The whole issue around commodifying our thoughts for exploitation by others is one of the reasons why I post anything of length on a site that I own, rather than letting Facebook or Google own them. Of course, Google Plus and Facebook are good ways to get an audience—but you don’t want to let them own you.

One of the sad facts about the New Economy idea of unregulated markets and computer networks leading to stability, is that I think any decent mathematician or computer scientist would have told you that it was almost certainly not going to work. Unregulated systems with feedback often have chaotic behavior, and the more complicated the system, the more likely it is to be chaotic. Even trivial systems of a few equations with feedback can result in chaotic complexity—that’s what makes fractals so interesting. Unfortunately a lot of people in Internet businesses and banks in the 90s either didn’t have the mathematical background to know about chaotic systems, or didn’t want to believe that they were building them. I remember reading articles about the issue at the time, but nobody really took it seriously. There is at least now some discussion of issues like the effect of trading speed on market stability, even as the financial services companies continue to reduce already small latencies to allow for even faster trading cycles.

Around Austin, Greenspan and the Federal Reserve are widely seen as villains. It’s pretty common to see “End The Fed” on bumper stickers and T-shirts. Unfortunately, a lot of the criticism comes from Ron Paul followers, and Paul is one of those people who still believes that unregulated market systems will be naturally stable. The fact that history seems to show the opposite, he and his followers dismiss, arguing that there was still some government regulation somewhere, and if only we had absolutely no regulation anywhere, then it would all work just fine. That is, the cure that killed the economy didn’t work because we didn’t try it hard enough.

It has been obvious to many people for years that China has been systematically buying control of the USA. As I would tell people during the boom, when they got angry for action against China over human rights abuse: China could shut down the US economy overnight any time they liked. They wouldn’t need bombs to do so, they would just shut down a few factories or ban exports. The USA wouldn’t be able to restart manufacturing, and its economy would collapse. There are a few companies that understand this; mostly foreign ones, like Toyota. They keep manufacturing plants across the globe, hedging their bets.

Finally: It’s pretty ballsy of Curtis to effectively make the case that Al Qaeda were right to bomb the WTC. Fortunately for him, I think he stated it subtly enough that the people who might otherwise have lynched him, failed to notice the point being made.