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Back in the mid Nineties I wrote a piece for Nick Routledge’s World3 called “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?”. And, among a whole lot of other stuff, I wrote this:
“… the only large scale attempt to apply cybernetic insights into running a national economy in real time, under the Allende government in Chile in the early seventies, was ruthlessly crushed as a side effect of the US-backed coup 1973. Destroying a democratically elected government, torturing, killing and disappearing thousands of people and installing a military dictatorship is the kind of crime that the forces of organised stupidity have committed for years, in both the East and the West. But destroying an experiment from which we could have learned much, whether it succeed or failed, without even realising they were doing so, is an almost unprecedented triumph of stupidity. I am using ‘stupidity’ here in a very precise, even technical way. In this definition it is the inability of the brain or any other part of nature to accept useful information, learn from it, and act intelligently on it.
The mystery of the comparative neglect of cybernetics is only one example of our failure to try out the ideas, concepts and hard won knowledge that have been developed over the past fifty years, preferring instead to cling on to the mishmash of survival techniques from the savannahs and the half remember ideas of long dead theorists that we confuse with practical commonsense. How often have you presented a new idea to a suit and met a blank quasi-religious face unthinkingly, but triumphantly, chanting the mantra ‘But where’s the bottom line?’ as if it really meant something?”
Stumbling around the web a few nights ago I found this piece, “Santiago dreaming”, by Andy Beckett, written about four years ago, that reconnected my rage. It also led me to this fascinating essay by Eden Medina, “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation : Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile”. Beer, himself, has written extensively about the Chilean experiment, which clearly affected him deeply. As Andy Beckett reports Beer was in London at the time of the coup:
“The Chilean military found the Cybersyn network intact, and called in Espejo and others to explain it to them. But they found the open, egalitarian aspects of the system unattractive and destroyed it. Espejo fled. Some of his colleagues were not so lucky. Soon after the coup, Beer left West Byfleet, his wife, and most of his possessions to live in a cottage in Wales. “He had survivor guilt, unquestionably,” says Simon.” (Simon being Stafford Beer’s son)
But what makes Eden Medina’s essay so intriguing is that, while Beer inevitably discuss some of the tensions involved in realising the project, as a disinterested outsider, Eden Medina is able to explore the tensions and contradictions more fully and, as she explains in this, one of her concluding paragraphs, why this is a history still worth exploring:
“The history presented here demonstrates, moreover, the singular nature of Chile’s socialist experiment. Not only was this project unique in the manner in which it applied cybernetic science to economic regulation and state governance, but its emphasis on decentralised control also resulted in a technology that reflected the distinguishing features of the UP government. Although we may question the exact magnitude of the contribution made by this system in staving off Chile’s mounting political, social and economic upheavals, its history does offer a new perspective on the Chilean experience. In contrast to the chaotic images of shortages, strikes, and protests that have come to characterise the era, Cybersyn presents an alternative history. Here we see members of CORFO, INTEC, ECOM and their British interlocutors struggling to realise a different dream of socialist modernity, technological capability and regulated order. It would be a dream some Cybersyn team members continued to pursue up until the day the military imposed a very different form of order on the Chilean people and members of the project team fled CORFO headquarters with project documents tucked under their arms in order to preserve them for the future”
Postscript 1: After writing this piece I found this letter from Simon Beer that challenges a number of aspects of both Andy Becket’s and Eden Median’s account and includes this moving comment about his father:
“For Stafford it was no experiment, it was life itself. After his disappointment in Britain working with the Labour government of the 1960s, he was indeed frustrated with British politics. In Chile, Stafford was working with people who believed that what they were doing really would make a difference.
But despite everybody’s hard work and commitment, 9/11 (1973) saw a democratically elected government overthrown by American foreign policy. Stafford undoubtedly did suffer from survivor guilt. Had he not been back in England when Allende was killed, he would unquestionably have died in Chile, alongside the president he so believed in.”
Postscript 2: While trying to find out a bit more Simon Beer, I found this excellent site, CYBERSYN/cybernetic synergy, created by Catalina Ossa, multimedia artist, and Enrique Rivera, film maker and audiovisual artist. The site, which is a great resource, is part of a much larger project to reclaim CYBERSYN, which they outline here.

Regular readers will probably be aware that I sit at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Samuel Brittan. But curiously I often find myself warming to him when he expresses his sympathy for ideas like a land tax or a basic citzen’s income. See if you can get which bits of the following two paragraphs I responded to positively:
“The world is not yet one single economy, but it is moving in that direction. The integration of nations such as China and India into it is the equivalent of multiplying several-fold the amount of unskilled labour relative to the supply of skilled labour and capital. The conventional response is to say that US and European industry needs to move continually upmarket, developing new products and processes, to maintain its position. There are limits to how far this can go. Not everyone can be retrained to undertake high- technology jobs.
Moreover, is it really desirable that everyone all the time should be engaged in non-stop reskilling (misleadingly called “lifelong education”). “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”? The western response should surely be to keep its own frontiers open to gain the benefits of trade but redistribute income to those who would otherwise lose out. My longtime slogan, coined before the word “globalisation” was invented, has been: “Redistribution yes, equality no.””

This thought from Chris Corrigan is a bit long for a sampler, but written on a pocket sized piece of paper so that we could pull it out and meditate on it from time to time could benefit us all:
“It’s amazing how the stories we tell ourselves perpetuate our own suffering and inability to fully participate in the world. When we think that we are in control or that we are the only ones with the answer, it doesn’t take long to discover that the world has no trouble making a mockery of us. Control and certainty are illusory. All we have is our own meager dependance on each other. The more we are related and understand one another, the safer we truly are, because we are better able to address the vagaries of the world if there are many eyes, hearts and brains making sense of a situation.”

In one of Johnnie Moore’s more recent entries on his blog there is a piece of advice worthy of being embroidered on a sampler and hung in every living room, “Pay more attention to what is happening and less to your notion of what should be happening.”
More than that every manager should have it engrave on plaque and place on their desk where they can’t avoid seeing it. Every teacher…
I think you probably get the point by now.

There is a fascinating article in the New York Times about a symposium, the Magic of Consciousness, organised by members of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. (Thanks to Abbas Raza of 3Quarks for the pointer)
Reading through it, there were a whole host of examples of how conjurers misdirect our attention to produce the illusion of magic. So at a variety points I hit something I thought I would like to write about. But the biggie for me was this exchange with Daniel Dennett:
“For years Dr. Dennett has argued that qualia, in the airy way they have been defined in philosophy, are illusory. In his book ‘Consciousness Explained,’ he posed a thought experiment involving a wine-tasting machine. Pour a sample into the funnel and an array of electronic sensors would analyze the chemical content, refer to a database and finally type out its conclusion: ‘a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.’
If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?
Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — ‘ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather’ — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are ‘like sheepdogs herding ideas.'”
Hitting that phrase, “Words are like sheepdogs herding ideas” is a great example of what he means in itself. As I read it I realised that much of my time is spent in searching for those words and phrases that crystallise the buzzing confusion of ideas, impressions and experiences bumping around in my mind that I haven’t been able to articulate.
Finding the illuminating word or phrase, for me seems to be what transforms a mess of ideas into something more coherent that I can work with. Adding Dennett’s phrase to one of my favourite quotes from George Nelson, “The connection game is a process of building patterns. Patterns make things intelligible.”, seems to sum up what I do.

… where even the flowerbeds rebuke us.
Shiny Happy Person,a junior psychiatrist working in the NHS, reports on her blog how, when taking a break in the hospital gardens, she heard a voice from a flowerbed saying, “this is a no smoking area. Please put your cigarette out. A member of staff has been informed”.
Nic Cohen writing in today’s Observer picks up the story and adds:
“… it is on the record that hospitals have banned smoking and some, such as the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire Trust, have put smoke alarms outdoors to catch patients who nip outside for a quick fag.
The makers of a new generation of alarms say their trade doesn’t stop with the NHS. They are doing good business with local authorities, drug rehabilitation centres and government departments. Their Cig-Arrete (geddit?) detector provides ‘a visual and audible re-enforcement of your commitment to creating a smoke-free environment’.”
Isn’t it reassuring to know that our apparatchiks are working so hard to guarantee our well-being.

Charles Leadbeater writes very vividly about the later years of his wife’s grandmother and how she coped with her everyday life and how she didn’t. As you read the quote below I would like you to think about the similarities between yourself and Ethel, rather than the obvious differences. I certainly found the exercise very instructive.
“My wife’s grandmother, Ethel, was born and bred in London’s East End. She lived into her 90s, in a tiny council flat in run-down Stepney. As Ethel got older, she got smaller and frailer. By the time she died her brain was incapable of any bouts of new learning. She lived in a dream-world, in which she and her doctor were about to elope to Southend. Despite these eccentricities, Ethel was able to live a reasonably ordered life by distributing her intelligence around her. She cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, listened to the radio, by knowing where to find all the tools she needed to do these jobs. Ethel’s flat was encrusted with little landmarks and rules of thumb that she had laid down over many years to help get by. By picking up these markers and putting them back in the same place – the washing powder here, the ironing board there, the radio next to the toaster – she could get a lot done. Ethel’s brain was addled, but she could appear mentally robust because so much of her intelligence had been sub-contracted to her environment. That was also her weakness. As soon as Ethel was taken out of her flat into a nursing home, she could not do a thing. All her rules of thumb and landmarks disappeared. Her worn-out brain was incapable of putting other landmarks in place in her new surroundings. She became utterly vulnerable….”

Every so often I get a buzz when I spot something that looks like a glimpse into the future. I had that feeling when I saw Jeff Han’s demo of a multi-touch system at TED. I got a similar buzz watching Steve Job’s demo of the iPhone with its multi-touch interface, that I believe was based on the work of Wayne Westerman and John Elias. But the biggest buzz I have had for a very long time was seeing James Patten‘s PICO. (Thanks to Andy Polaine‘s Playpen for the tip.)
So why am I so excited by PICO. Four years ago I wrote:
“I think it was Niels Bohr who said, “It’s hard to predict, especially the future”. But, driven by the number of my friends working in the interactive media industry, who complain that things have got very boring, I thought I’d venture a few predictions.
The first is that we should still expect a lot of disruptive, technological surprises to come.
The second is that network thinking, or what George Nelson called the “connections game”, is going to become a key ability in life and in business.
And the third is that analogue interfaces to digital media are going to be a hot area of development over the next few years.”
My glimpse of PICO seems to have all three ingredients. It looks disruptive because I can see a potential for its analogue interface to be a powerful tool for us to do some real network thinking. Again to quote from my 2003 piece:
“In the mean time the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to be bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”
At the moment we are really bad at this. Most of us have been programmed to think in a very simple, linear cause and effect mode. The internet and the Web have helped, but for most of us our feel for the interactions within networks is still pretty primitive. The kind of physical engagement that PICO promises could help us transcend the limitations of our education and training with disruptive effects on our current models of our world and how our actions impact on it.
PICO promises the kind of conversations between human beings and computers that Gordon Pask and Nicholas Negroponte dreamt of in the 1960s. Conversations where computers do what they are good at and humans do what we are good at. A synthesis that goes way beyond AI and, just maybe, could help us navigate our way through the coming hazards that our simple cause and effect models of the world have created.

There are a lot of good William Gibson interviews around at the moment as he roams the world promoting his new book, “Spook Country”. One I particularly like is in College Crier Online. There is a lot of interesting stuff in the interview, but the answer that really intrigued me is where he talks about surrendering control of the process of composing a novel. This seems to me to capture the space where real creativity takes place and one that frightens the shit our of the bureaucratic rationalists who want every thing predictable and tick-boxed. Read it and see what you think:
“…I don’t believe that didactic writing can be really good. If I’m figuring out what I think is going on the world, and creating a fiction to illustrate that, I don’t feel like really doing what I’m supposed to be doing. When I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I feel like I’m sort of inviting those characters in for a cup of coffee. And if I surrendered control over the process sufficiently, I won’t know what will be there until the narrative closes. And then it will take me a while to figure it out. So when, in Spook Country , for instance, I was in that narrative for a long time. Months and months, with no idea what was in the box. I had no idea. I was hundreds of pages into it and had no idea what was in that container. Or rather, I had like a dozen different ideas of what was in the container. I had to let the narrative inform me of what it was. It’s a very uncomfortable way of working, but it’s the only way I know to write a book. In the beginning all I had was that scene that became the second chapter with Tito and the old man and I didn’t really know anything about them and I just kind of stuck with that for months. Then I got some early version of the Hollis stuff and somehow it built a bridge between the two things and this narrative started to emerge. That sense of “this is how things are” that I think you’re talking about is secondary. It may be there, but it’s secondary to the process of pulling that narrative out and finding where it’s going. Like if I know where it’s going, it’s dead for me. I can’t do it.”

I think I’ve found a fellow spirit in Dan Roberts, who confesses in the Independent that he finds getting up early in the morning a real pain. Fortunately, we are not alone. As he points out, Camilla Kring from Denmark has founded the B-Society to campaign for “an uprising against the tyranny of early rising”.