The Power Shifts

In 1991 Loren Carpenter, leading computer engineer from California, created an experiment to project the early computer game Pong. Each half of the audience jointly control the paddle on their one side of the screen. If an individual helps up red on their paddle the computer sense would pick it up and the ball on the screen would go down. If they hold up green it went up. But people had to operate it together. Carpenter thought that in this experiment he created society, where there is no hierarchy, where everyone makes their own choice, without guidance, and because people were led by the machine there was a balance between stability and the order. This experiment created a subconscious consensus.¹⁷

Similar concept was also behind the Californian Ideology.¹⁸ It was a combination between radical individualism and utopian theories about computer systems. Their united vision that the world was one interconnected system, nations and states were irrelevant and politicians should not try to control the system, they should let it free to create a new kind of democracy and the internet is going to spread and create a different kind of global government.

The important person in this new power shift was Alan Greenspan, who was friend of Ayn Rand, became Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He persuaded Bill Clinton to let the markets grow, cut taxes, and to let the markets stabilise themselves with the help of computer technology, to create the New economy. This involved using computer models to predict risks and hedge against them, in accordance with the Californian Ideology. Like Rand economists of the 90's believed in a system of self-regulation, in this instance governed over by computers, which would minimise the chances of financial collapse by carefully monitoring investments and the rise and fall of global markets. It was a belief that ultimately led to a disastrous recession in Asia, and in 2008, a similar financial catastrophe in the West.¹⁹

People began to see that the computer networks and the global systems that they had created have not distributed power, they have just shifted it and concentrated it to the new forms. Some of the computer utopians from Silicon Valley were also beginning to realise that the world wide web was not a new kind of democracy but something much more complicated, where power was exercised over an individual in a new, very surprising way.

We are now living in very strange moment we know that the idea of market stability has failed. The Californian ideology’s promise that computers would liberate us from all the forms of political control and we would become Raynd's heroes and create our own destiny, turned into total opposite. We became hopeless components of a global system, a system that is controlled by rigid logic, that we are powerless to challenge or change. We moved from the idea of individualism and state of nature into self-stabilising network system and we treat it like existing world.

The Ecosystem of Machines

Sigmud Freud had an interesting theory that the human brain was actually an electrical machine. That all that we get from our senses creates a certain energy that flowed around networks inside of the brain. Just like electrical circles. Arthur Tansley, who was a pioneer in the science of ecology dived into Sigmund Freud’s theory. He became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks, ecosystems, which he believed were inherently stable and self-correcting, and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.²⁰

The ecology movement adopted this idea and viewed the natural world as systems. It explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops. Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network.²¹He is talking about how one can link the behaviour of machine and the behaviour of a human through mathematical formula and you if you can module this formula or predict this formula using computers then you end up in the world where humans and machines seem to be one. That we are all now part of universal system link together by informations.

The ecosystem At the end of 1968 group of computer pioneers gave up developing large main frames and instead they would create a way of linking small personal computers in networks. These pioneers believed that in the future the computer networks will allow you to create a society that was created in the communes but in a global scale. Everyone could be free as an individual, not dominated any longer by any old hierarchies or controlled politically. Instead they would be linked together in global system that would find its own natural order. It can do it through the feedback information between millions of people on their personal computers. By the late 1960s the idea of modern nature, the ecosystem, and cybernetics theories about computers had fused together. Part of it had come to an epic new vision of how to manage the world without the old corruption of power. It was an vision that seemed to be different from all past political attempts to change the world, because it was based on natural order.

Tord Bjork, the environmental activist, explained the trick of environmental movement. Claiming that you have something like nature and in nature you have a certain balance and we need a society to have the same balance. Then it becomes unquestionable because you cannot change nature and you cannot change society because society should be the same as nature.²²The concept of nature was needed to protect the system and lead. What began to rise up in 70s was the idea that we and everything else on the planet are connected together in complex webs and networks. What was beginning to disappear was the enlightenment idea that human beings are separate from the rest of nature and masters of their own destiny. Instead we started to see ourselves as components in the system and our duty was to help the system maintain its natural balance. What made this systems idea so powerful was that it did not seem to be based on any political ideology but on a scientific idea of organisation that mirrors the natural world.

But the new a generation of ecologist began to produce evidence that showed that eco system did not tend towards stability. But the very opposite was true. The nature far from seeking equilibrium was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. There was no stability. Hurricanes, tornados, storms or fires, you get disturbance but the nature never came back the same way it was. Disturbance comes along and it resets the system to something new. Dr. Steward Pickett said that the balance of nature is a total illusion and we hold to it so tightly in our culture. Contemporary ecology tells us that we live in very dynamic world and you have to replace the assumption of a balance of nature and you have to get rid of the myth. The scientific bases had fallen away but the ideologist vision of self- organising system continued to grow.

In the early part of this century the idea of self- organising network remerged in was seem In the early part of this century the idea of self- organising network remerged in was seem to be its original radical form. Beginning of 2003 a wave of a spontaneous revolutions ran through Asia and Europe. In each case hundreds and hundreds people floated to capitals of Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and they forced the old corrupt leaders from power. In all these cases no-one seemed to be in charge. The internet played the key role. It brought millions of people together to create revolutions that had no guiding ideology except to desire for self determination and for freedom. But as in all revolutions that new sense of freedom lasted only for a moment. What we often forget in the optimism of revolution was what it really happened in the original experiment of the communes.²³They all failed, lasted no longer that 3 years, some for less than 6 months. What made them fall apart was the very thing that was supposed to be vanished, power. People in communes discover that some people are more free than the others, strong personalities started to dominate the weaker members of the group but the rules of a self organising system refused to allow any organised opposition to it. The failure of the commune movement and the faith of the revolutions show the limitation of the self- organising model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forced by a human society, politics and power. The hippies took the ideal of the network society because they are disillusion with politics. They believed that this alternative way of ordering the world was good because it was based on the underline order of the nature but this was a fantasy. In reality what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines.

Now we are all disillusioned with politics and the machine organising principles became the ideology of our age. What we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in the system it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organising things even rebellions but it offers no idea of what comes next. And just like in the communes it leaves us helpless to those already imposed in the world.We moved from Rousseau idea of the essential state of nature towards artificial intelligence where we do not support the right of individuals but used them in the system as Zoe, bare life but we replace and govern them by machines. But what is the world we live in? The Internet seems to be a new world where we all play a role of citizens, we have our number, personal date, communication, entertainment and rights.