Brian Holmes on Thu, 5 Mar 2009 09:47:20 -0500 (EST) |
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<nettime> Cybernetics and the Internet |
Hello Nettime - Since the summer of 2006 we've had quite a few debates (a recurrent fever?) under this cryptic heading: Cybernetics and the Internet. The implication that a distant, partially militarized and long-obsolete research program might have anything to do with the ways we use our computers to freely communicate no doubt smacked to many of a dark and useless conspiracy theory, and perhaps even of an attack on Our Beloved Internet (OBI). I understand the reticence, but I saw it all a bit differently. Contemporaneous with the vast expansion of free-market capitalism after 1989, the commercial Internet became the symbol, the tool and the most common lived experience of American-led globalization. By 2006 we had been through the boom, the bust, the blast, and a radical shift from the sunny Californian neoliberal rhetoric of infinite openness and a world without borders (or maybe even without salaried labor) to the thick-crude Texas neocon rhetoric of "freedom" aka security panic and neo-imperialism. While I watched a hulking Cold War military-industrial apparatus lurch back onto the stage along with some of the very goons who had brought it to its peak in 1950-70, I could not help being struck by the coexistence of two seemingly opposite paradigms: a command-and-control logic that had everything to do with the centralized military state, and a freewheeling "open systems" approach that had everything to do with the liberal theory of the market. If they coexisted, could they have any common root in the historical processes that laid the groundwork for the US-centric world-system way back in the 1940s? Could such common origins explain why one paradigm could shift almost instantaneously into the other? Honestly I knew nothing about cybernetics, but the question was far too interesting to ignore. After a couple years' reading, the answer seemed to be that an initial system of control engineering through the use of feedback information about a machine's environment, developed by McCulloch, Pitts, Wiener and Shannon in particular, had been rapidly extended to become a social science projecting its informatic models onto the human beings of the Cold War era. This command-and-control paradigm, in its turn, was destabilized by Maturana, Varela and Von Foerster's self-reflexive introduction of the observer's consciousness into the system, leading to "second-order cybernetics" and ultimately to the chaos and complexity theories that came to dominate our understanding of both networks and the economy during the 1980s and 90s. I therefore came to see the dark and sunny sides, first and second-order cybernetics, as remarkably different and yet inextricably intertwined approaches, forming the underpinning of a democratic social project based on a hard core of corporate-military power, and continually extended to meet the governance needs of what I call "liberal empire." This research gave rise to essays about the cultural critique of Adam Curtis, the development of surveillance technology since WWII, the film by Lutz Dammbeck entitled Das Netz, the dynamic organizational form of the swarm, and finally, the culmination of these cybernetic reflections in a new essay about "Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies," which situates his and Deleuze's work with the context of postwar social science and its developments into chaos and complexity theory. These could have formed a small publication on their own, but instead I've made them into the "Dark Crystals" section of my upcoming book, *Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society* (for which, by the way, I'm happy to have won the Villem Flusser award along with hacker extraordinaire Denis Rojo aka "Jaromil"). All these essays would never have happened without the collective intelligence of Nettime, and they can of course be consulted on OBI: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/neolib-goes-neocon http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/future-map http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/filming-the-world-laboratory http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/guattaris-schizoanalytic-cartographies http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/swarmachine Today it is once again the market logic that clamors from the headlines and preoccupies our fevered brains, this time not with a boom or a bubble but instead with the biggest-ever bust of a semiotic economy driven by computer-crunched mathematics and distributed by networked systems. The interesting question is obviously, what's gonna happen next, now that capitalism's orgiastic infatuation with networks seems almost sure to go into decline? Will there be a social backlash against ODI (Our Detested Internet)? Will the new forms of "closure" that Kenneth Werbin was talking about in the post that originally sparked this thread be developed in useful or in reactionary ways? (cf. Kenneth's post, http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l@bbs.thing.net/msg03546.html) Will the regionalism that I have been predicting in the Continental Drift seminars become a reality, and if so, will it be a dangerous or a benevolent one? Stay tuned folks, and keep those channels, uhhh, open.... Brian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org