User:Dave Young/Trimester 1 Research
< User:Dave Young
Revision as of 16:23, 7 November 2011 by Dave Young (talk | contribs)
Points of Departure
Methods of information distribution > limiting information exchange across a network
Collateral listeners / Overhearing / Eavesdropping
Radio broadcasts > encryption > Number Stations
Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation
Control, Paranoia, and Technology
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
Adam Curtis documentary about "how humans have been colonised by technology." Adam Curtis has kindly made this available to watch online - find all three parts on thoughtmaybe.
Part 1
- Ayn Rand > The Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged > Rational, systematic blueprints for a new society. Free from political/religious control.
- Order without social control.
- Ayn Rand's theories greatly influenced tech-entrepreneurs in 70s > Heroic individuals > decentralisation of control systems.
- Fear of anarchy from decentralised control.
- Alan Greenspan > Encouraged a cybernetic approach to managing US economy in late 90s > deregulation, low interest rates > crash!
Part 2
- Arthur Tansley > Ecosystem theory > Inspired by Freud's concept of the brain as a machine > translated this idea to the natural world as a whole
- Ecosystems tend towards equilibrium
- Howard Odum > ecosystems as circuit schematics > studied environments and created self-regulated electronic circuits based on interactions between animals and vegetation and climate
- James Lovelock > Gaia Theory followed on from this > see The Revenge of Gaia
- Jay Forrester > Early Warning System > Cold War > Network of satellites that would "predict" an attack from Russia
- Jay Forrester > Club of Rome > Environmental Disaster in the early 70s > Forrester's crisis-aversion feedback system viewed humans as automatons, heavily criticised > his model predicted societal breakdown in the early 21st Century
- George van Dyne > Colorada ecosystem project > failure? > seemed to disprove eco-equilibrium theory
- The failure of the communes > Synergia > flat hierarchical system actually generated power/control relationships between commune members
- Richard Brautigan > All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace manifesto > viewed harmonious relationships between animals and machines
- Buckminster Fuller > The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth