User:Dave Young/Trimester 1 Research

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 [the New Economy] in late 90s, then changed his mind > met with fierce opposition, backed down > then 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