Dave Young Trimester1-Essay Cybernetic Ideologies

Cybernetic Ideologies

The development of cybernetics had ramifications far beyond the world of science - for the counterculture of the mid 20th century, Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theories became an integral part of their ideology. Two countercultural movements that were particularly inspired by Wiener's ideas were the Silicon Valley artisans-turned-entrepreneurs that domesticated software and networks, and those who were inspired by the Californian Ideology and extended cybernetic theories into the homes of America in the 1990s. As can be expected, the ideologies of both generations are complex and at times contradictory, particularly with relation to cybernetics – for example, it could be argued that the cybernetic way of thinking was partially what the counterculture were rebelling against, while their desire to construct a new non-hierarchical society that would allow the free flow of information was influenced by cybernetic systems. Similarly, cybernetic concepts were at the basis of the development of the web, which promised to finally realise the countercultural dream of a global consciousness through systems of feedback and decentralised communication networks. Despite the utopian desires of both generations of creating a discursive space free of any central governing authority, it could be argued that the technologies they pioneered have resulted in a society more divided by control structures than ever before.

In essence, cybernetics described a new set of methodologies for studying how to control the flow of information through a system, and through the non-specificity of these methodologies, it could be adapted to suit a diverse range of applications. While it was quickly adopted in various scientific disciplines, cybernetics had initially been developed by Norbert Wiener before World War II while working on a manned anti-aircraft gun that could predict the flight path of an airborne target. The important conceptual switch for Wiener had been to consider the human operator as a mechanical extension of the gun itself, allowing him to develop a mathematics that could describe their interactions. The result was the provision of a new vocabulary for the systems-obsessed culture of the time, and reinforced the usefulness of the 'mechanistic view' that dominated the physical sciences. His theories were published in Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948, and with America entering an era of Cold War paranoia, cybernetics became an important tool for the development of new military technologies.

In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner describes the effects of the mechanistic discourse going mainstream: “Within this discourse, the mind of the individual man and the command centers of America's nuclear establishment both seemed to be mechanised tools of managament and control.” (2006: 17) Cybernetics became a symbol of the Cold War paranoid ideology: the rationalism and obsession with control, nuclear missile trajectories, the Early Warning System, and the development of a mathematics that could predict how society would respond in times of crisis. It was precisely this atmosphere of restraint, paranoia, and control that the counterculture saw as problematic and worth rebelling against.

By the end of the 1960s, the countercultural revolution had transformed from its modest Californian roots into a large-scale social movement whose influence stretched far beyond the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The counterculture's aversion to the mechanisation of society was summarised in Mario Savio's infamous “bodies upon the gears” speech at the University of California in 1964: “And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” (as quoted in Turner, 2006: 11) As suggested in Savio's speech, the counterculture as a whole did not see the machine as being an answer to the revolution. In actuality, the counterculture was a fractured movement of opposing ideals and alternative priorities, but united by a common interest in re-managing the control systems that were creating a more docile and consumerist American society. Ironically, it was cybernetics that some countercultural movements looked to for inspiration. Turner writes: “Like Norbert Wiener two decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and the top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information.”(2006: 38)

The New Communalists were one countercultural movement that had a particular interest in cybernetics. Strictly apolitical, they used cybernetic theories to create non-hierarchical systems to encourage their ideals of collaborative knowledge and egalitarian communities. Acting out these theories in communal-living experiments generally located away from the cities and the throes of capitalism, the New Communalists attempted to create “leaderless” democratic societies, in which all members were supposedly equal in the running of the commune. The community was treated as a rule-based system: alliances were forbidden, and problems within it would be dealt with through group feedback sessions. With these parameters, they attempted to “rediscover what they imagined to be the pre-industrial forms of intimacy and egalitarian rule.” (Turner, 2006: 37) The movement had a sizeable impact on American culture in general: in the early 70s, over half a million Americans were living in the communes. According to Adam Curtis, “It was one of the biggest migrations in American history.”

Despite the utopian desires of the New Communalists and the relative popularity of the movement, almost all of the communes were a complete failure, with most not lasting more than 6 months. The democratic systems on which the communes were based were inherently flawed, as they did not successfully consider a basic facet of social systems: that within a group of people, control and power dynamics arise naturally. As Adam Curtis writes in The Observer: “This was the central problem with the concept of the self-regulating system, one that was going to haunt it throughout the 20th century. It can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable.” (2011)

After the failure of the experimental new communities in the Californian countryside due to hierarchical struggles, the question of control was still firmly on the countercultural. Seemingly in direct opposition to Savio's speech in 1964, many of the New Communalists that returned to the cities attempted to explore how computers could help control social systems. As James Harkin says of the ex-commune dwellers in his book Cyburbia: “The politics of the counterculture had long been eclipsed, but its central idea of bringing about direct communication between peers outside the reach of authority had survived intact.[...] The aim was to make the electronic ties that they had begun to hold in such high regard coalesce into a network and give rise to a thousand blooming new connections.”(2009: 80) Being positioned during a period of intense innovation, the synergy between this ideology and rapid advances in technological possibilities at the time led those inspired by the communes to look at the machine as a democratic communication tool, and perhaps still act on some of the ideas that were behind the countercultural movement in the first place.

Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook, writing in 1995 about the counterculture's post-commune move to Silicon Valley, called the new belief in technological-utopianism “the Californian Ideology”, and described its proponents as “advocates of an impeccably libertarian form of politics – they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” (1995) Born out of a heady mix of homebrew computer developers, anti-corporate attitudes, and the belief in social and environmentally-conscientious way of doing business, the Californian Ideology seemed to be a logical development of the various countercultural sub-movements. This utopian worldview doesn't remain entirely without criticism in Cameron and Barbrook's essay – as the counterculture was a group of splinter-movements, so too was the Californian Ideology. Summarising it as an “amalgamation of opposites”, they state how the technologically-augmented society subscribes to neither the New Right nor the New Left's vision of a utopia: “As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answer this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticising either of them.” (ibid.) Furthermore, the fact that the New Communalists had promoted an egalitarian society within communes that largely consisted of middle-class white Americans illustrates how, in practice, the ideology could be considered problematic. While cybernetics remained an important influence on the ex-communalists, their desire to use its theories to create egalitarian communities still seemed flawed.

It was the Californian Ideology that propelled much of the late 20th century's information technology advancements, producing software and hardware that could empower the regular citizens of the world to form international communication networks and share knowledge with each other. As the internet left the secretive world of military experimentation and penetrated the American domestic market in the 1990s, it seemed like the countercultural dream was being realised - albeit almost 30 years late. Cybernetics, again growing increasingly relevant as the web went mainstream, became a tool for organising and controlling the exponential growth of the networks. Concepts such as the network effect became extensions of the cybernetic vocabulary and generation-X buzzwords, appearing in articles in the hip American new media magazines that embodied the post-hippie spirit of the Californian Ideology.

The trend in extending the cybernetic metaphor into other avenues continued also, especially into management structures in corporate America where new styles were needed to match the new economy. Stewart Brand helped found the Global Business Network, encouraging companies to adopt a cybernetic approach to controlling their staff, while Kevin Kelley's book titled Out of Control became a bestseller in 1995, and urged a new style of management that would “relinquish control and let people organise themselves.” (Harkin, 2009: 83) Bill Gate's company Microsoft, from its humble beginnings in Silicon Valley in the late 1970s, now dominated the personal computer market, making him the richest man in the world along the way. The technology industry was booming, and while on the surface it certainly seemed that the utopian future that the counterculture had imagined was being realised, we can see the emergence of hierarchies similar to those which occurred in the communes.

The hippie concept of freedom was updated for the information age to mean the free move of capital: citizens should have the freedom to purchase the products that they desire in the new system of liberal capitalism. In practice, this meant that you were permitted to partake in the globalised egalitarian sharing of information as long as you had the means of access to a computer. In 1999, the US Department of Labour issued a pamphlet outlining the demographics of computer users in America, with the computer-ownership by income statistics being hardly surprising: “Almost two-thirds of the households in the top 20-percent income group own computers, as do almost half in the second highest income group.[...] Households in the lowest two income groups also had the lowest rate of computer ownership, with less than 1 in every 5 owning PCs in 1997. ” (US Dept. Labour, 1999: 2) This gap between the upper and lower classes was one aspect of the “digital divide”, and despite being fundamentally contrary to what many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley had believed, it seemed to be a non-issue for much of the big businesses. As Bill Gates admits in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2008: “We weren't focused on the needs of the neediest, [...] although low-cost personal computing certainly is a tool for drug discovery and things that have had this very pervasive effect, including the rise of the Internet.”(as quoted by Guth, 2008) In short, the familiar patterns of hierarchies and power that were present in the largely white middle-class communes had reappeared in the supposedly non-hierarchical system through certain members of society being priced-out of participation.

In Cyburbia, Harkin describes how as internet penetration rates and broadband speeds rapidly increased worldwide, cybernetic concepts were further incorporated into the web's infrastructure. Feedback became an integral part to the way communities developed in cyberspace: through social networking and media-sharing sites that were essentially made up entirely out of user-generated content, a new cultural shift took place. According to Harkin, “its promise was nothing less than to level hierarchies of all kinds, and to do so by tying people together with greater efficiency than ever before.” (2009: 100) He references the network effect with relation to Facebook's rising popularity in London – the number of potential connections between users rises exponentially with each new member of the network. During the summer of 2007, London's Facebook population doubled to almost 900,000 new members liking, tagging, uploading and writing on “walls.” (2009: 95) While many of Facebook's members may see the site as a non-hierarchical method of networked communication, in effect the most important hierarchy operates outside the user-level of the system: the power/control relationship between the users and the operators of the network itself.

In contemporary cyberculture, it is generally accepted that data is currency. The biggest private spaces of the internet offer free (or at least heavily subsidised) services in return for the user populating their servers with personal information, which can then be used to target them with content-relevant advertisements – one very commercially-successful feedback loop for the biggest e-companies. With companies such as Google dominating a diverse range of online services, from blogging, email, and social networking, to image and video hosting services, the internet seems less like the open and non-hierarchical space dreamt about by the counterculture in the 1960s/70s. To return to the previous quote by Adam Curtis in The Observer: “[The system] can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable.”(2011) While there are of course some popular web services that appear to offer an extension of the countercultural dream into 21st Century cyberspace, with the crowd-sourced encyclopedia Wikipedia being the obvious example, the internet has by and large become a commercialised space dominated by multi-national corporations – another media stream to facilitate the free flow of capital from one place to another.

Bibliography:

Barbrook, Richard and Cameron, Andy - The Californian Ideology (1995) accessed online 13/11/11 http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-main.html

Bureau of Labor Statistics Issues: Computer Ownership Up Sharply in the 1990s (Summary 99- 4 March, 1999) U.S. Deptartment of Labour. Accessed online 8/12/11 www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils31.pdf

Curtis, Adam: How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means (Sunday 29 May 2011 ) The Observer. Accessed online 1/12/11, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts

Guth, Robert A. Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism Appeared in The Wall Street Journal (Jan 24, 2008) Accessed online 12/12/12 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120113473219511791.html

Harkin, James - Cyburbia (2009) Little, Brown. University of Chicago Press, United States.

Turner, Fred From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), London

Wiener, Norbert Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1947) MIT Press, United States

Filmography: Curtis, Adam - All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

Ronson, Jon - Esc and Ctrl (2011) - documentary series produced for The Guardian