All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts - full transcript
MUSIC: "Baby Love Child"
by Pizzicato Five
# When I see you, my love
# I see what's in your mind
# You own me, yes you do
# You don't need to tell me
# I know you love me most
# No-one else take my place
# You need me, yes you do
# For ever and ever
# We are in love
# Baby love child
# I take you so high
# Groovy love child
# Give me a kiss
# Baby love child
# Do it again... #
In the mass democracies of the West,
a new ideology has risen up.
We have come to believe that
the old hierarchies of power
can be replaced
by self-organising networks.
From internet utopianism,
to the global economic system,
and above all,
the ecosystems of the natural world.
Today we dream of systems that can
balance and stabilise themselves
without the intervention
of authoritarian power.
But in reality,
this is the dream of the machines.
It reflects how they are organised.
It has nothing to do with nature,
and as a model for human society
and for politics,
it is wholly inadequate in the face
of the powerful, dynamic forces
that really dominate
the world today.
This is the story of the rise of the
dream of the self-organising system
and the strange machine fantasy
of nature that underpins it.
CMOL is...
..is a... In a sense
it's a high-level language.
Very, very close to machine language,
time-coded machine language.
VOICE FADES OUT UNDER STATELY MUSIC
At the end of the First World War,
a young biologist called Arthur
Tansley had a frightening dream.
He dreamt he was in
an African village.
The natives
started to come towards him.
Then his wife appeared.
He picked up a rifle, aimed it
at her, and pulled the trigger.
Tansley wanted to know
what the dream meant,
so he started to study
the ideas of Sigmund Freud,
and he became fascinated.
In 1922, he even went to Vienna
to be analysed by Freud himself.
What caught Tansley's imagination
was an obscure part of
Freud's theory
that said the human brain
was actually an electrical machine.
That the sense data that came in
through the eyes and ears
created bursts of energy that flowed
around networks inside the brain,
just like electrical circuits.
Tansley was fascinated by this,
and he made an extraordinary
conceptual leap.
He decided that he could take
this model of the mind
and apply it
to the whole of the natural world.
He became convinced that
underneath the complexity of nature
were systems,
vast interconnected circuits
that linked all animals and plants,
through which energy flowed.
He invented a name for them.
He called them ecosystems.
Tansley's idea of the mind
was that of a network.
So you have energy going through
tubes into a new explosion,
a new explosion.
What would create this explosion
would be sense perception.
So these energy tubes would go out
in the modern mechanism
of the mind,
creating a network,
a system within the mind.
Now this he would transfer,
one-to-one, almost,
into his description
of the natural environment,
in which energy between species
and among the species
would constitute a system,
an ecosystem,
of energy flowing between
these different species.
So the grasshopper eating the grass
will then be energy transforming
through the tube
into the dune where the beetle
would do his or her job.
A very mechanical idea.
It's very mechanical indeed.
But Tansley went much further.
He said that if these
ecosystems were disturbed,
they would always try and return to
an original balanced state.
Which meant that they had
the ability to regulate
and stabilise themselves.
It was part of what Tansley called
The Great Universal Law
of Equilibrium.
All these systems, he wrote,
are constantly tending towards
positions of balance or equilibrium.
The idea that there was an
underlying balance of nature
went back thousands of years
in Western culture.
But it had always been a dream,
a vision of a hidden natural order.
What Tansley was saying was that
this might be scientifically true.
That from the English countryside
to the jungles of Africa,
there was an underlying mechanism
that regulated nature
as if it were a machine.
But it was only a hypothesis.
No-one knew
how the ecosystem worked.
The answer would not come from
the study of nature
but from a new kind of machine -
the computer.
LILTING BAROQUE-STYLE PIANO PLAYS
Jay Forrester studied electrical
engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
where he became one of the
early innovators in computers.
And in the 1950s, he built
America's early warning system.
It was a global network
of radar installations,
all linked to giant computers
in the United States.
Its aim was to create
a stable balance in the nuclear
stand-off of the Cold War.
Forrester was convinced that
the whole world, not just nature,
was composed of systems.
He believed that by building
his own man-made system,
the early warning network,
he had identified how
all systems stabilised themselves.
It was through a mechanism
called feedback.
What Forrester meant by this
was that every action we take
has consequences
that feed through the system
and then return to shape our future
behaviour in ways we cannot see.
But the computers could.
They had the power to analyse the
true consequences of human actions -
what Forrester called
feedback loops.
Most people
think of action as,
"Here's a problem,
I'll take action, and I'll solve it."
Straight line.
But that's not the system
in which we live.
There is a problem, we take action,
it may change things,
it gives us a new environment
for taking the next action
and changing things.
And so we live in these networks
of feedback loops,
that are controlling us and
those things that we interact with.
So we're just part of a system?
We're just part of a system.
That is anathema to many people
because they like to think of us
as people, as independent,
but basically they are driven
in most of their actions
by feedback loops,
which means physical systems,
electrical systems, social systems,
political systems, biological
systems, internal medicine,
medical systems of the body.
They are all fundamentally
networks of feedback loops.
Forrester was one of the leaders of
an ambitious new scientific movement
called cybernetics.
Cybernetics 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
a 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 computer's-eye view of the world,
and 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.
One of the leading cybernetic
theorists called Norbert Wiener
laid this out clearly in a book that
became the bible of the movement.
He called it
Control And Communication
In The Animal And The Machine.
If, as Norbert Wiener
and his team decided,
you can actually
link the behaviour of machines
and the behaviour of fleshy humans
through mathematical formulae,
and if you can model and predict
those formulae using computers,
then you end up in a world where
humans and machines seem to be one.
They can glimpse the
deep cybernetic truth,
one in which natural,
mechanical and social systems
are seen as one another.
Humans linked together
in a man-machines system.
We are all now part of
a universal system
linked together by information.
And cybernetics transformed
the idea of the ecosystem
because it seemed to explain how
ecosystems stabilised themselves.
They did it through feedback.
It would lead ecology to rise up
and become one of the dominant
sciences of the 20th century.
The key figures
were two American ecologists.
They were brothers called
Howard and Eugene Odum.
Howard Odum took cybernetics
and used it as a tool to analyse
the underlying structure of nature.
In the 1950s he travelled 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 that showed
how energy flowed round the system
between all the animals
and the plants.
Odum even built
real electrical circuits
to represent the environments
and he used them to adjust the
feedback levels in the system.
Odum really believed that you could
actually make a model of that system
and monitor and watch
how all the parts were working.
You could decide
when you had to intervene,
when it was...when the feedbacks
weren't sufficient,
so that they come back
to some equilibrium,
some stable functioning.
When I visited him in the middle '80s
and we started talking about
his own history,
he went beside his desk
and he pulled out
one of these electrical
circuit boards from the middle '50s.
Howard Odum's brother Eugene
then 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.
And Tansley's machine hypothesis
became a scientific certainty.
But to make their theory work,
what the Odum brothers had done
was distort the scientific method.
They had taken a metaphor, that
the ecosystem worked like a machine.
But then, instead of looking
at the data they had gathered
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 pared it down
so it would fit with the equations
and the circuits they had drawn.
As they did this,
it stopped being a metaphor
and became what seemed to be
a scientific description of reality.
One of Howard Odum's assistants
later wrote
that what they were really doing
was creating a machine-like fantasy
of stability.
Driven by the desire for prestige,
he said,
biological reality disappeared.
Organisms were expected to act
mechanically, in predicable ways.
Animals became robots,
and the ideas were never presented
as hypotheses to be tested.
When I first went into ecology,
we really did believe that nature
had to have a fixed stability,
it had to be stable.
That's what we were taught,
the miraculous thing about nature was
it was stable
against all these problems.
So we believed
there was a balance of nature.
The balance of nature idea
comes from two things.
Ancient Western mythology
and religious beliefs,
and also from the machine age.
The actual mathematics that came out
of it was mathematics of machinery.
Nature should have that
same kind of mechanical steady state,
which would fit in with
this balance of nature idea,
that if you left nature alone,
it would run like
a perfectly-oiled piston engine.
This fusion of cybernetics and
ecology was going to lead to far
more than just a new idea of nature,
for out of it was about to come
a new organising principle
for human society as well.
It would be a vision
of a new kind of world,
one without the authoritarian
exercise of power,
and the old political hierarchies.
A vision that was different
from past ideologies,
because it mirrored
how order was created in nature.
The man behind it
was a utopian visionary
who had worked as an engineer
in the US military.
He was called Buckminster Fuller.
"I will make my life an experiment,"
he said,
"to search for the principles
that govern the universe."
Fuller had invented
a radically new kind of structure
that was based on the underlying
system of order in nature.
It was called a geodesic dome.
It was very simple
but incredibly strong.
Giant geodesic domes were built
to house the radar installations
for America's early warning system
in the Arctic.
These are what we call
geodesic radons.
They are designed to protect very
powerful and important apparatus
from the great storms of nature.
We think of structures
as being something very powerful,
but these are very delicate.
Yet they've been through about
10 years
of the most formidable conditions
in the Arctic
that any structures
have ever had to stand.
But I'm not a...a dome salesman,
I'm an explorer in structures.
I'm interested in the
fundamental principles by which
nature holds her shapes together.
Fuller's geodesic domes
imitated the idea of the ecosystem.
Each tiny strut was weak,
but when thousands were joined
to form a giant interconnecting web,
they became strong and stable.
Fuller believed that this principle
of copying nature could be applied
not just to structures,
but to creating new systems
to manage societies.
But in order to do this,
Fuller realised that there would
have to be a conceptual shift
in the way human beings
saw 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 help design a closed system
for the astronauts inside the cabin.
It was constantly monitored
by computers to keep it
in perfect balance.
And in 1964, Fuller wrote a
manifesto
called The Operating Manual
For Spaceship Earth.
It said that the world should be
seen as one giant spaceship
and that all human beings should
try and manage that global system
so it was kept in a perfect balance,
just like the tiny cabin
of the spacecraft.
He would say in his lectures, like,
"You guys wonder what it's like to be
an astronaut. Well, I can tell you.
"You are an astronaut.
"We're all astronauts
on board Spaceship Earth."
So here's the image of the Earth
suddenly being like a spaceship,
like a closed ecosystem,
in which we live in strict balance.
Notice that suddenly
you are not in the centre any more.
The spaceship is in the centre.
Meaning that you start de-emphasising
the importance of
the individual human being
because you're concerned about
the welfare of the system,
not the individual.
There was a threat, though,
to this new vision, Fuller said.
It was politicians,
because politicians believed that
they could control the system.
And that always led to
struggles for power,
and out of that came wars.
Instead, the system
should be allowed to find
its own natural order
and there would be no need for
hierarchies and power any longer.
If man is going to stay on board
our Spaceship Earth,
it can't be done by politics
because politics is so inadequate.
It cannot be commanded by politics
because a politician
doesn't know about such a thing.
He has to go on what have you, which
is the kind of design he now has.
All he can do is give you war.
And Fuller's ideas caught the
imagination of a generation
who had become disillusioned
with politics.
The counterculture had emerged
after the student movement
had failed to change
the structure of power in America.
Between 1967 and 1971,
over half a million Americans
left the cities
and set out to create thousands
of experimental communities.
It was one of the biggest migrations
in American history.
They used Buckminster Fuller's
geodesic domes
to build their new homes,
but more than that,
they adopted his cybernetic ideas
as their organising principle.
The communes deliberately had no
hierarchy of control or authority.
Instead, the central idea was that
everyone should see themselves
as part of a system,
a distributed network
that could stabilise itself
just like the ecosystems in nature.
In one of the most influential
communes called Synergia,
this cybernetic theory
was called ecotechnics.
We were trying to create a society
based on understanding ecosystems.
A society of inter-relationship
and balance.
A man-machine biological system
working in combination.
That was sort of our ideal
with what we called ecotechnics.
The idea of the ecotechnics is simply
that you are a part of the system,
in which there would be
less if not no hierarchy at all.
In the communes, anything that
smacked of politics was forbidden.
No coalitions or alliances with
others in the group were permitted.
Instead, individuals dealt with each
other one-to-one in group sessions
in which they told each other how
they were feeling about each other.
I don't know if I want you
to reach me.
Because I'm afraid.
I'd like you to try to reach me.
I don't know that
I'd like you to reach me.
They remained free individuals,
yet at the same time
through this system of feedback,
the group would be stable.
We didn't use the word system,
but we very much thought of
the whole group, of ourselves,
as all connected.
There was a group sense,
there was a group feeling.
That was our whole purpose,
was to be...
fully connected to each other
and to have this group sense
of the organism of many who act as
one. That's part of what it meant.
Switch.
Switch.
Switch, switch, switch, switch.
'It would be like a dance where we're
creating a new kind of society,
'freeing each person
to be fully themselves in the group,
'but we are all affecting each other
at all times,
'like an organism of many
who act as one.'
And there was another group
of visionaries in California
who believed the communes
were only a prototype
for a self-organising society
built on a global scale.
They were the engineers who
were inventing the new computer
technologies on the west coast.
The way they were going to develop
these technologies
would be shaped by this vision
of a natural order
that combined humans and machines.
At the end of 1968,
a group of computer pioneers
took a conscious decision.
They would give up
developing large mainframes.
Instead, they would create
a way of linking small
personal computers in networks.
..when I get introduced.
The fact that I'm going to come to
you mostly through this medium here
for the rest of the show...
In a dramatic demonstration,
they showed how this could be done.
It included all the necessary
elements, even the computer mouse.
..the devices that I'm using.
I use three,
and they're not all centred.
You have a pointing device called
a mouse,
a standard keyboard,
and special key set we have here.
Now, computer,
do the automatic switching
that will bring in a camera.
Hi, Bill. That's great.
Now we're connected. Audio. You can
see my work, you can point at it.
I can see your face and we can talk.
These pioneers believed that
in the future,
computer networks would allow you
to create the very kind of society
that was being developed in
the communes but on a global scale.
Everyone could be free
as individuals, no longer dominated
by old hierarchies,
or controlled politically.
Instead, they would be linked
together in a global system
that would find
its own natural order.
It would do it through the feedback
of information
between millions of people
on their personal computers.
The demonstration was filmed by
one of the prophets of this vision.
He was a leader of the commune
movement called Stewart Brand.
They felt like computers
had liberated them
and they were going to use
computers.
They were going to enable computers
to liberate society,
civilisation, every-damn-body.
I can have file control and I've
already accepted file referencing.
'Their computers would
save the world. These guys
would make sure they could.
'It was going to be a power to
the people in a very direct sense.'
That was an early iteration
of the internet,
and of Google and all of that.
This was a vast network,
that was self-correcting.
By the late 1960s, what had happened
was that our modern idea of nature,
the ecosystem, and cybernetic
theories about computers,
had fused together.
Out of it had come an epic new
vision of how to manage the world
without the old corruption of power.
It was a vision that seemed to be
different
from all past political attempts
to change the world
because it was based on
the natural order.
In 1967, a young writer called
Richard Brautigan crystallised this.
One morning he walked through
the streets of San Francisco
handing out a manifesto.
It described a future world
held in a balanced equilibrium
by the fusion
of nature and computers.
It was called All Watched Over
By Machines of Loving Grace.
'I like to think -
'and the sooner the better -
of a cybernetic meadow
'where mammals
and computers live together
'in mutually programming harmony
like pure water touching clear sky.
'I like to think -
right now, please -
'of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics,
'where deer stroll peacefully
past computers as if they were
flowers with spinning blossoms.
'I like to think - it has to be -
'of a cybernetic ecology where we are
free of our labours
'and join back to nature, returned to
our mammal brothers and sisters
'and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.'
And then the world was hit by
a new kind of crisis.
It was a crisis
that could not be solved
by the old hierarchies of power
or by national governments.
As a result, the idea of the
world as a self-regulating system
was going to move to centre stage.
By the early 1970s,
it was clear that there was
a global environmental crisis.
But it was also clear that
politicians had no idea
how to deal with it.
The crisis baffled them because
of its horrifying complexity.
It crossed national boundaries
and involved the whole of nature.
But then a man emerged who said
he knew how to save the world
from this disaster.
He was the cybernetic scientist
who had built America's early
warning system, Jay Forrester.
By now, Forrester had become
a powerful figure
because he used his computers
to build models of corporations
and even whole cities as systems.
Then Forrester became involved
with a think tank
called the Club of Rome.
They were a group of international
businessmen and technocrats
who were trying to find a way of
solving the environmental crisis.
At a meeting in Switzerland,
Forrester told them
that the only way to do this
was to look at the world
as an entire cybernetic system.
And he would build a model that
would do just that in his computer.
Our problem is the big problem.
Our problem is a hard one and you're
not dealing with the hard problem.
And that hard problem was?
The world.
So on the way back from Switzerland,
I sketched out
the first sketch of such a system,
which was this.
This is a picture
of that first sketch
of the world in terms of
population, resources,
capital investment in industry,
investment in agriculture, and the
accumulated pollution in the world.
All of these lines
here are the feedback loops,
the many feedback loops.
Those feedback loops are spread
all through the model,
as you can see, by the various lines
that are connecting things here.
Back in America, Forrester set up
a team of systems theorists.
They built a computer model
of the world.
The team designed it
as a giant cybernetic system
in which all known data
about population growth,
industrial production,
food and agriculture,
natural resources and pollution
were all fed in.
The team then ran the model
and what it predicted
was an imminent global collapse.
And when you ran that model,
what did it show?
It showed that in all likelihood,
population would overshoot
the carrying capacity of the world,
and then you would have a collapse
of population back to a lower level,
and that the standard of living
would decline through all that period
in a serious way.
The model based on current policies
lead essentially to disaster.
Disease, crowding, wars,
atomic bombs.
It was pessimistic, wasn't it?
Well, I considered myself
an optimist.
The Club of Rome then held a press
conference where they announced that
the computer had predicted that
the world was heading for disaster.
From a very large number
of computer runs
making various assumptions,
adopting various maxima and minima,
there is in fact a general forecast
of a breakdown of world society
in the first decades
of the next century.
We regard the MIT report
as an extraordinarily important
initial pioneering effort.
It's opening up
a great new field of research,
research in the world as a system.
The Club of Rome published a book
called The Limits To Growth,
which laid out
Forrester's world model
and its frightening conclusions.
It was a bestseller,
and it transformed the debate
about the environment.
Because Forrester's model offered
a way of conceptualising the problem
that seemed to be scientific
and therefore neutral.
His vision of the world
as one interconnected system
seemed to transcend politics
and the petty interests of nations.
Then in Stockholm in 1972,
the United Nations held a conference
for the first time ever
on the world environmental crisis.
The international bureaucrats
who ran it
turned to this idea of the world
as a system
to provide the conceptual framework.
The world needed to be managed
in a new non-political way
to avoid the threat
of global collapse.
This is the beginning of a debate.
Nobody's decided what the limits are.
One can question whether it's 2010
when we all collapse or 2050
when we all collapse, but what is
absolutely certain is,
you cannot run a planetary society
on the total irresponsible
sovereignty of 120 different
governments. It simply can't be done.
Forrester's apocalyptic predictions
dominated the conference.
But he also said that his
computer model showed the only way
of avoiding that disaster.
World governments, he said,
should give up on any idea
of promoting continual growth.
Instead they should create a new
kind of steady state for the world.
Their job was now to hold the world
system in a balanced equilibrium
to avoid the collapse.
Forrester was arguing for
a fundamental shift in the role
of politics and politicians.
They should give up
trying to change the world,
and instead,
the aim of politics should now be
to manage the existing system -
to hold it in equilibrium.
The idea of growth
is in contrast to the idea
of equilibrium,
where you're maintaining
a constant or equilibrium level
of population and enough industrial
activity to sustain that population,
which could lead to a much more
desirable steady state equilibrium,
a man-made equilibrium of our choice,
and live within
the boundaries set by the world,
by the Earth,
by the capacity of the Earth.
Which was a stable world?
Which would be a stable, ongoing one.
But large sections
of the environmental movement
were opposed to this idea
and they held protests
outside the conference.
They said that the idea of
enforcing stability on the world
was not neutral,
that the Limits To 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
they hadn't before.
That led to only two choices.
You either preserve the existing
system in a steady state
or face catastrophe.
And this, the protestors argued,
suited those who wanted to maintain
the status quo -
those in power.
This argument had happened before,
back in the 1930s,
at the very moment when
Britain's imperial power was waning.
In 1935, Arthur Tansley, who
invented the idea of the ecosystem,
accused one of the most powerful men
in the British Empire
of abusing ecological ideas.
He was Field Marshal Smuts,
who was the autocratic ruler
of South Africa.
Smuts used ecological ideas
to develop a philosophy
he called holism.
Holism said that the whole world
was one giant organic system
in which everything
had its natural place.
So long as everyone stayed
in their proper place,
this global system would be stable.
Smuts had a vision
of a new global world order
where artificial distinctions
like nations would disappear,
and his model for this world system
was the British Empire.
And it would be managed by the white
European races
because that was their natural place
in the whole.
General Smuts
actually coined the word holism.
Every human being
would have its place within society,
every animal would have its place
in the environment,
and every other species -
grass, grasshoppers, you name it -
would have their place
in the environment,
struggling towards fulfilling their
wholeness in the greater whole.
'It is an order of nature
and an order of society
which celebrates equilibrium.
'It's a static world,
'and holism became a tool to make
the British Empire more stable.'
The idea that ecosystem theories,
theories of equilibrium etc,
that these are neutral, is bogus.
They are highly politically charged.
What Smuts was doing showed
how easily scientific ideas
about nature and natural equilibrium
could be used by those in power
to maintain the status quo.
Tansley hated this, and he publicly
accused Smuts of what he called
"the abuse
of vegetational concepts."
Now 40 years later, the protestors
in Stockholm were accusing Forrester
of doing the same.
The real role of the
environmental movement, they said,
was not to hold the world stable
but to struggle to change it.
Because it was the greed of
the Western elites that was causing
the environmental crisis.
The movement, they claimed,
was being hijacked
by right-wing think tanks
and Cold War technocrats
who were using the balance of nature
as a political trick.
The trick is claiming that
you have something as nature.
"In nature you have this balance
"and we need a society
to have the same balance."
And then...
it becomes unquestionable,
because you cannot change nature.
And thus you cannot change society,
because society should be
the same as nature.
So it's a sort of
intellectual trick.
They needed this concept of the
balanced nature
to protect the elite
and to protect the system.
But the protests were in vain,
because Forrester's
cybernetic vision of the world
as one interconnected system
now began to penetrate
deep into the public imagination.
What began to rise up in the 1970s
was the idea that we,
and everything else on the planet,
are connected together
in complex webs and networks.
Out of that were now going to come
epic visions of connectivity,
like the Gaia theory, and utopian
ideas about the worldwide web
and the global economic system.
Underlying this was
a profound shift.
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 began see ourselves
as components, cogs in a system,
and our duty was to help that system
maintain its natural balance.
It's quite clear the entire Earth has
to be treated as a spaceship,
run as a spaceship,
planned as a spaceship.
We're all part of the web of life
and the sooner man fully
appreciates this, the better.
This image, our home, our Earth,
one people in one world.
What we've really got to do is manage
the entire planet as a single system.
Well, ecology
is the balance of nature.
It's the relationship between me,
the plants and animals,
and the world in general.
Now the problem is totally global,
which is going to mean running the
entire planet as a single system.
Without upsetting the natural
balances that are there.
Ecology, yes.
That's what I'm talking about.
TAPE SLOWS DOWN
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 organisation that
mirrored the natural world.
But at precisely this moment
in the mid-1970s, the science that
supported the 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 towards stability,
that the very opposite was true,
that nature, far from seeking
equilibrium, was always in a state
of dynamic and unpredictable change.
Ecologists really thought that
we were dealing with a stable world.
You didn't question it.
It was just like the air. You didn't?
You didn't question it at all.
Now the really remarkable thing is
when people began to find out that
that might have some chinks in it,
that that might not be right,
people were really almost
viscerally upset.
Ecologists, many ecologists,
were almost viscerally upset
because it offended that very
comfortable idea that nature
was stable.
HOWLING
Ecologists began to revisit
environments that were supposed
to be models of stability.
One ecologist called Daniel Botkin
travelled to a remote island in
the Great Lakes called Ile Royale.
In theory, the populations of
moose and wolves were supposed
to live in a stable balance.
But when Botkin researched the
history of the two populations,
he discovered that in reality
they were constantly changing.
In theory, the wolves
controlled the moose,
and the moose and the wolves
and vegetation all lived together
in this miraculous system.
We went out
to try to figure out how could this
beautiful system be steady?
Once I got out there
and started to look at
the historic information about it,
it was all about changes -
everything was always changing, it
wasn't what it was supposed to be.
When you looked at the populations
of the moose and wolves,
you saw nothing but change.
They just fluctuated.
You can still say, "Maybe they're
on their way to a steady state,"
but then you can go back and look
at the history of the vegetation.
Trees will tell us their own story
and the soil with its pollen
tells you more of the story,
so you can reconstruct centuries
of history from forests.
When you looked at that,
you saw nothing but change.
As a result of this, ecology started
to look at the history of ecosystems
and what they discovered
began to undermine the very
foundations of the science.
The theory said that when
ecosystems were disturbed
by storms or fires or floods,
they would always try to return
to their original balanced state.
But study after study showed that
the very opposite was true,
that after the disturbances, the
plants and animals would recombine
in radically different ways.
The history of nature
was full of radical dislocations
and unpredictable change.
There was no stable pattern.
Big wind storms,
hurricanes,
tornadoes,
fires.
You get a disturbance, the forest
doesn't come back the way it was.
Disturbance comes along
and it resets the system
to something new.
What we were doing was to challenge
the basic assumptions of ecology,
that the balance of nature
was something that
guided ecological systems.
But even as this was happening,
a huge experiment began that aimed
to prove convincingly
how stability
was maintained in ecosystems.
An ecologist called George Van Dyne
set out to create a computer model
of the grasslands that
stretched across Colorado.
All the animals, insects, plants
and the systems that linked them
were going to be recreated
inside a computer.
Van Dyne wanted to finally show
how feedback worked in nature.
What George Van Dyne really wanted
to do was take this universe
that you see in front of you,
this grassland landscape,
and be able to
represent it in the computer,
to have a virtual grassland.
It's an act of substantial arrogance
to say that I think that I can devise
a virtual ecosystem
and capture it inside this computer,
I think. That's a good...
It was a great idea.
Van Dyne hired dozens of researchers
to begin collecting data
on everything that lived
in the grasslands
AND what was underneath in the soil.
They built a machine that travelled
across hundreds of square miles,
hoovering up insects
and small mammals.
These were then opened up
to find out what they had eaten.
Other researchers followed larger
animals to find out in minute detail
what they were eating.
We had a graduate student who would
follow the pronghorn, the antelope.
He could walk along beside him
and watch what they ate.
Every time they took a bite
of his plant, he would record
on his tape recorder,
"One bite of blue grama,
one bite of sphaeralcea."
Two bites of artemisia,
three inches tall without flower.
Two more bites of artemisia.
Six bites of kosha without flower.
Three bites of blue grama,
two inches tall without flower.
Sometimes they would take a bite.
He couldn't tell what it was,
so he would stop, open the animal's
mouth, reach in, pull it out,
look at it, put it back and go on.
And they put a hole
in the side of the bison
where you could reach in and sample
what the bison had been eating,
look at it under a microscope.
Then you'd weigh each
little separate pile
and you'd enter it in a data sheet.
We'd give it to Dave
who was the data manager
and he would get one
of his minions to punch it on
an IBM card, an 80 column IBM card,
and that would be read
into the computer
and stored on magnetic tape.
Let's take a look at the reading
cycle and see how we're doing.
George Van Dyne then used
all the data to construct a vast,
intricate model
that simulated how all the different
elements of the system -
the plants and animals - interacted.
Every species had its own sub-model
that then was linked through
feedback loops
to other species
and their sub-models.
This grasshopper sub-model tells us
what's going on with grasshoppers.
There's predators down here.
At this point,
it's just an unspecified thing.
What that means is that there
was another sub-model
for birds, for small mammals
and other potential predators
of grasshoppers.
So there was another
sub-model that was simulating
the populations of, let's say,
lark buntings all the time,
which is one of the predators
on the grasshoppers.
That sub-model then feeds
that information to this sub-model,
which uses Sam's equation
to predict the death rate of
grasshopper eggs for that day.
But when George Van Dyne ran
the model, what happened
seemed to make no sense.
No stable underlying
pattern emerged.
Van Dyne was convinced that all
the model needed was more data
and he worked feverishly, sometimes
all night, putting more and more
information into the computer model.
But in fact, he was just
making the problem worse.
The ecosystem theory had worked for
previous ecologists because they
had ruthlessly simplified nature.
What Van Dyne was really doing
with his mountains of data
was recreating the real
chaotic instability of nature
inside his computer.
In 1981, Van Dyne died
of a heart attack at the age of 48
and the project was closed down.
The collapse of his experiment
marked the end of the systems theory
which had driven the science
of ecology for 50 years,
the theory that somewhere in nature
is an ultimate order,
a balanced equilibrium.
The balance of nature is an illusion
and we hold on to it
so tightly in our culture.
That is completely counter to
what contemporary ecology tells us.
Contemporary ecology says that we
live in a very dynamic world.
We have to replace that assumption
of the balance of nature.
You have to discard the myth.
The scientific basis
had fallen away,
but the idealistic vision of
the self-organising system
continued to grow.
The reason
was that in an age of mass democracy
where the individual was sacrosanct
and politics discredited and
distrusted, it offered the promise
of a new egalitarian world order.
SHOUTING AND YELLING
So this is the situation here,
incredible scenes.
Parliament in the hands of
these opposition supporters.
The MPs fled so quickly that they
even left their papers behind.
In the early part of this century,
the idea of the self-organising
network re-emerged
in what seemed to be
its original radical form.
Beginning in 2003,
a wave of spontaneous revolution
swept through Asia and Europe.
In each case, hundreds of thousands
of people flooded into the capitals
of Georgia, the Ukraine
and Kyrgyzstan
and they forced the old
corrupt leaders from power.
In all these cases,
no-one seemed to be in charge.
But then, journalists discovered
that the internet
had played a key role.
It had brought millions of people
together to create revolutions
that had no guiding ideology
except a desire for
self-determination and for freedom.
Tonight, well, I feel really sort
of powerful and happy.
We did what we wanted.
This is our freedom.
Now, computer,
do the automatic switching
that will bring in a camera.
Hi, Bill.
That's great. Now we're connected.
It seemed to be the triumph
of the vision that had begun
with the computer utopians
in California in the 1960s.
They had dreamt of a time when
interconnected webs of computers
would allow individuals to create
new non-hierarchical societies,
just like in the commune
experiments, but on a global scale.
Now that dream seemed
to be really coming true.
In 2009, Twitter and Facebook
appeared to play a key role
in organising the protests in Iran.
There was a lot of excitement
in the ability of individuals in Iran
to connect with a global audience
and with their peers inside Iran
to build a political consciousness
in support of democracy.
It represents the emergence of a
completely new information ecosystem.
But in all the revolutions,
that new sense of freedom
lasted only for a moment.
In the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych,
the man who was ousted,
is back in power
and has started to dismantle
democratic institutions.
In Kyrgyzstan,
the new president fled
because of accusations of corruption
and the country is torn apart
by ethnic clashes.
And Georgia has now fallen in
the world index of press freedom.
At the time of the revolution,
it was 73rd.
It is now 99th.
What had been forgotten in
the optimism about the revolutions
was 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.
And what tore them all apart
was the very thing that was supposed
to have been banished - power.
The commune members
discovered that some people
were more free than others.
Strong personalities came to
dominate the weaker members of
the group,
but the rules
of the self-organising system
refused to allow any organised
opposition to this oppression.
The original idea was
very positive indeed.
It was to create
an egalitarian society
in which everyone would both be free
to be themselves
and also be able to contribute to the
group in a really positive way.
But the very rules that kind of set
up this egalitarian group
resulted in the opposite
of the dream.
They resulted in creating
a hierarchical structure
in which some could be
dominant over others
because everyone is not equally
powerful in their voice against one
other person.
In the communes, what were supposed
to be systems of negotiations
between equal individuals
often turned into vicious bullying.
In practice, these would be
20 and 30 minute hazing sessions
that were, um...quite awful
to experience
and usually were met by silence
with the rest of one's peers,
so there wasn't any, "Hey, lay off.
He's an OK guy,"
or anything like that.
There were no supportive comments.
The rule was "travel in your
own country", which means
"shut up, listen and observe".
There was fear, actually,
because the people who were more
dominating and had more power
could make you ...
There was anger.
There was constantly a background
of fear in the house.
It was like a virus running
in the background, so that...
like Spyware.
You know it's there, but you
don't know how to get rid of it.
The failure of the commune movement
and the fate of the revolutions
show the limitations of
the self-organising model.
It cannot deal with the central
dynamic forces of human society -
politics and power.
The hippies took up the idea of
a network society because they
were disillusioned with politics.
They believed that this alternative
way of ordering the world was good
because it was based
on the underlying order of 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, in our age, we are all
disillusioned with politics
and this machine organising
principle has risen up to become
the ideology of our age.
But what we are discovering
is that if we see ourselves as
components in a system,
that it is very difficult
to change the world.
It is a very good way of
organising things, even rebellions,
but it offers no ideas
about what comes next.
And just like in the communes,
it leaves us helpless in the face of
those already in power in the world.
Next week's programme will show how
we have reconciled ourselves to
this voluntary sacrifice of power
by coming to believe
that WE are nothing more
than machines ourselves.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
by Pizzicato Five
# When I see you, my love
# I see what's in your mind
# You own me, yes you do
# You don't need to tell me
# I know you love me most
# No-one else take my place
# You need me, yes you do
# For ever and ever
# We are in love
# Baby love child
# I take you so high
# Groovy love child
# Give me a kiss
# Baby love child
# Do it again... #
In the mass democracies of the West,
a new ideology has risen up.
We have come to believe that
the old hierarchies of power
can be replaced
by self-organising networks.
From internet utopianism,
to the global economic system,
and above all,
the ecosystems of the natural world.
Today we dream of systems that can
balance and stabilise themselves
without the intervention
of authoritarian power.
But in reality,
this is the dream of the machines.
It reflects how they are organised.
It has nothing to do with nature,
and as a model for human society
and for politics,
it is wholly inadequate in the face
of the powerful, dynamic forces
that really dominate
the world today.
This is the story of the rise of the
dream of the self-organising system
and the strange machine fantasy
of nature that underpins it.
CMOL is...
..is a... In a sense
it's a high-level language.
Very, very close to machine language,
time-coded machine language.
VOICE FADES OUT UNDER STATELY MUSIC
At the end of the First World War,
a young biologist called Arthur
Tansley had a frightening dream.
He dreamt he was in
an African village.
The natives
started to come towards him.
Then his wife appeared.
He picked up a rifle, aimed it
at her, and pulled the trigger.
Tansley wanted to know
what the dream meant,
so he started to study
the ideas of Sigmund Freud,
and he became fascinated.
In 1922, he even went to Vienna
to be analysed by Freud himself.
What caught Tansley's imagination
was an obscure part of
Freud's theory
that said the human brain
was actually an electrical machine.
That the sense data that came in
through the eyes and ears
created bursts of energy that flowed
around networks inside the brain,
just like electrical circuits.
Tansley was fascinated by this,
and he made an extraordinary
conceptual leap.
He decided that he could take
this model of the mind
and apply it
to the whole of the natural world.
He became convinced that
underneath the complexity of nature
were systems,
vast interconnected circuits
that linked all animals and plants,
through which energy flowed.
He invented a name for them.
He called them ecosystems.
Tansley's idea of the mind
was that of a network.
So you have energy going through
tubes into a new explosion,
a new explosion.
What would create this explosion
would be sense perception.
So these energy tubes would go out
in the modern mechanism
of the mind,
creating a network,
a system within the mind.
Now this he would transfer,
one-to-one, almost,
into his description
of the natural environment,
in which energy between species
and among the species
would constitute a system,
an ecosystem,
of energy flowing between
these different species.
So the grasshopper eating the grass
will then be energy transforming
through the tube
into the dune where the beetle
would do his or her job.
A very mechanical idea.
It's very mechanical indeed.
But Tansley went much further.
He said that if these
ecosystems were disturbed,
they would always try and return to
an original balanced state.
Which meant that they had
the ability to regulate
and stabilise themselves.
It was part of what Tansley called
The Great Universal Law
of Equilibrium.
All these systems, he wrote,
are constantly tending towards
positions of balance or equilibrium.
The idea that there was an
underlying balance of nature
went back thousands of years
in Western culture.
But it had always been a dream,
a vision of a hidden natural order.
What Tansley was saying was that
this might be scientifically true.
That from the English countryside
to the jungles of Africa,
there was an underlying mechanism
that regulated nature
as if it were a machine.
But it was only a hypothesis.
No-one knew
how the ecosystem worked.
The answer would not come from
the study of nature
but from a new kind of machine -
the computer.
LILTING BAROQUE-STYLE PIANO PLAYS
Jay Forrester studied electrical
engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
where he became one of the
early innovators in computers.
And in the 1950s, he built
America's early warning system.
It was a global network
of radar installations,
all linked to giant computers
in the United States.
Its aim was to create
a stable balance in the nuclear
stand-off of the Cold War.
Forrester was convinced that
the whole world, not just nature,
was composed of systems.
He believed that by building
his own man-made system,
the early warning network,
he had identified how
all systems stabilised themselves.
It was through a mechanism
called feedback.
What Forrester meant by this
was that every action we take
has consequences
that feed through the system
and then return to shape our future
behaviour in ways we cannot see.
But the computers could.
They had the power to analyse the
true consequences of human actions -
what Forrester called
feedback loops.
Most people
think of action as,
"Here's a problem,
I'll take action, and I'll solve it."
Straight line.
But that's not the system
in which we live.
There is a problem, we take action,
it may change things,
it gives us a new environment
for taking the next action
and changing things.
And so we live in these networks
of feedback loops,
that are controlling us and
those things that we interact with.
So we're just part of a system?
We're just part of a system.
That is anathema to many people
because they like to think of us
as people, as independent,
but basically they are driven
in most of their actions
by feedback loops,
which means physical systems,
electrical systems, social systems,
political systems, biological
systems, internal medicine,
medical systems of the body.
They are all fundamentally
networks of feedback loops.
Forrester was one of the leaders of
an ambitious new scientific movement
called cybernetics.
Cybernetics 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
a 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 computer's-eye view of the world,
and 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.
One of the leading cybernetic
theorists called Norbert Wiener
laid this out clearly in a book that
became the bible of the movement.
He called it
Control And Communication
In The Animal And The Machine.
If, as Norbert Wiener
and his team decided,
you can actually
link the behaviour of machines
and the behaviour of fleshy humans
through mathematical formulae,
and if you can model and predict
those formulae using computers,
then you end up in a world where
humans and machines seem to be one.
They can glimpse the
deep cybernetic truth,
one in which natural,
mechanical and social systems
are seen as one another.
Humans linked together
in a man-machines system.
We are all now part of
a universal system
linked together by information.
And cybernetics transformed
the idea of the ecosystem
because it seemed to explain how
ecosystems stabilised themselves.
They did it through feedback.
It would lead ecology to rise up
and become one of the dominant
sciences of the 20th century.
The key figures
were two American ecologists.
They were brothers called
Howard and Eugene Odum.
Howard Odum took cybernetics
and used it as a tool to analyse
the underlying structure of nature.
In the 1950s he travelled 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 that showed
how energy flowed round the system
between all the animals
and the plants.
Odum even built
real electrical circuits
to represent the environments
and he used them to adjust the
feedback levels in the system.
Odum really believed that you could
actually make a model of that system
and monitor and watch
how all the parts were working.
You could decide
when you had to intervene,
when it was...when the feedbacks
weren't sufficient,
so that they come back
to some equilibrium,
some stable functioning.
When I visited him in the middle '80s
and we started talking about
his own history,
he went beside his desk
and he pulled out
one of these electrical
circuit boards from the middle '50s.
Howard Odum's brother Eugene
then 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.
And Tansley's machine hypothesis
became a scientific certainty.
But to make their theory work,
what the Odum brothers had done
was distort the scientific method.
They had taken a metaphor, that
the ecosystem worked like a machine.
But then, instead of looking
at the data they had gathered
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 pared it down
so it would fit with the equations
and the circuits they had drawn.
As they did this,
it stopped being a metaphor
and became what seemed to be
a scientific description of reality.
One of Howard Odum's assistants
later wrote
that what they were really doing
was creating a machine-like fantasy
of stability.
Driven by the desire for prestige,
he said,
biological reality disappeared.
Organisms were expected to act
mechanically, in predicable ways.
Animals became robots,
and the ideas were never presented
as hypotheses to be tested.
When I first went into ecology,
we really did believe that nature
had to have a fixed stability,
it had to be stable.
That's what we were taught,
the miraculous thing about nature was
it was stable
against all these problems.
So we believed
there was a balance of nature.
The balance of nature idea
comes from two things.
Ancient Western mythology
and religious beliefs,
and also from the machine age.
The actual mathematics that came out
of it was mathematics of machinery.
Nature should have that
same kind of mechanical steady state,
which would fit in with
this balance of nature idea,
that if you left nature alone,
it would run like
a perfectly-oiled piston engine.
This fusion of cybernetics and
ecology was going to lead to far
more than just a new idea of nature,
for out of it was about to come
a new organising principle
for human society as well.
It would be a vision
of a new kind of world,
one without the authoritarian
exercise of power,
and the old political hierarchies.
A vision that was different
from past ideologies,
because it mirrored
how order was created in nature.
The man behind it
was a utopian visionary
who had worked as an engineer
in the US military.
He was called Buckminster Fuller.
"I will make my life an experiment,"
he said,
"to search for the principles
that govern the universe."
Fuller had invented
a radically new kind of structure
that was based on the underlying
system of order in nature.
It was called a geodesic dome.
It was very simple
but incredibly strong.
Giant geodesic domes were built
to house the radar installations
for America's early warning system
in the Arctic.
These are what we call
geodesic radons.
They are designed to protect very
powerful and important apparatus
from the great storms of nature.
We think of structures
as being something very powerful,
but these are very delicate.
Yet they've been through about
10 years
of the most formidable conditions
in the Arctic
that any structures
have ever had to stand.
But I'm not a...a dome salesman,
I'm an explorer in structures.
I'm interested in the
fundamental principles by which
nature holds her shapes together.
Fuller's geodesic domes
imitated the idea of the ecosystem.
Each tiny strut was weak,
but when thousands were joined
to form a giant interconnecting web,
they became strong and stable.
Fuller believed that this principle
of copying nature could be applied
not just to structures,
but to creating new systems
to manage societies.
But in order to do this,
Fuller realised that there would
have to be a conceptual shift
in the way human beings
saw 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 help design a closed system
for the astronauts inside the cabin.
It was constantly monitored
by computers to keep it
in perfect balance.
And in 1964, Fuller wrote a
manifesto
called The Operating Manual
For Spaceship Earth.
It said that the world should be
seen as one giant spaceship
and that all human beings should
try and manage that global system
so it was kept in a perfect balance,
just like the tiny cabin
of the spacecraft.
He would say in his lectures, like,
"You guys wonder what it's like to be
an astronaut. Well, I can tell you.
"You are an astronaut.
"We're all astronauts
on board Spaceship Earth."
So here's the image of the Earth
suddenly being like a spaceship,
like a closed ecosystem,
in which we live in strict balance.
Notice that suddenly
you are not in the centre any more.
The spaceship is in the centre.
Meaning that you start de-emphasising
the importance of
the individual human being
because you're concerned about
the welfare of the system,
not the individual.
There was a threat, though,
to this new vision, Fuller said.
It was politicians,
because politicians believed that
they could control the system.
And that always led to
struggles for power,
and out of that came wars.
Instead, the system
should be allowed to find
its own natural order
and there would be no need for
hierarchies and power any longer.
If man is going to stay on board
our Spaceship Earth,
it can't be done by politics
because politics is so inadequate.
It cannot be commanded by politics
because a politician
doesn't know about such a thing.
He has to go on what have you, which
is the kind of design he now has.
All he can do is give you war.
And Fuller's ideas caught the
imagination of a generation
who had become disillusioned
with politics.
The counterculture had emerged
after the student movement
had failed to change
the structure of power in America.
Between 1967 and 1971,
over half a million Americans
left the cities
and set out to create thousands
of experimental communities.
It was one of the biggest migrations
in American history.
They used Buckminster Fuller's
geodesic domes
to build their new homes,
but more than that,
they adopted his cybernetic ideas
as their organising principle.
The communes deliberately had no
hierarchy of control or authority.
Instead, the central idea was that
everyone should see themselves
as part of a system,
a distributed network
that could stabilise itself
just like the ecosystems in nature.
In one of the most influential
communes called Synergia,
this cybernetic theory
was called ecotechnics.
We were trying to create a society
based on understanding ecosystems.
A society of inter-relationship
and balance.
A man-machine biological system
working in combination.
That was sort of our ideal
with what we called ecotechnics.
The idea of the ecotechnics is simply
that you are a part of the system,
in which there would be
less if not no hierarchy at all.
In the communes, anything that
smacked of politics was forbidden.
No coalitions or alliances with
others in the group were permitted.
Instead, individuals dealt with each
other one-to-one in group sessions
in which they told each other how
they were feeling about each other.
I don't know if I want you
to reach me.
Because I'm afraid.
I'd like you to try to reach me.
I don't know that
I'd like you to reach me.
They remained free individuals,
yet at the same time
through this system of feedback,
the group would be stable.
We didn't use the word system,
but we very much thought of
the whole group, of ourselves,
as all connected.
There was a group sense,
there was a group feeling.
That was our whole purpose,
was to be...
fully connected to each other
and to have this group sense
of the organism of many who act as
one. That's part of what it meant.
Switch.
Switch.
Switch, switch, switch, switch.
'It would be like a dance where we're
creating a new kind of society,
'freeing each person
to be fully themselves in the group,
'but we are all affecting each other
at all times,
'like an organism of many
who act as one.'
And there was another group
of visionaries in California
who believed the communes
were only a prototype
for a self-organising society
built on a global scale.
They were the engineers who
were inventing the new computer
technologies on the west coast.
The way they were going to develop
these technologies
would be shaped by this vision
of a natural order
that combined humans and machines.
At the end of 1968,
a group of computer pioneers
took a conscious decision.
They would give up
developing large mainframes.
Instead, they would create
a way of linking small
personal computers in networks.
..when I get introduced.
The fact that I'm going to come to
you mostly through this medium here
for the rest of the show...
In a dramatic demonstration,
they showed how this could be done.
It included all the necessary
elements, even the computer mouse.
..the devices that I'm using.
I use three,
and they're not all centred.
You have a pointing device called
a mouse,
a standard keyboard,
and special key set we have here.
Now, computer,
do the automatic switching
that will bring in a camera.
Hi, Bill. That's great.
Now we're connected. Audio. You can
see my work, you can point at it.
I can see your face and we can talk.
These pioneers believed that
in the future,
computer networks would allow you
to create the very kind of society
that was being developed in
the communes but on a global scale.
Everyone could be free
as individuals, no longer dominated
by old hierarchies,
or controlled politically.
Instead, they would be linked
together in a global system
that would find
its own natural order.
It would do it through the feedback
of information
between millions of people
on their personal computers.
The demonstration was filmed by
one of the prophets of this vision.
He was a leader of the commune
movement called Stewart Brand.
They felt like computers
had liberated them
and they were going to use
computers.
They were going to enable computers
to liberate society,
civilisation, every-damn-body.
I can have file control and I've
already accepted file referencing.
'Their computers would
save the world. These guys
would make sure they could.
'It was going to be a power to
the people in a very direct sense.'
That was an early iteration
of the internet,
and of Google and all of that.
This was a vast network,
that was self-correcting.
By the late 1960s, what had happened
was that our modern idea of nature,
the ecosystem, and cybernetic
theories about computers,
had fused together.
Out of it had come an epic new
vision of how to manage the world
without the old corruption of power.
It was a vision that seemed to be
different
from all past political attempts
to change the world
because it was based on
the natural order.
In 1967, a young writer called
Richard Brautigan crystallised this.
One morning he walked through
the streets of San Francisco
handing out a manifesto.
It described a future world
held in a balanced equilibrium
by the fusion
of nature and computers.
It was called All Watched Over
By Machines of Loving Grace.
'I like to think -
'and the sooner the better -
of a cybernetic meadow
'where mammals
and computers live together
'in mutually programming harmony
like pure water touching clear sky.
'I like to think -
right now, please -
'of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics,
'where deer stroll peacefully
past computers as if they were
flowers with spinning blossoms.
'I like to think - it has to be -
'of a cybernetic ecology where we are
free of our labours
'and join back to nature, returned to
our mammal brothers and sisters
'and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.'
And then the world was hit by
a new kind of crisis.
It was a crisis
that could not be solved
by the old hierarchies of power
or by national governments.
As a result, the idea of the
world as a self-regulating system
was going to move to centre stage.
By the early 1970s,
it was clear that there was
a global environmental crisis.
But it was also clear that
politicians had no idea
how to deal with it.
The crisis baffled them because
of its horrifying complexity.
It crossed national boundaries
and involved the whole of nature.
But then a man emerged who said
he knew how to save the world
from this disaster.
He was the cybernetic scientist
who had built America's early
warning system, Jay Forrester.
By now, Forrester had become
a powerful figure
because he used his computers
to build models of corporations
and even whole cities as systems.
Then Forrester became involved
with a think tank
called the Club of Rome.
They were a group of international
businessmen and technocrats
who were trying to find a way of
solving the environmental crisis.
At a meeting in Switzerland,
Forrester told them
that the only way to do this
was to look at the world
as an entire cybernetic system.
And he would build a model that
would do just that in his computer.
Our problem is the big problem.
Our problem is a hard one and you're
not dealing with the hard problem.
And that hard problem was?
The world.
So on the way back from Switzerland,
I sketched out
the first sketch of such a system,
which was this.
This is a picture
of that first sketch
of the world in terms of
population, resources,
capital investment in industry,
investment in agriculture, and the
accumulated pollution in the world.
All of these lines
here are the feedback loops,
the many feedback loops.
Those feedback loops are spread
all through the model,
as you can see, by the various lines
that are connecting things here.
Back in America, Forrester set up
a team of systems theorists.
They built a computer model
of the world.
The team designed it
as a giant cybernetic system
in which all known data
about population growth,
industrial production,
food and agriculture,
natural resources and pollution
were all fed in.
The team then ran the model
and what it predicted
was an imminent global collapse.
And when you ran that model,
what did it show?
It showed that in all likelihood,
population would overshoot
the carrying capacity of the world,
and then you would have a collapse
of population back to a lower level,
and that the standard of living
would decline through all that period
in a serious way.
The model based on current policies
lead essentially to disaster.
Disease, crowding, wars,
atomic bombs.
It was pessimistic, wasn't it?
Well, I considered myself
an optimist.
The Club of Rome then held a press
conference where they announced that
the computer had predicted that
the world was heading for disaster.
From a very large number
of computer runs
making various assumptions,
adopting various maxima and minima,
there is in fact a general forecast
of a breakdown of world society
in the first decades
of the next century.
We regard the MIT report
as an extraordinarily important
initial pioneering effort.
It's opening up
a great new field of research,
research in the world as a system.
The Club of Rome published a book
called The Limits To Growth,
which laid out
Forrester's world model
and its frightening conclusions.
It was a bestseller,
and it transformed the debate
about the environment.
Because Forrester's model offered
a way of conceptualising the problem
that seemed to be scientific
and therefore neutral.
His vision of the world
as one interconnected system
seemed to transcend politics
and the petty interests of nations.
Then in Stockholm in 1972,
the United Nations held a conference
for the first time ever
on the world environmental crisis.
The international bureaucrats
who ran it
turned to this idea of the world
as a system
to provide the conceptual framework.
The world needed to be managed
in a new non-political way
to avoid the threat
of global collapse.
This is the beginning of a debate.
Nobody's decided what the limits are.
One can question whether it's 2010
when we all collapse or 2050
when we all collapse, but what is
absolutely certain is,
you cannot run a planetary society
on the total irresponsible
sovereignty of 120 different
governments. It simply can't be done.
Forrester's apocalyptic predictions
dominated the conference.
But he also said that his
computer model showed the only way
of avoiding that disaster.
World governments, he said,
should give up on any idea
of promoting continual growth.
Instead they should create a new
kind of steady state for the world.
Their job was now to hold the world
system in a balanced equilibrium
to avoid the collapse.
Forrester was arguing for
a fundamental shift in the role
of politics and politicians.
They should give up
trying to change the world,
and instead,
the aim of politics should now be
to manage the existing system -
to hold it in equilibrium.
The idea of growth
is in contrast to the idea
of equilibrium,
where you're maintaining
a constant or equilibrium level
of population and enough industrial
activity to sustain that population,
which could lead to a much more
desirable steady state equilibrium,
a man-made equilibrium of our choice,
and live within
the boundaries set by the world,
by the Earth,
by the capacity of the Earth.
Which was a stable world?
Which would be a stable, ongoing one.
But large sections
of the environmental movement
were opposed to this idea
and they held protests
outside the conference.
They said that the idea of
enforcing stability on the world
was not neutral,
that the Limits To 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
they hadn't before.
That led to only two choices.
You either preserve the existing
system in a steady state
or face catastrophe.
And this, the protestors argued,
suited those who wanted to maintain
the status quo -
those in power.
This argument had happened before,
back in the 1930s,
at the very moment when
Britain's imperial power was waning.
In 1935, Arthur Tansley, who
invented the idea of the ecosystem,
accused one of the most powerful men
in the British Empire
of abusing ecological ideas.
He was Field Marshal Smuts,
who was the autocratic ruler
of South Africa.
Smuts used ecological ideas
to develop a philosophy
he called holism.
Holism said that the whole world
was one giant organic system
in which everything
had its natural place.
So long as everyone stayed
in their proper place,
this global system would be stable.
Smuts had a vision
of a new global world order
where artificial distinctions
like nations would disappear,
and his model for this world system
was the British Empire.
And it would be managed by the white
European races
because that was their natural place
in the whole.
General Smuts
actually coined the word holism.
Every human being
would have its place within society,
every animal would have its place
in the environment,
and every other species -
grass, grasshoppers, you name it -
would have their place
in the environment,
struggling towards fulfilling their
wholeness in the greater whole.
'It is an order of nature
and an order of society
which celebrates equilibrium.
'It's a static world,
'and holism became a tool to make
the British Empire more stable.'
The idea that ecosystem theories,
theories of equilibrium etc,
that these are neutral, is bogus.
They are highly politically charged.
What Smuts was doing showed
how easily scientific ideas
about nature and natural equilibrium
could be used by those in power
to maintain the status quo.
Tansley hated this, and he publicly
accused Smuts of what he called
"the abuse
of vegetational concepts."
Now 40 years later, the protestors
in Stockholm were accusing Forrester
of doing the same.
The real role of the
environmental movement, they said,
was not to hold the world stable
but to struggle to change it.
Because it was the greed of
the Western elites that was causing
the environmental crisis.
The movement, they claimed,
was being hijacked
by right-wing think tanks
and Cold War technocrats
who were using the balance of nature
as a political trick.
The trick is claiming that
you have something as nature.
"In nature you have this balance
"and we need a society
to have the same balance."
And then...
it becomes unquestionable,
because you cannot change nature.
And thus you cannot change society,
because society should be
the same as nature.
So it's a sort of
intellectual trick.
They needed this concept of the
balanced nature
to protect the elite
and to protect the system.
But the protests were in vain,
because Forrester's
cybernetic vision of the world
as one interconnected system
now began to penetrate
deep into the public imagination.
What began to rise up in the 1970s
was the idea that we,
and everything else on the planet,
are connected together
in complex webs and networks.
Out of that were now going to come
epic visions of connectivity,
like the Gaia theory, and utopian
ideas about the worldwide web
and the global economic system.
Underlying this was
a profound shift.
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 began see ourselves
as components, cogs in a system,
and our duty was to help that system
maintain its natural balance.
It's quite clear the entire Earth has
to be treated as a spaceship,
run as a spaceship,
planned as a spaceship.
We're all part of the web of life
and the sooner man fully
appreciates this, the better.
This image, our home, our Earth,
one people in one world.
What we've really got to do is manage
the entire planet as a single system.
Well, ecology
is the balance of nature.
It's the relationship between me,
the plants and animals,
and the world in general.
Now the problem is totally global,
which is going to mean running the
entire planet as a single system.
Without upsetting the natural
balances that are there.
Ecology, yes.
That's what I'm talking about.
TAPE SLOWS DOWN
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 organisation that
mirrored the natural world.
But at precisely this moment
in the mid-1970s, the science that
supported the 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 towards stability,
that the very opposite was true,
that nature, far from seeking
equilibrium, was always in a state
of dynamic and unpredictable change.
Ecologists really thought that
we were dealing with a stable world.
You didn't question it.
It was just like the air. You didn't?
You didn't question it at all.
Now the really remarkable thing is
when people began to find out that
that might have some chinks in it,
that that might not be right,
people were really almost
viscerally upset.
Ecologists, many ecologists,
were almost viscerally upset
because it offended that very
comfortable idea that nature
was stable.
HOWLING
Ecologists began to revisit
environments that were supposed
to be models of stability.
One ecologist called Daniel Botkin
travelled to a remote island in
the Great Lakes called Ile Royale.
In theory, the populations of
moose and wolves were supposed
to live in a stable balance.
But when Botkin researched the
history of the two populations,
he discovered that in reality
they were constantly changing.
In theory, the wolves
controlled the moose,
and the moose and the wolves
and vegetation all lived together
in this miraculous system.
We went out
to try to figure out how could this
beautiful system be steady?
Once I got out there
and started to look at
the historic information about it,
it was all about changes -
everything was always changing, it
wasn't what it was supposed to be.
When you looked at the populations
of the moose and wolves,
you saw nothing but change.
They just fluctuated.
You can still say, "Maybe they're
on their way to a steady state,"
but then you can go back and look
at the history of the vegetation.
Trees will tell us their own story
and the soil with its pollen
tells you more of the story,
so you can reconstruct centuries
of history from forests.
When you looked at that,
you saw nothing but change.
As a result of this, ecology started
to look at the history of ecosystems
and what they discovered
began to undermine the very
foundations of the science.
The theory said that when
ecosystems were disturbed
by storms or fires or floods,
they would always try to return
to their original balanced state.
But study after study showed that
the very opposite was true,
that after the disturbances, the
plants and animals would recombine
in radically different ways.
The history of nature
was full of radical dislocations
and unpredictable change.
There was no stable pattern.
Big wind storms,
hurricanes,
tornadoes,
fires.
You get a disturbance, the forest
doesn't come back the way it was.
Disturbance comes along
and it resets the system
to something new.
What we were doing was to challenge
the basic assumptions of ecology,
that the balance of nature
was something that
guided ecological systems.
But even as this was happening,
a huge experiment began that aimed
to prove convincingly
how stability
was maintained in ecosystems.
An ecologist called George Van Dyne
set out to create a computer model
of the grasslands that
stretched across Colorado.
All the animals, insects, plants
and the systems that linked them
were going to be recreated
inside a computer.
Van Dyne wanted to finally show
how feedback worked in nature.
What George Van Dyne really wanted
to do was take this universe
that you see in front of you,
this grassland landscape,
and be able to
represent it in the computer,
to have a virtual grassland.
It's an act of substantial arrogance
to say that I think that I can devise
a virtual ecosystem
and capture it inside this computer,
I think. That's a good...
It was a great idea.
Van Dyne hired dozens of researchers
to begin collecting data
on everything that lived
in the grasslands
AND what was underneath in the soil.
They built a machine that travelled
across hundreds of square miles,
hoovering up insects
and small mammals.
These were then opened up
to find out what they had eaten.
Other researchers followed larger
animals to find out in minute detail
what they were eating.
We had a graduate student who would
follow the pronghorn, the antelope.
He could walk along beside him
and watch what they ate.
Every time they took a bite
of his plant, he would record
on his tape recorder,
"One bite of blue grama,
one bite of sphaeralcea."
Two bites of artemisia,
three inches tall without flower.
Two more bites of artemisia.
Six bites of kosha without flower.
Three bites of blue grama,
two inches tall without flower.
Sometimes they would take a bite.
He couldn't tell what it was,
so he would stop, open the animal's
mouth, reach in, pull it out,
look at it, put it back and go on.
And they put a hole
in the side of the bison
where you could reach in and sample
what the bison had been eating,
look at it under a microscope.
Then you'd weigh each
little separate pile
and you'd enter it in a data sheet.
We'd give it to Dave
who was the data manager
and he would get one
of his minions to punch it on
an IBM card, an 80 column IBM card,
and that would be read
into the computer
and stored on magnetic tape.
Let's take a look at the reading
cycle and see how we're doing.
George Van Dyne then used
all the data to construct a vast,
intricate model
that simulated how all the different
elements of the system -
the plants and animals - interacted.
Every species had its own sub-model
that then was linked through
feedback loops
to other species
and their sub-models.
This grasshopper sub-model tells us
what's going on with grasshoppers.
There's predators down here.
At this point,
it's just an unspecified thing.
What that means is that there
was another sub-model
for birds, for small mammals
and other potential predators
of grasshoppers.
So there was another
sub-model that was simulating
the populations of, let's say,
lark buntings all the time,
which is one of the predators
on the grasshoppers.
That sub-model then feeds
that information to this sub-model,
which uses Sam's equation
to predict the death rate of
grasshopper eggs for that day.
But when George Van Dyne ran
the model, what happened
seemed to make no sense.
No stable underlying
pattern emerged.
Van Dyne was convinced that all
the model needed was more data
and he worked feverishly, sometimes
all night, putting more and more
information into the computer model.
But in fact, he was just
making the problem worse.
The ecosystem theory had worked for
previous ecologists because they
had ruthlessly simplified nature.
What Van Dyne was really doing
with his mountains of data
was recreating the real
chaotic instability of nature
inside his computer.
In 1981, Van Dyne died
of a heart attack at the age of 48
and the project was closed down.
The collapse of his experiment
marked the end of the systems theory
which had driven the science
of ecology for 50 years,
the theory that somewhere in nature
is an ultimate order,
a balanced equilibrium.
The balance of nature is an illusion
and we hold on to it
so tightly in our culture.
That is completely counter to
what contemporary ecology tells us.
Contemporary ecology says that we
live in a very dynamic world.
We have to replace that assumption
of the balance of nature.
You have to discard the myth.
The scientific basis
had fallen away,
but the idealistic vision of
the self-organising system
continued to grow.
The reason
was that in an age of mass democracy
where the individual was sacrosanct
and politics discredited and
distrusted, it offered the promise
of a new egalitarian world order.
SHOUTING AND YELLING
So this is the situation here,
incredible scenes.
Parliament in the hands of
these opposition supporters.
The MPs fled so quickly that they
even left their papers behind.
In the early part of this century,
the idea of the self-organising
network re-emerged
in what seemed to be
its original radical form.
Beginning in 2003,
a wave of spontaneous revolution
swept through Asia and Europe.
In each case, hundreds of thousands
of people flooded into the capitals
of Georgia, the Ukraine
and Kyrgyzstan
and they forced the old
corrupt leaders from power.
In all these cases,
no-one seemed to be in charge.
But then, journalists discovered
that the internet
had played a key role.
It had brought millions of people
together to create revolutions
that had no guiding ideology
except a desire for
self-determination and for freedom.
Tonight, well, I feel really sort
of powerful and happy.
We did what we wanted.
This is our freedom.
Now, computer,
do the automatic switching
that will bring in a camera.
Hi, Bill.
That's great. Now we're connected.
It seemed to be the triumph
of the vision that had begun
with the computer utopians
in California in the 1960s.
They had dreamt of a time when
interconnected webs of computers
would allow individuals to create
new non-hierarchical societies,
just like in the commune
experiments, but on a global scale.
Now that dream seemed
to be really coming true.
In 2009, Twitter and Facebook
appeared to play a key role
in organising the protests in Iran.
There was a lot of excitement
in the ability of individuals in Iran
to connect with a global audience
and with their peers inside Iran
to build a political consciousness
in support of democracy.
It represents the emergence of a
completely new information ecosystem.
But in all the revolutions,
that new sense of freedom
lasted only for a moment.
In the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych,
the man who was ousted,
is back in power
and has started to dismantle
democratic institutions.
In Kyrgyzstan,
the new president fled
because of accusations of corruption
and the country is torn apart
by ethnic clashes.
And Georgia has now fallen in
the world index of press freedom.
At the time of the revolution,
it was 73rd.
It is now 99th.
What had been forgotten in
the optimism about the revolutions
was 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.
And what tore them all apart
was the very thing that was supposed
to have been banished - power.
The commune members
discovered that some people
were more free than others.
Strong personalities came to
dominate the weaker members of
the group,
but the rules
of the self-organising system
refused to allow any organised
opposition to this oppression.
The original idea was
very positive indeed.
It was to create
an egalitarian society
in which everyone would both be free
to be themselves
and also be able to contribute to the
group in a really positive way.
But the very rules that kind of set
up this egalitarian group
resulted in the opposite
of the dream.
They resulted in creating
a hierarchical structure
in which some could be
dominant over others
because everyone is not equally
powerful in their voice against one
other person.
In the communes, what were supposed
to be systems of negotiations
between equal individuals
often turned into vicious bullying.
In practice, these would be
20 and 30 minute hazing sessions
that were, um...quite awful
to experience
and usually were met by silence
with the rest of one's peers,
so there wasn't any, "Hey, lay off.
He's an OK guy,"
or anything like that.
There were no supportive comments.
The rule was "travel in your
own country", which means
"shut up, listen and observe".
There was fear, actually,
because the people who were more
dominating and had more power
could make you ...
There was anger.
There was constantly a background
of fear in the house.
It was like a virus running
in the background, so that...
like Spyware.
You know it's there, but you
don't know how to get rid of it.
The failure of the commune movement
and the fate of the revolutions
show the limitations of
the self-organising model.
It cannot deal with the central
dynamic forces of human society -
politics and power.
The hippies took up the idea of
a network society because they
were disillusioned with politics.
They believed that this alternative
way of ordering the world was good
because it was based
on the underlying order of 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, in our age, we are all
disillusioned with politics
and this machine organising
principle has risen up to become
the ideology of our age.
But what we are discovering
is that if we see ourselves as
components in a system,
that it is very difficult
to change the world.
It is a very good way of
organising things, even rebellions,
but it offers no ideas
about what comes next.
And just like in the communes,
it leaves us helpless in the face of
those already in power in the world.
Next week's programme will show how
we have reconciled ourselves to
this voluntary sacrifice of power
by coming to believe
that WE are nothing more
than machines ourselves.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd