> [!cite]- Metadata > 2025-11-18 02:17 > Status: > Tags: `Read Time: 20m 30s` > [!Note]- Part 1 - Love and Power > Ayn Rand has an affair > The Asian Miracle > Joseph Stiglitz - Head of the Council of Economic Advisors - 1995-97 > Robert Rubin - Secretary of Treasury - Former head of Goldman Sacchs > People Commodifying themselves online > "I created my interior thoughts as commodities, for the corporations that owned the boards that I would post to" > Cyberspace is a black hole - it absorbs energy and personality and then represents it as a spectacle > Property bubble in Southeast Asia finally burst > The Asian crisis began in Thailand - hundreds of thousands of offices and apartments had been built, and no one wanted them. As developers went bust on their loans, western investors panicked and pulled their money out of the foreign markets. > The crisis spread to Indonesia > Bill Clinton becomes swept up the in Monica Lewinsky scandal > Robert Rubin as the Secretary of Treasury was running foreign policy and not the state department. Everything was judged on whether it was a threat to the global economic system. > IMF grants a loan to Indonesia to stabilize their economy. > Indonesia's currency collapses and their economy went into freefall. > For every country the IMF bailed out, for a moment their was stability and then their economies would collapse. > Their was another agenda of the bailouts, part of their real function was to rescue the western investors and not the countries. The bailout money granted by the IMF was immediately used to pay off the Western investors. When that happened their economies collapsed. > The same thing happened in Thailand and South Korea. > Bill Clinton had become president with the vision of using political power to transform America. But he had been persuaded to give away that power to the financial markets with the promise that this time they would create a new stability. A new kind of democracy free from the corruption of elite politics. But it was now becoming clear that in reality, America's political power had just been transferred to another elite. The financiers on Wall Street, and when faced with a crisis, they had simply used that power to rescue themselves. > In 1974 Gerald Ford made Alan Greenspan chairman of his council of economic advisors in Washington. > In 2001, when the World Trade Centers had collapsed, everyone knew that everything changed. Then the system returned to normal. The heroic individual who had done this, and bent history to his will, was Alan Greenspan. He became the most powerful man in the world. > One week after the attacks, the American markets opened again, dealers waited to see what would happen, it was a disaster. Immediately the market suffered the largest fall ever in its history. Two weeks later the Enron scandal was revealed. It became clear that it was only one example of a vast corporate fraud. > Since the 1990s many businesses had faked profits and hidden their debts. Helped by some of the major accounting firms. Alan Greenspan's strategy was to cut interest costs to encourage consumer borrowing and spending. Usually this leads to inflation. The largest consumer boom resulted and the market remained stable. It seemed like the market could manage itself. But it was an illusion, the reason for the boom was the exact opposite. It happened because of a giant exercise of political power by an elite, thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. > The Asian countries, led by China, decided that never again would they put themselves at the mercy of America and the financial elite. The Chinese politboom created a system to manage America. They deliberately held their currencies exchange rate at a low level, this meant that their exports were cheap, and Chinese goods flooded into America. To pay for all this, American dollars flooded into China, but instead of spending money on their population, the Chinese leaders lent the money back to America by buying government bonds. It was this that led to the stability of the markets. > In 2008, Alan Greenspan's vision of a new planet, and Gordon Brown's promise of no more boom and bust were revealed to be fantasies. And just as it happened before in Southeast Asia ten years before, those running the financial sector now mobilized political power to rescue themselves and rescue their supremacy. And again, just as in Southeast Asia, the price is being paid by the poor people of these countries. > We are now living through a very strange moment. We know that the idea of Market Stability has failed, but we cannot imagine any alternative. The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. In reality we feel the opposite, that we are helpless components in a global system, a system that is controlled by a rigid logic, that we are powerless to challenge or change. > [!Note]- Part 2 - The Use and Abuse of Vegetal Concepts > The rise of the dream of the self-organizing system, and the machine fantasy of nature that underpins it. > Arthur Tansley's idea of Ecosystems in 1935. Influenced Ecology > His idea went much further, he said that if these Ecosystem's were disturbed they would always try to return to an original balance state. > Which meant that they have an ability to regulate and stabilize themselves. It was part of what Tansley called 'the great universal law of equilibrium.' > "The Default Setting" > Jay Forrester - Systems Theorist > Convinced that the whole world, not just nature, was composed of systems. But he believed that by building his own man-made system, the early warning network, he had identified how all systems stabilize themselves. It was through a mechanism called feedback. > What Forrester meant by 'Feedback' is that every action we take has consequences that feed through the system, and then return to shape our future behavior in ways we cannot see. But the computers could. > They have the power to analyze the true consequences of human actions, what Jay Forrester called 'Feedback Loops' > Physical Systems, Electrical Systems, Social Systems, Political Systems, Biological Systems, Internal Medical Systems. They are all fundamentally networks of feedback loops. > He was one of the leaders of an ambitious scientific movement called Cybernetics, which said that everything from human brains, to cities, and even entire societies could be seen as systems, regulated and governed by feedback. It fascinated both biologists and physicists, because it seemed to offer new insight into how order is maintained in the world. It also had powerful implications for human beings, because cybernetics saw human beings, not as individuals in charge of their own destiny but as components in systems. At its heart Cybernetics was a computers eye view of the world. From that perspective, there was no difference between human beings and machines. They were just nodes in networks, acting and reacting to flows of information. > Cybernetics transformed the idea of the ecosystem, because it seemed to explain how ecosystems stabilize themselves. They did it through feedback. This would lead ecology to rise up and become one of the dominant sciences of the 21st century. > Howard and Eugene Odum > Howard took Cybernetics and used it as a tool. > In the 1950s he traveled the world collecting data from ponds in North Carolina, to a tropical rainforest in Guatemala, and a coral reef in the Pacific. In each case, he reduced the bewildering complexity of nature to cybernetic networks. The ecosystems were drawn out as electrical circuits, with feedback loops which showed how energy flowed around the system between all the animals and the plants. > His brother Eugene took these ideas and he used them to define a powerful vision of nature that still dominates our imaginations today. He wrote a book called the fundamentals of ecology that became the bible of the science. It portrayed the whole planet as a network of interlinked ecosystems. > They had taken a metaphor - 'that the ecosystem worked like a machine' - but then, instead of looking at the data from the natural world and trying to find out if this was true, the Odum brothers did the opposite. They simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. They took the complexity and the variability of the natural world and they paired it down so it would fit with the equations and the circuits they had drawn. > What they were really doing was creating a machinelike fantasy of stability, driven by the desire for prestige, biological reality disappeared, organisms were expected to act mechanically in predictable ways, and animals became robots. The ideas were never presented as hypothesis to be tested. > The balance of nature idea comes from two things; ancient Western mythology and religious beliefs and also from the Machine age, because the actual mathematics that comes out of it are the mathematics of machinery. > "The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" > Buckminster Fuller - Military Engineer and Architect > Early geodesic domes were made to house US Warning systems in the arctic. > Fuller's geodesic domes imitated the idea of the ecosystem, each tiny strut was weak, but when thousands were joined to make an interconnecting web, they became strong and stable. > Fuller believed their had to be a conceptual shift in the way human beings saw themselves and their position in the world. Instead of seeing themselves as members of nations, or classes, or hierarchies of power, people should instead see themselves as equal members of a global system. To persuade them, Fuller used the image of the spacecraft that NASA had built to take Americans to the moon. NASA had employed ecologists to design a closed system for the astronauts inside the cabin. It was constantly monitored by computers to keep it in perfect balance. > In his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, it said that the world should be seen as one giant spaceship. > As a result you deemphasize the importance of the individual. The threat to this new type of system, according to Fuller, was politicians. He felt that politicians believed they could control the system, which led to struggles for power, which led to wars. > Fuller's ideas captured the imagination of a generation of people who had become disillusioned with Politics. > 1967-1971 students leave cities and form communes, building geodesic domes, based on Buckminster Fuller's idea of cybernetics. Self organizing societies with no hierarchy. One of these was called Synergia. > The ideas of Ecotechnics, understand that you are part of the system. There would be less, if not, no hierarchy at all. > There was another group of visionaries in California who believed that the communes were only a prototype for a self-organizing society built on a global scale. They were the Engineers who were inventing the new computer technologies on the West Coast. The way that they were going to develop these technologies would be shaped by this vision of a natural order to combine humans and machines. > "The Doomsday Machine" > Jay Forrester by now had come into power, because he used his computers to build models of businesses and even entire cities. Then Forrester became involved with a think tank called the Club of Rome. A group of technocrats and businessmen concerned with solving the environmental crisis. > The Club of Rome published a book called "The Limits to Growth" which laid out Jay Forrester's model and its frightening conclusions. > In 1972, for the first time ever, the United Nations held a conference on The Environmental Crisis. Forrester's environmental predictions dominated the conference. "The idea of growth is in contrast to the idea of equilibrium" > Protesters remarked that the idea of enforcing stability on the world was not neutral. That the limits of growth model was not being used to save the world, but to control it. Critics of Forrester's model pointed out that he had put in no feedback loops for Politics and Political change. The idea that in the future human beings might adapt to the problems by changing their values and goals, and thus changing the whole system, was absent. Human beings were only present in the model as mechanistic nodes. It was a machine vision of the world which could not imagine a future where human beings, unlike machines, would behave in ways that they hadn't before. This model was suited to the people who wanted to maintain the status quo. Those in power. > Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts - demonstrated how easily scientific ideas about nature, and natural equilibrium, could be used by those in power to maintain the status quo. The philosophy of Holism. > Human beings, unlike machines, should be able to behave in ways they haven't before. > Equilibrium - Holism - Static - Highly Political - Status Quo - The Abuse of Vegetational Concepts > Environmentalists opposed Forrester. The real role of the environmental movement was not to hold the world stable, but to struggle to change it. It was the greed of the Western elites that was causing the environmental crisis. The movement was being hijacked by right-wing think-tanks and cold war technocrats. > The Gaia Theory > What made this systems idea so powerful was that it didn't seem to be based on a political ideology. It was a scientific idea of organization that mirrored the natural world. But in the 1970s, the science that supported this idea fell apart. The fatal flaw in the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem was exposed. A new generation of ecologists began to produce empirical evidence that showed that ecosystems did not tend toward stability. > The very opposite was true, that nature - far from seeking equilibrium, was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. Ecologists began to revisit environments that were supposed to be models of stability. > You can study centuries of information from forests. What the data will tell you is that everything is changing. > The theory said that when ecosystems were disrupted by storms, fires, and floods they would return to a state of equilibrium. The very opposite was true. After the disturbances, the clouds and animals would recombine in radically different ways. The history of nature was filled with radical dislocations and unpredictable change. > George Van Dyne - Grasslands Experiment > After his death in 1981, at the age of 48 from a heart attack, the project was closed down. The collapse of his experiment marked the end of the systems theory that drove the science of ecology for 50 years. > "It's an act of ignorance to say I can devise a virtual ecosystem and capture it inside this computer." > Each species had their own sub model. > When George Van Dyne ran the model the data seemed to make no sense. No stable underlying pattern emerged. What Van Dyne was really doing, with his mountain of data, was recreating the real and chaotic instability of nature inside his computer. > The balance of nature is an illusion. It is completely counter to what contemporary ecology tells us. The reality is that we live in a very dynamic world. To replace the assumption of the balance of nature you have to discard the myth. > The scientific basis had fallen away. The idealistic vision of the self-organizing system continued to grow. The reason - an an age of mass democracy, where the individual is sacrosanct, and politics are discredited and distrusted, it offered the promise of a new egalitarian world order. > The Self Organizing Network > In the early part of this century, the idea of the self organizing network reemerged in what seemed to be its original radical form. Journalists discovered that the internet played a key role. It brought millions of people together to create revolutions that had no guiding ideology, except a desire for self-determination and for freedom. > In all the new revolutions that sense of freedom lasted only a moment. What had been forgotten in the optimism about the revolutions is what had really happened in the original experiments in the communes. They all failed. Most lasted no more than three years, some for less than six months. What tore them all apart was the very thing that was supposed to be banished - power. > The commune members discovered that some members were more free than others. Strong personalities began to dominate the weaker members of the group. The rules of the self organizing system refused to allow any organized opposition to its suppression. The rules that set up this egalitarian group resulted in the opposite. They resulted in creating a hierarchical structure could be dominant over others because everyone is not equally powerful in their voice against one other person. There was fear actually. It was like a virus running in the background. You know it's there but you don't know how to get rid of it. > The limitations of the self-organizing model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human societies - politics and power. The hippies took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with society. They believed that this alternative way of ordering the world was good, because it was based on the underlying order of nature. This was a fantasy. In reality, what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines. This machine organizing principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age. > What we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in a system, it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organizing things, even rebellions. But it offers no ideas of what comes next. It leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power. > [!Note]- Part 3 - The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey > Why no one believes you can change the world for the better any more. How we decided that we we're machines ourselves, played video games, and helped start Africa's world war. > British biologist Bill Hamilton > Kisangani, Congo - Stanleyville > Columbite-tantalite (Coltan) > Spike in the need for Coltan because of the PS2 > Bill Hamilton believed that AIDS had been created 50 years before by American Scientists in the jungles around Kisangani. To prove this, he traveled to collect chimpanzee feces. One day he caught malaria. Took an aspirin that caused a hemorrhage and he died. > For almost 80 years the Congo had been ruled by Belgium, but in 1960 it became independent. It's first prime minister was Patrice Lumumba. The country was completely unprepared for self-governance and descended into chaos. > The Congo was central to the modern world. Hidden in its forests were an extraordinary range of minerals. The uranium that exploded in the atom bombs over Japan came from the Congo. > The Americans were worried that Lumumba would ally with the Soviet Union, so they and the Belgians helped to organize a coup. Lumumba was kidnapped by rebels in the mining areas, taken to the forests in the eastern Congo and killed, then his body was dissolved in acid. It would lead to the rise of one of Africa's most corrupt dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko. Amidst the chaos Western mining companies carried on their operations unhindered. > Bill Hamilton was obsessed with Darwin's ideas. He believed that everything could be explained as a desperate struggle for all living things to survive, and pass on their genes to the next generation. As he watched the behavior of ants, he realized there was a problem. Why did some of them offer themselves up to the jaws of predators, in an apparently selfless sacrifice to protect the rest of the group? Why did some humans behave in the same way, what was in it for them? > He looked at the world from a genes point of view. He saw that human beings were just temporary carriers that allowed the genes to pass on copies of themselves and live forever. Hamilton was no longer thinking like a human being. He was thinking like a gene, and genes were not like people. They were like machines, tiny calculating engines that could work out the mathematically best outcome. That explained altruism. The gene would destroy itself, if by doing that it would let more related copies of itself survive. > Armand Denis - Belgian documentary filmmaker. > In Rwanda he helped to create a myth that would have terrifying consequences, it said that the Tutsi's were a noble and intelligent race who had originally come from Egypt, and that the Hutus were a separate race of ignorant peasants. In reality there was no evidence for this at all. > The Belgians who ran Rwanda took the myth and used it ruthlessly. They brought in scientists to prove it biologically, measuring skulls and saying the Tutsi's had larger brains and therefore were the natural rulers. > They then made each race carry racial identity cards, and created a segregated system in which the Tutsi's ruled the Hutu's with a brutal arrogance. In the 1950's the Belgian's decided to give independence to Rwanda and a terrible thing happened. > George Price - Chemist on the Manhattan project > Goes to IBM designs graphics for early computers. > He wrote an article proposing that America could mathematically measure unhappiness levels among populations in the world, this would allow them to spot where communism might take root, and prevent it. Price's ideas were part of a powerful belief that had grown up in the electronic laboratories of the cold war - that computers could be the salvation of humanity. The Godfather of this movement, mathematician John Von Neumann, who had also built the H-bomb. > George Price finds Bill Hamilton's lost paper. Humans were simply soft machines controlled by on-board computers. Price took Hamilton's mathematics and developed it, as he did so he realized that the equations also worked in reverse. It was not just logical to be good, it was also logical to be spiteful. It made sense to kill yourself, if in the process you also killed people distantly related to you and allowed those closely related to you to survive. > Price's mathematics explained murder, warfare, and even genocide as possibly rational strategies for the genes controlling your behavior. Hamilton had seen that you could harm yourself as long as you helped your relatives. This is the gene's eye point of view. Together they would develop their theory which would become known as The Selfish Gene. What price had done is bring rationality and the clear logic of mathematics, into a new field, into the heart of being human, but with the strangest of consequences. > Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata > John Von Neumann > The extraordinary breakthrough that Price and Hamilton had made was that Self-Reproducing Automata didn't have to be invented, they were already here, they were us!! The equations had enormous implications, because if everything we did whether good or bad was actually a rational strategy computed by the codes inside us, then religion with its moral guidance was irrelevant. It demolished the enlightenment idea that human beings were above the rest of nature. In reality we were no different than all the other animals. > Dian Fossey - Researching Gorillas > In 1967 a new war broke out in the Congo. White mercenaries who supported the arrival of president Mubutu were leading a rebellion. There aim was to create a separate state in the mineral rich area within the eastern part of the country. Behind the scenes they were allegedly supported by the Western mining conglomerates, but the rebellion turned into horror. > Dian Fossey was captured by the Congolese for two weeks. She escaped at set up a new camp in Rwanda. > Dian Fossey tried to create a world in which the gorillas would be perfectly safe. Not just from poachers, but from all human beings. She patrolled the forest, destroying the snares the local people had built to catch small antelope, because they might hurt the gorillas. She began to terrorize the local people. She kidnapped them, spat on them, hit them, and sprayed them with tear gas. She also put on a mask and told them she was casting black magic spells. Fossey would have never called the African's animals because she loved animals, but she was following the tradition of so many westerners in Africa. Maltreatment of Africans in the interest of a higher Western idea, the locals began to hate her. > In 1973 George Price decided to devote his life to helping the homeless in London. As a result of the equations he had developed, Price had been given a job in the genetics laboratory in the University of London. But he had also converted to Christianity, and he had done so in an extreme way. Price decided that he was going to follow the teachings of Christ, as if they were an exact code. He set out to help the poor and the destitute. > William Hamilton became desperately worried about George Price. He believed that his belief was a mad superstition and pleaded with Price to give up trying to help the homeless and do more work on Genetics. Other's believe that he became so shocked by his and Hamilton's theory that he was, in some desperate personal way, trying to disprove it. He cut his carotid artery with scissors and bled to death. > His and Hamilton's theory was about to be taken up and transformed into one of the most defining concepts of our age. The young biologist called Richard Dawkins, who had himself been a computer programmer, took their equations and through vivid language captured the public imagination with a new way of looking at humans. Our old romantic idea of free will is grossly exaggerated. Most of our actions are actually controlled by the logic of our on board computers very deep within us. We are simply machines, playing tiny roles in a vast strategic game, played by competing computer codes over centuries. A machine for passing on genes. > At the heart of this supremely rational mathematical theory there was a paradox. William Hamilton, George Price, and Richard Dawkins had reinvented the immortal soul. A part within us that would survive our own death, and whose eternal life was far more significant than our own temporary and limited existence. The soul was now a computer code that made no distinction between good and evil. > 4.5M people died in Rwanda between 1998-2003 > Bill Hamilton wrote a series of books called the Narrow Roads of Gene Land. In them, he followed the logic of natural selection to its extreme conclusion. The idea that we should use science and medicine to prolong the lives of those who would otherwise die was wrong. It would allow the genetically inferior to survive and would so weaken society. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategy of the genes. He believed that some people are genetically inferior to others. > Hamilton's Journey was a vivid expression of what had happened at the end of the 20th century to the Western dream of transforming the world for the better. The logic of his scientific theory had led him to a small ruined town in Eastern Congo. He walked through the chaos murder and looting, looking for evidence that Western medicine was dangerous and misguided. While all around him the horrific consequences of the Rwanda massacres were being played out. Consequences created not just by Western imperialism and greed, but also by the best and noblest of Liberal ideas. > Because it was Liberals in the Belgian administration who had first encouraged the Hutus to rise up against the Tutsi elites. And it was the aid camps, set up in the wake of the massacres that had complicated the conflict and helped to spread the violence into the Congo. Then Hamilton died by the freak accident of the Asprin lodged in his gut that then caused a hemorrhage. His theory about the origin of aids in the vaccination programs of the 1950s turned out to be completely untrue. Subsequent research had shown that it had no factual foundation. > Above all the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic codes. The question is: Have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions that have helped to forge the actions still unfolding in the Congo, yet we have no idea what to do about it. So instead we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines, to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world. --- ### **References** [All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace](https://machines.cargo.site/)