Home · Book Reports · 2017 · Out of Control - The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

“A short-hand synopsis of Out of Control would be to say it is an update on the current state of cybernetic research.”

This is a very interesting book. It covers a gamut of topics that are all related to systems and control. The symbol of droning slavery, the beehive, is considered initially at great length. It is given as an example of a decentralized democracy where every bee has a part to play. In contrast to this beekeeping is discussed. From the start the author wants you to think the bees are in control, when really it is the beekeeper who is in charge. Again and again you will read examples of systems with no central authority that are juxtaposed against statements like “a flocked guided by a shepherd”. A flock of sheep is not a decentralized democracy. It is a totalitarian dictatorship under the shepherd’s crook and dog.

There is also an enormous amount of Darwin and evolution mentioned. This leads into such topics as natural and artificial evolution, social Darwinism, economics, computer simulated life, computer viruses, parasitism, Gaian theory, and almost countless others. To say Darwinian evolution, even when Lamarckian evolution is treated in depth as well, is a foundational tenet of this work would be an understatement.

Beyond Darwin, some of the other major players that those familiar with the various MK-Ultra-like programs would recognize include, but are not limited to, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Marshall McLuhan, Stewart Brand (the founder of WIRED, where the author was once editor), and even the grand-daddy of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner.

One view, that communication between agents of a system occurs through the world is fertile ground for showing how a decentralized system can still confer top down control. Consider the intelligence community and the oligarchy that, while often seen as completely centralized (CENTRAL Intelligence Agency), are actually a number of cells of agents working independently. The operations of one group are seen by the other groups which can adapt their strategy. With only a few contact points between agencies, a yearly meeting at a Bohemian Grove, Century Club, or a United Nations conference, and the pervasive feedback of seeing what the other groups do, both successfully and unsuccessfully, you can develop a shepherding system of control that is quite decentralized. A perfect example of this decentralized control can be seen in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when the English Empire re-branded itself as the Commonwealth. In England and in far off lands like India and Australia you had many individual agents working in their own independent manor, but each was deftly directed by London. Not overtly, but by instilling particular values in the future leadership of these colonies by another name. Each part of the commonwealth was free to act independently, as long as they were moving in the same general direction. This is kind of like letting out fishing line, giving the fish a chance to wear itself out on the false illusion of freedom, before reeling in your catch.

Many comparisons to environmental engineering being like machine engineering bring about a blurring of biological and mechanical (a clearly stated recurring theme). This reminds me of permaculture, succession, guilds, and assemblages. There is actually a lot of what I learned studying permaculture present in this work. “Happy accidents” are mentioned, and the idea of seeing how something works by simply trying it are both strong beliefs of many permaculturists.

While not front and center to permaculture, Lovelock’s Gaia theory is occasionally mentioned and most certainly a staple in this book. I make the connection to permaculture because, although it sounds great on the surface, could it be another cybernetic input to pacify those fed up with the status quo? If you are out gardening and planting trees, you are not combating the oligarchical fraud. If you are not starting families, who are you improving the environment for?

All of these vectors of social change steeped in cybernetic theory lead to worldwide single living system that feeds back on itself with “obligated cooperation”, which sounds a lot like justification for manipulation of the masses.

Several times the ubiquity of parasitism and symbiosis in natural systems is noted and increasing as more species evolve to interact with one another in novel ways. When applied to the social human world, what will it look like? It seems more justification for an oligarchy that is completely parasitic in its behavior.

Von Neumann’s games are discussed in fleeting generality, but more interesting is that the idea of a zero-sum game is discounted continually. The network effect, the more telephones there are the more valuable a telephone becomes (1 telephone is all but worthless), is heavily promoted instead of the zero-sum effect. While this sounds appealing, everyone can win, it is unrealistic. In terms of wealth, which is nothing more than a particular arrangement of (finite) earthly resources, it (life) is a zero-sum game. Things like the economy can exhibit non-zero sum characteristics (the stock market goes up and up and up), but that is an artifact of their artificiality. Money is a construct of man’s mind, a tool for measuring perceived wealth akin to inches measuring length. There is no limit to the amount of inches or dollars, but there is a definite limit to things we can measure with each.

“Although some links become hardwired and nearly symbiotic, most species are promiscuous in evolutionary time, shacking up with a different partners as the partners themselves evolve.” This struck me as interesting because it promotes promiscuity as an absolute. At least from a social human society standpoint, promiscuity erodes families. If the goal, as I submit it to be, is to break down society to the helpless individual, adrift in the virtual worlds, then this promotion is not at all out of place and simply another key being pressed to make the human organ sing the tune of submission.

At one point the book begins to talk about an omega-point where ecosystems tend toward. I immediately thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the originator of this omega-point theory. Pierre, a priest, combined science and religion in some really novel ways. Omega-point theory basically stated that everything in the universe was moving toward a single point, God. A few paragraphs later the largest bomb in the book was dropped. A quote from John Perry Barlow that mentions Pierre and The (Masonic) Great Work:

“Computers-the gizmos themselves-have far less to do with techie enthusiasm than some half-understood resonance to The Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating the Planetary Mind. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder to his Omega Point might be built by engineers and not mystics.”

In my opinion this one quote simultaneously summarizes and betrays both this book and the whole of the technocracy/cybernetic vision of the future. “Hardwiring collective consciousness” equates to plugging everyone into the (online, social media) matrix.

Further, the book goes into great detail of what we would call virtual reality. It covers simulated war games for the Department of Defense and simulation games like BattleTech. I find it interesting that there is such a crossover between gaming and war. Consider that the modern drones use controls eerily reminiscent of X-box game pads.

There is a whole chapter on e-money. Remember that this was written in the mid 1990s, long before things like bitcoin were even a glint in Satoshi’s eye. It portends the omnipresence of things like debit cards, club cards, and cards that use a small microchip to store reloadable value years before they became fashionable. The words you hear today surrounding bitcoin are all there: crypto-currency, libertarianism, crypto-anarchy, anonymous, and verifiable. Again, the chapter on e-money is pretty damning evidence that the oligarchy was either behind crypto-currency or at least had their finger on the pulse of the crypto-kids and therefore would not be shocked at the rise of something like bitcoin.

South American fiction master J. L. Borges and his Library are talked about at great length. Borges’ library is called back to many times subsequently after its introduction. Dawkin’s Biomorph Land and the various artificial evolutionary systems are compared to wandering through Borges’ library.

Moving beyond the gradual evolution Darwin, a new theory of saltationism (from Latin saltare, to jump) is pondered to describe how “hopeful monsters” appear suddenly. “The clues I present here of symbiosis, directed mutation, saltationism, and self-organization, are far from conclusive.” This, to me, reads as nothing more than mysticism masquerading as science, the modern religion.

The Macy conferences are mentioned as a great collection of minds sharing cutting-edge ideas since 1942. “Among the several dozen visionaries invited over the nine years of the conference were Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Lawrence Frank, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, and Arturo Rosenblueth. This stellar congregation later became known as the cybernetic group for the perspective they pioneered- cybernetics, the art and science of control.”

The book closes with a few pages on being a god. The godlike feeling one experiences when poking around in the world of artificial evolution or life mimicking games like SimCity is mentioned many times. It seems that god has taken on new meaning, acceptable to be bandied about haphazardly in the scientific community: to be the creator of a world, virtual or ecological. This is the last piece of evidence that shows where these peoples’ hearts and minds are. They see themselves as gods. All the matter of the world, including you and I, are to be subsumed into their artificial control mechanisms.

The constant restating of the title, “out of control”, is counter positioned to a less overtly stated “under control”. The entire book vacillates between the two contrary positions. Even when expressing such concepts of control being “bottom up” or as a shepherd herding sheep, control by any other name is still control.

Exceptional Excerpts

It’s an election hall of idiots, for idiots, and by idiots, and it works marvelously. This is the true nature of democracy and of all distributed governance. At the close of the curtain, by the choice of the citizens, the swarm takes the queen and thunders off in the direction indicated by mob vote.

Guiding a swarm system can only be done as a shepherd would drive a herd: by applying force at crucial leverage points, and by subverting the natural tendencies of the system to new ends (use the sheep’s fear of wolves to gather them with a dog that wants to chase sheep).

In the human management of distributed control, hierarchies of a certain type will proliferate rather than diminish. That goes especially for distributed systems involving human nodes-such as huge global computer networks.

One of the tenets in the gospel of American pop culture is the widely held creed of transferability of mind. People declare that mind transfer is a swell idea, or an awful idea, but not that it is a wrong idea. In modern folk-belief, mind is liquid to be poured from one vessel to another. From that comes Terminator 2, Frankenstein, and a huge chunk of science fiction.

Many evolutionary biologists in the last century such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin, too, understood it intuitively-that the physical environment shapes its creatures and the creatures shape their environment, and if considered in the long view, the environment is the organism and the organism is the environment. Alfred Lotka, an early theoretical biologist, wrote in 1925, ‘It is not so much the organism or the species that evolves, but the entire system, species plus environment. The two are inseparable.’ The entire system of evolving life and planet was coevolution, the dance of the chameleon on the mirror.

Chess, elections, races, and poker are zero-sum games: the winner’s earnings are deducted from the loser’s assets. Natural wilderness, the economy, a mind, and networks on the other hand, are nonzero-sum games. Wolverines don’t have to lose just because bears live.

Although some links become hardwired and nearly symbiotic, most species are promiscuous in evolutionary time, shacking up with a different partners as the partners themselves evolve.

Cybernetics. As has been noted by many writers, cybernetics derives from the Greek for ‘steersman’-a pilot that steers a ship. Wiener, who worked with servomechanisms during World War II, was struck by their uncanny ability to aid steering of all types. What is usually not mentioned is that cybernetics was also used in ancient Greece to denote a governor of a country. Plato attributes Socrates as saying, ‘Cybernetics saves the souls, bodies, and material possessions from the gravest dangers,’ a statement that encompasses both shades of the word. Government (and that meant self-government to these Greeks) brought order by fending off chaos. Also, one had to actively steer to avoid sinking the ship. The Latin corruption of kubernetes is the derivation of governor, which Watt picked up for his cybernetic flyball.

Warshall sighed, ‘It would have been nice if somewhere there was a database of all known species listing their food and energy requirements, their habitat, their waste products, their companion species, their breeding needs, etc., but there isn’t anything remotely like that. We know very little about even common species. In fact, what this project shows is how little we know about any species.’

One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. A company that was pure network would have the following traits: distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive.

Digital Money-Everyday digital cash replaces batch-mode paper money.

My friend Barlow-at least Barlow’s disembodied voice-has already connected his everything to his everything. He lives and works in a true network economy. He gives away information-for free-and he is given money. The more he gives away, the more money he gets. He had something to say about the emerging network in an e-mail message to me:

Computers-the gizmos themselves-have far less to do with techie enthusiasm than some half-understood resonance to The Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating the Planetary Mind. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder to his Omega Point might be built by engineers and not mystics.

We humans will be unconscious of what the global mind ponders. This is not because we are not smart enough, but because the design of a mind does not allow the parts to understand the whole. The particular thoughts of the global mind-and its subsequent actions- will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism.

Our primary difficulty in comprehending the global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central ‘I’ to appeal to. No headquarters, no head. That will be most exasperating and discouraging. In the past, adventurous men have sought the holy grail, or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or the secrets of the pyramids. In the future the quest will be to find the ‘I am’ of the global mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls will lose all they have searching for it-and many will be the theories of where the global mind’s ‘I am’ hides. But it will be a never-ending quest like the others before it.

The cypherpunks also talk about using the economics of the Net for the reverse side of encryption: to crack codes. They could assemble a people’s supercomputer by networking together a million Macintoshes, each one computing a coordinated little part of a huge, distributed decryption program. In theory, such a decentralized parallel computer would in sum be the most powerful computer we can now imagine-far greater than the centralized NSA’s.

I asked Chaum what banks think of digital cash. His company has visited or been visited by most of the big players. Do they say, gee, this threatens our business? Or do they say, hmm, this strengthens us, makes us more efficient? Chaum: ‘Well, it ranges. I find the corporate planners in $1,000 suits and private dining halls are more interested in it than the lower-level systems guys because the planners’ job is to look to the future.

Eric Hughes, maintainer of the cypherpunks’ mailing list, says, ‘The Really Big Question is, how large can the flow of money on the nets get before the government requires reporting of every small transaction? Because if the flows can get large enough, past some threshold, then there might be enough aggregate money to provide an economic incentive for a transnational service to issue money, and it wouldn’t matter what one government does.’

Danny Hillis proposes setting up a swarm system which would try to evolve better software to steer a plane, while tiny parasitic programs would try to crash it. As his experiments have shown, parasites encourage a faster convergence to an error-free, robust software navigation program.

Human history is a story of cultural takeover. As societies develop, their collective skill of learning and teaching steadily expropriates similar memory and skills transmitted by human biology.

No one has yet witnessed, in the fossil record, in real life, or in computer life, the exact transitional moments when natural selection pumps its complexity up to the next level.

‘Five years ago,’ recalls Kauffman, ‘Brian Goodwin [an evolutionary biologist] and I were sitting in some World War I bunker in northern Italy during a rainstorm talking about autocatalytic sets. I had this profound sense then that there’s a deep similarity between natural selection-what Darwin told us-and the wealth of nations-what Adam Smith told us. Both have an invisible hand. But I didn’t know how to proceed any further until I saw Walter Fontana’s work with autocatalytic sets, which is gorgeous.’

I was asking about predicting because a prediction is a form of control. It is a type of control particularly suited to distributed systems. By anticipating the future, a vivisystem can shift its stance to preadapt to it, and in this way control its destiny.

We have the technology now to forecast many social phenomena…

The Limits to Growth model is woven out of an impressive web of ‘stocks’ and ‘flows.’ Stocks (money, oil, food, capital, etc.) flow into certain nodes (representing general processes such as farming), where they trigger outflows of other stocks. For instance money, land, fertilizer, and labor flow into farms to trigger an outflow of raw food.

The all-star lineup who presented papers at the 1959 conference was a public rendezvous of scientists who had been convening in smaller meetings since 1942. These intimate, invitation-only gatherings were organized by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and became known as the Macy Conferences.

Among the several dozen visionaries invited over the nine years of the conference were Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Lawrence Frank, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, and Arturo Rosenblueth. This stellar congregation later became known as the cybernetic group for the perspective they pioneered- cybernetics, the art and science of control.

Table of Contents

• 01: THE MADE AND THE BORN
• 02: THE HIVE MIND
• 03: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE
• 04: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY
• 05: COEVOLUTION
• 06: THE NATURAL FLUX
• 07: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL
• 08: CLOSED SYSTEMS
• 09: POP GOES THE BIOSHPERE
• 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
• 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS
• 12: E-MONEY
• 13: GOD GAMES
• 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM
• 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION
• 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL
• 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE
• 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
• 19: POSTDARWINISM
• 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS
• 21: RISING FLOW
• 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY
• 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES
• 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD

· Reviews:

page 3:

• “Out Of Control is the breakthrough concept of contemporary science and technology. It links the best of cutting-edge biology, computer science, economics, organizational theory, art, and much more. No longer just the best journalist on the subject, Kevin Kelly with this book is actively shaping the intellectual implosion.” _Stewart Brand

page 4:

• Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: Is the flag waving? or the wind? or the mind? Richard Thieme in Enculturation, vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 2000

· Self selected quotes:

page 5:

• The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.

• There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.

• A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don’t happen as often.

• A system is anything that talks to itself.

• The future of machines is biology.

page 6:

• One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.

• Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge.

• There’s nothing more addictive than being a god.

• It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.

• Animals are robots that work. Toons are simply robots without hard bodies.

page 8:

• No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.

• This is absurd to me. How is getting everyone wired up (via smart phones currently) to a central authority, even if that authority comes from “the crowd” (directed by the controllers of the network who censor and promote at their whim) not authority?

· Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN

· Chapter 2: HIVE MIND

page 27:

• How bees select new sites. Scouts look around and select a site and then dance, more theatrically for the best sites. Other bees check out the site of the most frantic dancer and then join in the dance if they approve. The more dancers the more bees check out the new location the more dancers. This reminds me of voting on social media. The more votes something has the higher it appears in a feed, the higher it is in a feed the more visible it is and the more votes it gets.

• It’s an election hall of idiots, for idiots, and by idiots, and it works marvelously. This is the true nature of democracy and of all distributed governance. At the close of the curtain, by the choice of the citizens, the swarm takes the queen and thunders off in the direction indicated by mob vote.

page 30:

• Red and green paddles, determined by a computer vision system, allow the audience to play pong, “write” on the screen, and fly a simulator.

page 32:

• Wheeler held that this view of emergence was a way to reconcile the reduce- it-to-its parts approach with the see-it-as-a-whole approach. The duality of body/mind or whole/part simply evaporated when holistic behavior lawfully emerged from the limited behaviors of the parts.

page 33:

• The marvel of “hive mind” is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members.

page 34:

• …what is contained in a human that will not emerge until we are all interconnected by wires and politics? The most unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind.

page 39:

• The act of perceiving and the act of remembering are the same. Both assemble an emergent whole from many distributed pieces.

page 40:

• Distributed being and hive minds have their own rewards, such as greater immunity to disruption.

page 42:

• “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” wrote Norbert Wiener.

• One drop of water is not enough for a whirlpool to appear in,…

• Why not? Fill a microscopic sink and pull the drain plug and would you not get a microscopic whirlpool? A single molecule of H2O is not enough to form a whirlpool. Further, the whirlpool is not emergent from the water, it is emergent from the water, the forces acting on it, and its environment. Too large a drain and you won’t get a whirlpool. Too shallow a basin and you won’t get a whirlpool. Reduced gravity and you won’t get a whirlpool.

page 46:

• Life begets more life, wealth creates more wealth, information breeds more information, all bursting the original cradle. And with no bounds in sight.

• This seems ridiculous as well. In terms of wealth, it is limited by the available resource (on earth). All wealth is derived from nature. Further, it seems life would similarly be limited by available resources. The growth only holds within the environmental conditions.

• [swarms] don’t reckon individuals, so therefore individual variation and imperfection can be allowed.

• Allowed by whom? This seems to lead to the understanding that if you can create a “swarm” of cybernetically directed humans, a few rebels can be tolerated. Since this book was part of the inspiration for the Matrix movie, could Neo be the tolerated/allowed “imperfection”?

• Nonoptimal-Because they are redundant and have no central control, swarm systems are inefficient. Resources are allotted higgledy- piggledy, and duplication of effort is always rampant. What a waste for a frog to lay so many thousands of eggs for just a couple of juvenile offspring! Emergent controls such as prices in free-market economy-a swarm if there ever was one-tend to dampen inefficiency, but never eliminate it as a linear system can.

• Noncontrollable-There is no authority in charge. Guiding a swarm system can only be done as a shepherd would drive a herd: by applying force at crucial leverage points, and by subverting the natural tendencies of the system to new ends (use the sheep’s fear of wolves to gather them with a dog that wants to chase sheep). An economy can’t be controlled from the outside; it can only be slightly tweaked from within. A mind cannot be prevented from dreaming, it can only be plucked when it produces fruit. Wherever the word “emergent” appears, there disappears human control.

page 52:

• Nets have their own logic, one that is out-of-kilter to our expectations. And this logic will quickly mold the culture of humans living in a networked world.

• Global opinion polling in real-time 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ubiquitous telephones, asynchronous e-mail, 500 TV channels, video on demand: all these add up to the matrix for a glorious network culture, a remarkable hivelike being.

• As we wire ourselves up into a hivish network, many things will emerge that we, as mere neurons in the network, don’t expect, don’t understand, can’t control, or don’t even perceive. That’s the price for any emergent hive mind.

· Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE

page 55:

• Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Labs (SRL)

• “Dinosaur” like industrial robots that shoot flames, tear up pavement, etc. Light battle bots on steroids. All in the name of “art”.

page 56:

• That which isn’t made out of Obtainium is built from military surplus parts that Pauline buys by the truckload for $65 per pound from friendly downsizing military bases.

• Pauline: “These machines barely have enough control to be useful, but that’s all the control that we need.”

• At the ground-breaking ceremony for the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pauline was invited to gather his machines…

page 57:

• Our shows are not for humans, they are for machines. We don’t ask how machines are going to entertain us. We ask, how can we entertain them? That’s what our shows are, entertainment for machines."

• But the humans are treated like biological machines in a hivemind. Is this a clever play on words that betrays the real goal: how to entertain humans into doing what the shepherd commands?

• I asked Pauline, “If machines are natural, do they have natural rights?” “Big machines have a lot of rights,” Pauline said.

page 68:

• Daniel Dennett is slowly persuading many psychologists that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the distributed network of many feeble, unconscious circuits.

page 72:

• In the human management of distributed control, hierarchies of a certain type will proliferate rather than diminish. That goes especially for distributed systems involving human nodes-such as huge global computer networks.

page 73:

• Brooks said, “and often actually use the world as the communication medium between distributed parts." Rather than being notified by another module of what it expects to happen, a reflex module senses what happened directly in the world. It then sends its message to the others by acting upon the world.

page 76:

• five lessons from building mobots. What you want is:

1. Incremental construction-grow complexity, don’t install it
2. Tight coupling of sensors to actuators-reflexes, not thinking
3. Modular independent layers-the system decomposes into viable subunits
4. Decentralized control-no central planning
5. Sparse communication-watch results in the world, not wires

page 79:

• One of the tenets in the gospel of American pop culture is the widely held creed of transferability of mind. People declare that mind transfer is a swell idea, or an awful idea, but not that it is a wrong idea. In modern folk-belief, mind is liquid to be poured from one vessel to another. From that comes Terminator 2, Frankenstein, and a huge chunk of science fiction.

• For better or worse, in reality we are not centered in our head. We are not centered in our mind. Even if we were, our mind has no center, no “I.” Our bodies have no centrality either. Bodies and minds blur across each others’ supposed boundaries. Bodies and minds are not that different from one another. They are both composed of swarms of sublevel things.

page 81:

• in 1954 D.O. Hebbs built a dark, soundproof cell at McGill University in Montreal.

• …laid in bed, immobile, for two to three days.

• Early isolation tank. Is this the roots of the MKUltra experiments?

• Hebb’s experiments were taken up a few years later by Jack Vernon, who built a “black room” in the basement of the psychology hall at Princeton.

page 84:

• Pauline responded in words that I hope echo throughout this book: “I think humans will accumulate artificial and mechanical abilities, while machines will accumulate biological intelligence. This will make the confrontation between the two even less decisive and less morally clear than it is now.”

· Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY

page 101:

• Don’t try to make a functioning mechanical system all at once, in one glorious act of assembly. You have to first make a working system that serves as a platform for the system you really want.

· Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION

page 103:

• What color is a chameleon placed on the mirror?

• Stewart Brand posed that riddle to Gregory Bateson in the early 1970s. Bateson, together with Norbert Wiener, was a founding father of the modern cybernetic movement. Bateson had a most orthodox Oxford education and a most unorthodox career. He filmed Balinese dance in Indonesia; he studied dolphins; he developed a useful theory of schizophrenia. While in his sixties, he taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where his eccentric brilliant views on mental health and evolutionary systems caught the attention of holistically minded hippies.

• Stewart Brand, a student of Bateson’s, was himself a legendary promoter of cybernetic holism. Brand published his chameleon koan in his Whole Earth Catalog, in 1974.

page 108:

• Stewart Brand majored in biology at Stanford, where his teacher was Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist.

• In 1952, W. Ross Ashby, a cybernetician interested in how machines could learn, wrote, “[An organism’s gene-pattern] does not specify in detail how a kitten shall catch a mouse, but provides a learning mechanism and a tendency to play, so that it is the mouse which teaches the kitten the finer points of how to catch mice.”

page 109:

• “Coevolution is reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species,” says John Thompson in Interaction and Coevolution.

page 109:

• Biochemist James Lovelock writes of this embrace, “The evolution of a species is inseparable from the evolution of its environment. The two processes are tightly coupled as a single indivisible process.”

• Brand picked up the term and launched a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly.

• Biologist P. W. Price estimated that over 50 percent of today’s species are parasitic. (The figure has risen from the deep paleologic past and is expected to keep rising.)

page 110:

• In his magazine CoEvolution Brand began collecting stories of coevolutionary games. One of the most illustrative examples of alliance making in nature is the following:

• In eastern Mexico live a variety of acacia shrubs and marauding ants. Most acacias have thorns, bitter leaves, and other protection against a hungry world. One, the “swollen thorn acacia,” learned to encourage a species of ant to monopolize it as a food source and kill or run off all other predators. Enticements gradually included nifty water-proof swollen thorns to live in, handy nectar fountains, and special ant-food buds at the leaf tips. The ants, whose interests increasingly coincided with the acacia’s, learned to inhabit the thorns, patrol the acacia day and night, attack every acacia-hungry organism, and even prune away invading plants such as vines and tree seedlings that might shade Mother Acacia. The acacia gave up its bitter leaves, sharp thorns, and other devices and now requires the acacia-ant for survival. And the ant colonies can no longer live without the acacia. Together they’re unbeatable.

• Parasitism (and symbiosis) are increasing. In the future there will be even more, an entire planet full of coevolved species. What will humans look like in this world?

• Usually one species benefits more in symbiosis (approaching parasitism) but both benefit some. Is this justification for the oligarchy? “We give the people jobs and grease the wheels of economy for everyone and get more benefit, but that is just ’natural’. Along with all the references to Darwin, Brand, Bateson, McLuhan, etc, this book so far feels like exactly that - oligarchical justification.

• Paul Ehrlich sees coevolution pushing two competitors into “obligate cooperation.” He wrote, “It’s against the interests of either predator or prey to eliminate the enemy.”

• Coevolution = guilds in permaculture.

page 116:

• Many evolutionary biologists in the last century such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin, too, understood it intuitively-that the physical environment shapes its creatures and the creatures shape their environment, and if considered in the long view, the environment is the organism and the organism is the environment. Alfred Lotka, an early theoretical biologist, wrote in 1925, “It is not so much the organism or the species that evolves, but the entire system, species plus environment. The two are inseparable.” The entire system of evolving life and planet was coevolution, the dance of the chameleon on the mirror.

page 118:

• He wrote, “The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent part.” Lovelock called this view Gaia. Together with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, the two published the view in 1972 so that it could be critiqued on scientific terms. Lovelock says, “The Gaia theory is a bit stronger than coevolution,” at least as biologists use the word.

page 122:

• The bottomless complexity which grows out of such simple rules intrigued John von Neumann, the mathematician who developed programmable logic for a computer in the early 1940s, and along with Wiener and Bateson launched the field of cybernetics.

• Von Neumann invented a mathematical theory of games. He defined a game as a conflict of interests resolved by the accumulative choices players make while trying to anticipate each other. He called his 1944 book (coauthored by economist Oskar Morgenstern) Theory of Games and Economic Behavior because he perceived that economies possessed a highly coevolutionary and gamelike character, which he hoped to illuminate with simple game dynamics.

• Researchers at the U.S. government-funded RAND corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, extended von Neumann’s initial work and eventually catalogued four basic varieties of mutual second-guessing games. Each variety had a different structure of rewards for winning, losing, or drawing. The four simple games were called “social dilemmas” in the technical literature, but could be thought of as the four building blocks of complicated coevolutionary games. They were: Chicken, Stag Hunt, Deadlock, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

• Chicken is the game played by teenage daredevils. Two cars race toward a cliff’s edge; the driver who jumps out last, wins. Stag Hunt is the dilemma faced by a bunch of hunters who must cooperate to kill a stag, but may do better sneaking off by themselves to hunt a rabbit if no one cooperates. Do they gamble on cooperation (high payoff) or defection (low, but sure payoff)? Deadlock is a boring game where mutual defection pays best. The last one, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, is the most illuminating, and became the guinea pig model for over 200 published social psychology experiments in the late 1960s.

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma, invented in 1950 by Merrill Flood at RAND, is a game for two separately held prisoners who must independently decide whether to deny or confess to a crime. If both confess, each will be fined. If neither confesses, both go free. But if only one should confess, he is rewarded while the other is fined. Cooperation pays, but so does betrayal, if played right.

page 124:

• Chess, elections, races, and poker are zero-sum games: the winner’s earnings are deducted from the loser’s assets. Natural wilderness, the economy, a mind, and networks on the other hand, are nonzero-sum games. Wolverines don’t have to lose just because bears live.

• I argue the economy and natural wilderness are zero-sum. In the economy and wilderness alike there is wealth limited by the resources on earth. Eventually all of these resources will be deployed and the only way to accumulate more wealth is at the expense of others. When approaching from a currency standpoint, the same idea applies with the exception that currency is fiat. The issuance of new currency devalues all existing currency. The wolverines most certainly have access to less resource because bears live. This isn’t to say there aren’t intricate balances and the wolverines would be better off without bears, but everything on earth is zero-sum. Ideas, and the sharing of ideas, is not zero-sum. Trading ideas nets us both a gain.

· Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX

page 132:

• We see, too, that human institutions-those ecologies of human toil and dreams-must also be in a state of constant flux and reinvention, yet we are always surprised or resistant when change begins. (Ask a hip postmodern American if he would like to change the 200-year-old rule book known as the Constitution. He’ll suddenly become medieval.)

• Change, not redwood groves or parliaments, is eternal. The questions become: What controls change? How can we direct it? Can the distributed life in such loose associations as governments, economies, and ecologies be controlled in any meaningful way? Can future states of change even be predicted?

page 133:

• This convergence [of old garden, swamp, etc, all converge to northern hardwood] led ecologists to the notion of an omega point, or a climax community.

page 136:

• Although some links become hardwired and nearly symbiotic, most species are promiscuous in evolutionary time, shacking up with a different partners as the partners themselves evolve.

• In this light of evolutionary time, ecology can be seen as one long dress rehearsal. It’s an identity workshop for biological forms. Species try out different roles with one another and explore partnerships. Over time, roles and performance are assimilated by an organism’s genes. In poetic language, the gene is reluctant to assimilate into its code any interactions and functions directly based upon its neighbors’ ways because the neighborhood can shift at any evolutionary moment.It pays to stay flexible, unattached, and uncommitted.

page 149:

• First, Copernicus eliminated the discontinuity between the terrestrial world and the rest of the physical universe. Next, Darwin eliminated the discontinuity between human beings and the rest of the organic world. And most recently, Freud eliminated the discontinuity between the rational world of the ego and the irrational world of the unconscious.

• No longer do we have to choose between the living or the mechanical because that distinction is no longer meaningful.

page 150:

• As Ehrlich hints, wild life resembles that strange loop of the Uroborus biting its tail, consuming itself. But in truth, wild life is the far stranger loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly larger mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.

· Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL

page 160:

• Norbert Wiener was thus born into high expectations. By the age of three he was reading. At 18 he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard. By 19 he was studying metamathematics with Bertrand Russell. Come 30 he was a professor of mathematics at MIT…

• In 1948 he published a book for nonspecialists on the feasibility and philosophy of machines that learn. The book was initially published by a French publisher (for roundabout reasons) and went through four printings in the United States in its first six months, selling 21,000 copies in the first decade of its influence-a best seller then. It rivaled the success of the Kinsey Report on sexual behavior, issued the same year. As a Business Week reporter observed in 1949, “In one respect Wiener’s book resembles the Kinsey Report: the public response to it is as significant as the content of the book itself."

• What a connection… Wiener and Kinsey.

page 161:

• Cybernetics. As has been noted by many writers, cybernetics derives from the Greek for “steersman”-a pilot that steers a ship. Wiener, who worked with servomechanisms during World War II, was struck by their uncanny ability to aid steering of all types. What is usually not mentioned is that cybernetics was also used in ancient Greece to denote a governor of a country. Plato attributes Socrates as saying, “Cybernetics saves the souls, bodies, and material possessions from the gravest dangers,” a statement that encompasses both shades of the word. Government (and that meant self-government to these Greeks) brought order by fending off chaos. Also, one had to actively steer to avoid sinking the ship. The Latin corruption of kubernetes is the derivation of governor, which Watt picked up for his cybernetic flyball.

• The managerial nature of the word has further antecedent to French speakers. Unbeknownst to Wiener, he was not the first modern scientist to reactivate this word. Around 1830 the French physicist Ampere (whence we get the electrical term amperes, and its shorthand “amp”) followed the traditional manner of French grand scientists and devised an elaborate classification system of human knowledge. Ampere designated one branch the realm of “Noological Sciences,” with the subrealm of Politics. Within political science, immediately following the sub-subcategory of Diplomacy, Ampere listed the science of Cybernetics, that is, the science of governance.

• Wiener had in mind a more explicit definition, which he stated boldly in the full title of his book, Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine. As Wiener’s sketchy ideas were embodied by later computers and fleshed out by other theorists, cybernetics gradually acquired more of the flavor of Ampere’s governance, but without the politics.

page 162:

• In implementation, a feeler gauge measures the thickness of the just-made sheet metal (the output) and sends this signal back to a servo-motor controlling the single variable of traction, the variable to affect the steel last, just before the rollers. By this meager, solo loop, the whole caboodle is regulated. Since all the factors are interrelated, if you can keep just one of them directly linked to the finished thickness, then you can indirectly control them all.

• The cybernetic principle the engineers discovered is a general one: if all the variables are tightly coupled, and if you can truly manipulate one of them in all its freedoms, then you can indirectly control all of them. This principle plays on the holistic nature of systems. As Latil writes, “The regulator is unconcerned with causes; it will detect the deviation and correct it. The error may even arise from a factor whose influence has never been properly determined hitherto, or even from a factor whose very existence is unsuspected.” How the system finds agreement at any one moment is beyond human knowing, and more importantly, not worth knowing.

page 163:

• Frederick Hayek and the influential Austrian school of economics had dissected the attempts to trace out the routes of feedback in complex networks and called the effort futile. Their argument became known as the “calculation argument.” In a command economy, such as the then embryonic top-down economy installed by Lenin in Russia, resources were allotted by calculation, tradeoffs, and controlled lines of communication. Calculating, even less controlling, the multiple feedback factors among distributed nodes in an economy was as unsuccessful as the engineer’s failure in chasing down the fleeing interlinked factors in a steel mill. In a vacillating economy it is impossible to calculate resource allotment. Instead, Hayek and other Austrian economists of the 1920s argued that a single variable-the price-is used to regulate all the other variables of resource allotment. That way, one doesn’t care how many bars of soap are needed per person, or whether trees should be cut for houses or for books. These calculations are done in parallel, on the fly, from the bottom up, out of human control, by the interconnected network itself. Spontaneous order.

page 168:

• The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control. The gift is an irreversible transfer from ourselves to the second selves.

· Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS

page 187:

• “The thing we didn’t realize at first,” said Tony Burgess, “was that soils are alive. They breathe as fast as you do. You have to treat soil as a living organism. Ultimately it controls the biota.”

page 188:

• Warshall sighed, “It would have been nice if somewhere there was a database of all known species listing their food and energy requirements, their habitat, their waste products, their companion species, their breeding needs, etc., but there isn’t anything remotely like that. We know very little about even common species. In fact, what this project shows is how little we know about any species.”

page 190:

• One unexpected consequence of living in a small materially closed system is that rather than water becoming precious, it’s in virtual abundance. In about one week 100 percent of the water is recycled, cleansed by microbiological activity in wetland treatment areas. When you use more water, it just goes around the loop a little faster.

· Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSHPERE

page 214:

• What we know as life today will remain the ultimate technology because of its autonomy-it goes by itself, and more importantly, it learns by itself. Ultimate technologies, of any sort, inevitably win the allegiance of engineers, corporations, bankers, visionaries, and pioneers-all the agents who once were thought of as pure life’s biggest threat.

• In the factories of bioengineering firms and in the chips of neural-net computers, the organic and the machine are merging.

· Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

page 220:

• “You know the premise of virtual reality-to put you inside a computer world,” says Mark Weiser. “Well, I want to do the opposite. I want to put the computer world around you on the outside. In the future, the smartness of computers will surround you.”

page 236:

• Biology is an inevitability-almost a mathematical certainty-that all complexity will drift towards. It is an omega point.

· Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS

page 237:

• John Perry Barlow’s exact mission in life is hard to pin down.

• I know Barlow from an experimental computer meeting place, the WELL, a place where no one has a body. There, he plays the role of “hippie mystic.”

page 238:

• Barlow moved from the emptiness of Wyoming and is now homesteading in the vaster wilds of cyberspace, the frontier where our previous conversation technically took place. As originally envisioned by writer William Gibson, cyberspace encompasses the realm of large electronic networks which are invisibly spreading “underneath” the industrial world in a kind of virtual sprawl. In the near future, according to Gibson’s science-fiction, cyberspace explorers would “jack in” to a borderless maze of electronic data banks and video-gamelike worlds. A cyberspace scout sits in a dark room and then plugs a modem directly into his brain.

page 244:

• One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. A company that was pure network would have the following traits: distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive.

page 256:

• Digital Money-Everyday digital cash replaces batch-mode paper money.

page 257:

• My friend Barlow-at least Barlow’s disembodied voice-has already connected his everything to his everything. He lives and works in a true network economy. He gives away information-for free-and he is given money. The more he gives away, the more money he gets. He had something to say about the emerging network in an e-mail message to me:

• Computers-the gizmos themselves-have far less to do with techie enthusiasm than some half-understood resonance to The Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating the Planetary Mind. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder to his Omega Point might be built by engineers and not mystics.

• This quote of Barlow’s is mind boggling. The Great Work = hardwiring collective consciousness, Planetary Mind. Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. It is the masonic hivemind wrapped up in one neat little sound-byte.

• We humans will be unconscious of what the global mind ponders. This is not because we are not smart enough, but because the design of a mind does not allow the parts to understand the whole. The particular thoughts of the global mind-and its subsequent actions- will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism.

• I bet the designers/oligarchy will understand, and steer, this global mind…

• Our primary difficulty in comprehending the global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central “I” to appeal to. No headquarters, no head. That will be most exasperating and discouraging. In the past, adventurous men have sought the holy grail, or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or the secrets of the pyramids. In the future the quest will be to find the “I am” of the global mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls will lose all they have searching for it-and many will be the theories of where the global mind’s “I am” hides. But it will be a never-ending quest like the others before it.

• There is no one behind the curtain. Your [conspiracy] theories are nonsense. Ignore that oligarchical touch.

· Chapter 12: E-MONEY

page 259:

• Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins

page 261:

• [Tim May, a retired Intel physicist] warned of the coming “specter of crypto anarchy”:

…The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.

Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of government.

• The reason crypto anarchy hasn’t broken out yet, according to May, is that the military has a monopoly on the key knowledge of encryption

• Very little developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)-whose mandate it is to develop crypto systems-has ever trickled down for civilian use

page 263:

• another tool for distributed computing is born

• Posting anything anonymously to the Net is quite hard: the nature of the Net is to track everything infallibly, and to duplicate items promiscuously. It is theoretically trivial to monitor transmission nodes in order to backtrack a message to its source.

page 266:

• (The cypherpunks also talk about using the economics of the Net for the reverse side of encryption: to crack codes. They could assemble a people’s supercomputer by networking together a million Macintoshes, each one computing a coordinated little part of a huge, distributed decryption program. In theory, such a decentralized parallel computer would in sum be the most powerful computer we can now imagine-far greater than the centralized NSA’s.)

• Decrypt, decentralized, economy… like bitcoin?

page 269:

• When bandwidth becomes free and entire gigabytes of information are swapped around the clock, what you don’t want to communicate becomes the most difficult chore. Encryption systems and their ilk are technologies of disconnection.

page 271:

• The Videocipher encryption system, used to meter satellite-delivered TV programs such as HBO and Showtime, was compromised within weeks of its introduction. Despite claims by the meter’s manufacturer that the encrypto-metering chip was unhackable

• But I thought encryption was unbreakable and “always wins”?

• No system is hack-proof. But disruptions of an encrypted system require deliberate creative energy.

page 277:

• Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge

• We have a hint of digital cash in credit cards and ATMs. Like most of my generation, I get the little cash I use at an ATM, not having been inside a bank in years. On average, I use less cash every month. High-octane executives fly around the country purchasing everything on the go-meals, rooms, cabs, supplies, presents-carrying no more than $50 in their wallets. Already, the cashless society is real for some.

page 281:

• Because of its cheaper costs, the Danish government is making plans to switch from the Dencard to the Dencoin…

page 282:

• I asked Chaum what banks think of digital cash. His company has visited or been visited by most of the big players. Do they say, gee, this threatens our business? Or do they say, hmm, this strengthens us, makes us more efficient? Chaum: “Well, it ranges. I find the corporate planners in $1,000 suits and private dining halls are more interested in it than the lower-level systems guys because the planners’ job is to look to the future.

page 285:

• [e-money] allows recurring expenses to be paid, in Alvin Toffler’s phrase, by “bleeding electronically from one’s bank account in tiny droplets, on a minute-by-minute basis.” Your e-money account pays for each phone call as soon as you hang up, or-how about this?-as you are talking. Payment coincides with use.

• Paving the way for a no-ownership society.

page 286:

• We are headed toward programmed capitalism.

page 287:

• Eric Hughes, maintainer of the cypherpunks’ mailing list, says, “The Really Big Question is, how large can the flow of money on the nets get before the government requires reporting of every small transaction? Because if the flows can get large enough, past some threshold, then there might be enough aggregate money to provide an economic incentive for a transnational service to issue money, and it wouldn’t matter what one government does."

· Chapter 13: GOD GAMES

page 292:

• Kids who become comfortable relating to machines as if they behave organically, later expect the same from machines at work when they are older. MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle describes the readiness of children to perceive complicated devices as organic as an affinity for a “second self”-a projection of themselves onto their machines. Toy worlds certainly encourage that personification.

• SimEarth has no narrative or fixed goals-a nonstarter for many adults. Kids, on the other hand, fall into the game without hesitation or instruction. “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it,” declared Stewart Brand in 1968, who had personal computers (a term he later coined) and other vivisystems in mind when he said it.

page 298:

• the Wall Street Journal headlined virtual reality as “An Electronic LSD."

• In the Entertainment & Information Systems Group at the MIT Media Lab, Andy Lippman is developing an approach to television transmission that “lets the audience drive.”

page 317:

• The slipperiness between real life and virtual life is one of MUD’s chief attractions, particularly for teenage kids who are wrestling with their identity.

· Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM

• Library of Jorge Luis Borges and the evolution of books or art or creatures is a similarly infinite space. Using algorithms and selection to guide evolution may lead to novel designs previously beyond imagination.

· Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION

page 353:

• “It seems to be a universal property of life that all successful systems attract parasites," Ray reminds me. In nature parasites are so common that hosts soon coevolve immunity to them. Then eventually the parasites coevolve strategies to circumvent that immunity. And eventually the hosts coevolve defenses to repel them again. In reality, these actions are not alternating steps but two constant forces pressing against one another.

page 373:

• But is this really evolution? Is this the same vital spirit that brought us insulin, eyelashes, and raccoons in the first place? It is. “We approach evolution with a capital D for Darwin,” Gerald Joyce told me. “But since the selection pressure is determined by us, rather than nature, we call this directed evolution.”

• Directed evolution is another name for supervised learning, another name for the Method of traversing the Library, another name for breeding. Instead of letting the selection emerge, the breeder directs the choice of varieties of dogs, pigeons, pharmaceuticals, or graphic images.

page 376:

• David Ackley and Michael Littman, both of Bellcore’s Cognitive Science Research Group, set out to fabricate a non-Darwinian evolutionary system in a computer. They chose a most logical alternative: Lamarckian evolution-the inheritance of acquired traits.

page 382:

• Danny Hillis proposes setting up a swarm system which would try to evolve better software to steer a plane, while tiny parasitic programs would try to crash it. As his experiments have shown, parasites encourage a faster convergence to an error-free, robust software navigation program.

• “This kind of software would be built in an environment full of thousands of full-time adversaries who specialize in finding out what’s wrong with it,” Hillis says, thinking of his parasites. “Whatever survives them has been tested ruthlessly.”

• A positive case for parasitism. Can this be used as justification of the oligarchy? The more parasitic/harsh an environment they create, only the stronger humans will survive?

• We trade power for control. For control junkies like us, this is a devil’s bargain.

· Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL

page 402:

• Behavior wants to be free, but to be of any use to humans, artificially generated behavior needs to be supervised or controlled.

page 407:

• “Out of control,” to be honest, is a great exaggeration of the state that our enlivened machines will take. They will remain indirectly under our influence and guidance but free of our domination.

• “Enlivened machines” taken to mean hive-mind humans gives this statement quite a sinister sound.

page 408:

• We do better with sheep where we have the notion of “shepherding.” When we herd a flock of sheep, we know we are not in complete authority, yet neither are we without control. Perhaps we will shepherd artificial lives.

· Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE

page 416:

• How to program happy accidents

• “Happy accidents” is a permaculture phrase.

· Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE

page 441:

• Robert Reid, at the University of Victoria, Canada, suggests that organisms can respond to environmental change with the following types of plasticity:

Morphological plasticity
(An organism can have more than one body form.)

Physiological adaptability
(An organism's tissues can modify themselves to accommodate stress.)

Behavioral flexibility
(An organism can do something new or move.)

Intelligent choice
(An organism can choose, or not, based on past experiences.)

Guidance from tradition
(An organism can be influenced or taught by others' experiences.)

page 442:

• Learning plus evolution is basically the recipe for culture.

page 443:

• Human history is a story of cultural takeover. As societies develop, their collective skill of learning and teaching steadily expropriates similar memory and skills transmitted by human biology.

• Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz sums up this hand-off:

• “The slow, steady, almost glacial growth of culture through the Ice Age altered the balance of selection pressures for the evolving Homo in such a way as to play a major directive role in his evolution. The perfection of tools, the adoption of organized hunting and gathering practices, the beginnings of true family organization, the discovery of fire, and most critically, though it is as yet extremely difficult to trace it out in any detail, the increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language, art, myth, ritual) for orientation, communication, and self-control all created for man a new environment to which he was then obliged to adapt.…We were obliged to abandon the regularity and precision of detailed genetic control over our conduct…”

page 444:

• Cultural learning rewires biology (to be precise, it allows biology to remodel itself) so that biology becomes susceptible to further culturalization.

• What evolution eventually found in the human brain was the complexity needed to peer ahead in anticipation and direct evolution’s course.

• The obvious course that evolution seems bound to hit sooner or later is self-direction. In self-direction, evolution itself chooses where it wants to evolve. This is not discussed by biologists.

page 449:

• The mystical archeologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote:

• Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more-it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow-this is what evolution is.

• Author Mary Midgley begins her slim and wonderful monograph Evolution as a Religion, with these four sentences: “The theory of evolution is not just an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins. Any narrative must have symbolic force. We are probably the first culture not to make that its main function.”

· Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM

page 456:

• No one has yet witnessed, in the fossil record, in real life, or in computer life, the exact transitional moments when natural selection pumps its complexity up to the next level.

page 460:

• Early geneticists like Mendel and William Bateson (Gregory Bateson’s father and the man who coined the term “genetics”) struggled with explanations of how variations arose and were passed on to descending generations.

page 462:

• In 1988 Harvard geneticist John Cairns and colleagues published evidence of environmentally induced mutations in the bacterium E. coli. Their claim was audacious: that under certain conditions the bacteria spontaneously crafted needed mutations in direct response to stresses in their environment.

page 470:

• “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic [gradual] evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid," says Stephen Stanley, evolutionary paleontologist.

page 476:

• The clues I present here of symbiosis, directed mutation, saltationism, and self-organization, are far from conclusive.

page 479:

Symbiosis-Easy informational swaps that permit convergence of distinct lines

Directed Mutations-Nonrandom mutation and crossover mechanisms with direct
communication from the environment

Saltationism-Clustering of functions, hierarchical levels of control,
modularization of components, and adaptive processes that modify a cluster all
at once

Self-organization-Development biased toward certain forms (like four wheels),
which become pervasive standards

· Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS

page 482:

• The regulatory gene set into motion the quintessential cybernetic dialogue: What controls genes? Other genes! And what controls those genes? Other genes! And what…

page 484:

• This set of math techniques that Kauffman, Holland and others devised is still without a proper name, but I’ll call it here “net math.” Some of the techniques are known informally as parallel distributed processing, Boolean nets, neural nets, spin glasses, cellular automata, classifier systems, genetic algorithms, and swarm computation.

page 490:

• “Five years ago,” recalls Kauffman, “Brian Goodwin [an evolutionary biologist] and I were sitting in some World War I bunker in northern Italy during a rainstorm talking about autocatalytic sets. I had this profound sense then that there’s a deep similarity between natural selection-what Darwin told us-and the wealth of nations-what Adam Smith told us. Both have an invisible hand. But I didn’t know how to proceed any further until I saw Walter Fontana’s work with autocatalytic sets, which is gorgeous.”

page 491:

• It [democracy] keeps subgroups from getting stuck on some locally good but globally inferior solution.” -Kauffman

page 493:

• Large networks with thousands of members adapted best with less than ten connections per member. Some nets peaked at less than two connections on average per node! A massively parallel system did not need to be heavily connected in order to adapt. Minimal average connection, done widely, was enough.

• To evolve most rapidly, add members but don’t increase average link rates. This result confirmed what Craig Reynolds had found in his synthetic flocks: you could load a flock up with more and more members without having to reconfigure its structure.

· Chapter 21: RISING FLOW

page 501:

• Our collective history as living beings is the story of a trickster who has found a foolproof gimmick and is pulling a fast one-and getting away with it so far. “Life might be defined as the art of getting away with it,” said the theoretical biologist C. H. Waddington.

• The continuing abuse of Darwin’s theories to bolster racism didn’t help the notion of evolutionary “progress” either.

• “Abuse”… what about the ordered list of races in Origin?

page 503:

• It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you make it.

page 509:

• Trends of Hyperevolution: Irreversibility, Increasing Complexity, Increasing Diversity, Increasing Numbers of Individuals, Increasing Specialization, Increasing Codependency, Increasing Evolvability.

page 514:

• Marvin Minsky noticed a similar power of change- which-changes-its-own-rules in the development of a child’s mind. Minsky: “A mind cannot really grow very much by only accumulating more and more new knowledge. It must also develop new and better ways to use what it already knows. That’s Papert’s Principle: Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows."

page 517:

• Life is the substrate for evolution. Life provides the raw material of organisms and species which allows evolution to evolve further. Without a parade of complexifying organisms, evolution cannot evolve more evolvability. So evolution generates complexity and diversity and millions of beings and thereby gives itself room to evolve into a more powerful evolver.

· Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY

page 519:

• I was asking about predicting because a prediction is a form of control. It is a type of control particularly suited to distributed systems. By anticipating the future, a vivisystem can shift its stance to preadapt to it, and in this way control its destiny.

page 533:

• Then I met the JPL honcho. He was nervously uncomfortable with my presence as a journalist. Why? my professor friend asked him. The simulation system was not classified; the results were published in the open literature. The JPL honcho replied in so many words: “Well, umm, you see, there is this war goin” on, and quite inadvertently the generic scenario we have been dry-running for the last year or so-a game we chose quite by accident, with no thought of prediction-is being played out now for real. When we first tested this computer algorithm we had to pick some scenario, any scenario, to try out the simulation with. So we picked a simulated desert war with…Iraq and Kuwait. Now we are fighting this simulation. We are a bit on the spot here. It’s a little sensitive. I’m sorry.”

• I did not get to see that war simulation. But about a year after the Gulf War’s end, I discovered that JPL was not the only place that serendipitously preenacted that war. The U.S. Military Central Command in Florida ran a second and more useful simulation of a desert battle prior to the war. Cynics interpret the fact that the U.S. government had simulated the Kuwait war twice beforehand as a mark of its imperialist and conspiratorial desire to have that war. I find the predictive scenarios spooky, strange, and instructional rather than diabolical.

• Color me cynical.

page 537:

• why not reconfigure a supercomputer to predict the rest of the world? If human society is just a large distributed system of agents and machines, why not construct an apparatus to forecast its future? Even a cursory study of past predictions shows why not. On the whole, cultural predictions historically have been worse than random guesses.

• Yet the DoD has a simulated world running right now.

page 538:

• We have the technology now to forecast many social phenomena…

page 541:

• To see into the future one must see into the past. A constant pulse of the past along feedback loops informs and controls the future.

page 546:

• Sitting on an airplane on the way home from a conference on “The Predicament of Mankind” held in Switzerland in 1970, Forrester began to sketch out the first equations that would form a model he called “World Dynamics.”

• The Club of Rome, the group that had sponsored the conference, came to MIT to evaluate the prototype Forrester had tinkered up. They were encouraged by what they saw. They secured funding from the Volkswagen Foundation to hire Forrester’s associate, Dennis Meadows, to develop the model to the next stage.

• Dennis Meadows, together with his wife Dana and two other coauthors, published the souped-up model, now filled with real data, as the “Limits to Growth."

page 547:

• The Limits to Growth model is woven out of an impressive web of “stocks” and “flows.” Stocks (money, oil, food, capital, etc.) flow into certain nodes (representing general processes such as farming), where they trigger outflows of other stocks. For instance money, land, fertilizer, and labor flow into farms to trigger an outflow of raw food.

• But money is a construct of man’s mind. The equivalence to inches that measure perceived value. Not that money is not a useful tool, but to say money etc flow into farms to produce food is disingenuous. Money is simply a measure of how much physical wealth flows into the farm. Congress can create as much money as it wants and the price-tag on land, fertilizer, labor etc will simply adjust. While land, fertilizer, and labor are limited by the amount available on earth, money is not. Consider houses used to cost a few thousand dollars. Today they cost a few hundred thousand dollars. The houses are “static” wealth created from earthly resources. Their value did not change. The amount of dollars in existence increased. Each additional dollar diluted the value of each previously existing dollar. Creating dollars does not change the affordability of houses (assuming the dilution of value per dollar and inflation of house price is balanced).

• At least the author recognizes Limits to Growth is not accurate.

· Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES

page 555:

• There they were: signal noise, mutations, executive function, self- organization. These words were spoken before the arrival of the DNA model, before digital technology, before departments of information management systems, and before complexity theory. It is difficult to imagine how alien and innovative these ideas were at the time.

• And how right. In one fell swoop 35 years ago, Dr. Weyl outlined my whole 1994 book on the breaking science of adaptive, distributed systems and the emergent phenomenon they engender.

• The all-star lineup who presented papers at the 1959 conference was a public rendezvous of scientists who had been convening in smaller meetings since 1942. These intimate, invitation-only gatherings were organized by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and became known as the Macy Conferences.

• Among the several dozen visionaries invited over the nine years of the conference were Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Lawrence Frank, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, and Arturo Rosenblueth. This stellar congregation later became known as the cybernetic group for the perspective they pioneered- cybernetics, the art and science of control.

page 556:

• In Steve Heims’s history of this influential circle of minds, The Cybernetics Group, he says of the Macy Conferences: “Even such anthropocentric social scientists as Mead and Frank became proponents for the mechanical level of understanding, wherein life is described as an entropy-reducing device and humans characterized as servomechanisms, their minds as computers, and social conflicts by mathematical game theory."

• At one conference McCulloch said, “I don’t particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all the animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun that he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily.

• A short-hand synopsis of Out of Control would be to say it is an update on the current state of cybernetic research.

page 559:

• This very book is full of holes as well as wholes. What I don’t know far exceeds what I know, but unfortunately, it is far easier to write about what I know than about what I don’t know. By the nature of ignorance, I am, of course, not aware of all the places and gaps where my own knowledge fails. Recognizing one’s own ignorance is quite a trick. That goes for science, too.

page 564:

• I often use the word “emergent” in this book. As used by the practitioners of complexity, it means something like: “that organization which is generated out of parts acting in concert.” But the meaning of emergent begins to disappear when scrutinized, leaving behind a vague impression that the word is, at bottom, meaningless. I tried substituting the word “happened” in every instance I used “emerged” and it seemed to work. Try it. Global order happens from local rules. What do we mean by emergent?

• And what is “complexity” anyway? I looked forward to the two 1992 science books identically titled Complexity, one by Mitch Waldrop and one by Roger Lewin, because I was hoping one or the other would provide me with a practical measurement of complexity. But both authors wrote books on the subject without hazarding a guess at a usable definition. How do we know one thing or process is more complex than another? Is a cucumber more complex that a Cadillac?

page 565:

• What, if any, are the distinctions between a simulation and a reality?

page 566:

• And what about God? God gets no honor in the academic papers of artificial lifers, evolutionary theorists, cosmologists, or simulationists. But much to my surprise, in private conversations these same researchers routinely speak of God. As used by scientists, God is a coolly nonreligious technical concept, closer to god-a local creator. When talking of worlds, both real and modeled, God is an almost algebraically precise notation standing for whatever “X” operating outside a world that has created that world. “Okay, you’re God…” says one computer scientist during a demo when he means that I’m now setting the rules for the world. God is a shorthand for the uncreated observer making things real. God thus becomes a scientific term, and a scientific concept. It doesn’t have the philosophical subtleties of prime cause, or the theological finery of Creator; it is merely a handy way to talk about the necessary initial conditions to run a world. So what are the requirements for godhood. What makes a good god?

page 569:

• Citation indexing is currently employed to map the breaking “hot” areas of science. Clusters of a few extremely highly cited papers can indicate a rapidly moving area of research.

• Or a self-referencing academic intelligence cell.

page 574:

• The ever insightful Bolter writes, “Critics accuse the computer of promoting homogeneity in our society, of producing uniformity through automation, but electronic reading and writing have just the opposite effect.” Computers promote heterogeneity, individualization, and autonomy.

• I am a critic then. The connectedness of the network is leading to cultural convergence.

• No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.

• For such a forward thinker, the author conceals that this entire book is about predicting network effects to afford a degree of control. One needn’t have a top down command hierarchy to have control. Again this book is evidence that the control of distributed systems has been on the mind of the oligarchy for a long time. The Starfish and the Spider is more evidence that decentralized systems CAN be controlled, but in a different way than centralized ones.

· Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD

page 576:

• The Nine Laws of God governing the incubation of somethings from nothing:

Distribute being
Control from the bottom up
Cultivate increasing returns
Grow by chunking
Maximize the fringes
Honor your errors
Pursue no optima; have multiple goals
Seek persistent disequilibrium
Change changes itself.

page 577:

• governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer.

• Or a worldwide network, a global commonwealth, steered by individuals working in parallel. Reminds me of Cecil Rhodes era early 20th century. Use Rhodes scholars deployed the world over to steer the world. Each agent working independently in parallel, but all focused on a long term goal. How they each moved toward the goal is not relevant, only that they move toward it. Ex: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford working to sculpt the USA. Rothschild, Warburg, and Schiff cultivating Europe. Some, unknown to me, Chinese oligarchs reforming China. No central authority, but by staying on the same page via global conferences, UN meetings, etc, all regions converge on a so-called new world order.

• In the Gospels, this principle of social dynamics is known as “To those who have, more will be given.”

• Them that has, gets.

• More justification of the oligarchy.

• Complexity is created, then, by assembling it incrementally from simple modules that can operate independently.

• Like I just mentioned: independent entities working in tandem the world over.

page 578:

• Diversity favors remote borders, the outskirts, hidden corners, moments of chaos, and isolated clusters. In economic, ecological, evolutionary, and institutional models, a healthy fringe speeds adaptation, increases resilience, and is almost always the source of innovations.

• Burning Man, hacker cons, hippies, anarchists, communists, permaculture. Use of the fringe to “adapt” society.

• Pursue no optima; have multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none of them can be served exclusively.

• Again supports a distributed network of individuals each implementing the Great Work in their own way.

• Change changes itself. Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do: they coordinate change.

· Bibliography

• Selections I am interested in reading:

• Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballentine, 1972.

A great book about the parallels between evolution and the mind. Of particular
interest is the chapter on "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution."

• Mind and Nature. Dutton, 1979.

Bateson stresses and stretches the similarities between mind and evolution in
nature.

• Bateson, Mary Catherine. With a Daughter’s Eye. William Morrow, 1984.

A memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson that is more than a memoir.
Written by daughter Mary Catherine, who is an intellectual of equal caliber to
her parents, this is a book of cybernetic family stories.

• Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred. Macmillian, 1987.

Interwoven between the final writings of Gregory Bateson--completed
posthumously by his daughter Mary Catherine--are dialogues between father and
daughter that convey Gregory's deep ideas of sacrament, communication,
intelligence, and being.

• Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General System Theory. George Braziller, 1968.

For many years this was the cybernetic bible.  It's still one of the few books
on whole systems or "systems in general." But it seems to me to be vague even
in the places I agree with. And Bertalanffy's signature idea--equifinality--I
think is wrong, or at least incomplete.

• Braitenberg, Valentino. Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. The MIT Press, 1984.

Shows how very simple circuits can produce the appearance of complicated
behaviors and movement. The experiments were eventually implemented in
tiny model cars.

• Brand, Stewart. II Cybernetic Frontiers. Random House, 1974.

A curious, small book that is pleasantly two-faced. One-half is the first
published report on computer hackers playing computer games, and the other is
Gregory Bateson talking about evolution and cybernetics.

• The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. Viking, 1987.

Although about media future, there are enough gems of insight about the future
of interconnectivity to keep this rich book ahead of the curve.

• Bruckman, Amy. “Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality.” Unpublished, 1992.

Excellent study of the new sociology of teenage obsessives building and playing
online MUDs.

• Chaum, David. “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.” Communications of the ACM, 28, 10; October 1985.

Highly detailed explanation of how an ID-less electronic money system works.
Very readable and visionary. A revised version is even clearer. Worth seeking
out.

• Colinvaux, Paul. Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. Princeton University Press,

Pure pleasure. Wonderful prose in a short book on the intricacies and
complexities of ecological relationships. Based on the author's own naturalist
experiences. Seeks to extract ecological principles. Best book I know of about
the cybernetic connectiveness of ecological systems.

• Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Collier Books, 1872.

The fountainhead of all books on evolution. Darwinism reigns in large part
because this book is so full of details, supporting evidence, and persuasive
arguments, all so well written, that other theories pale in comparison.

• Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976.

A wholly original idea (that genes replicate for their own reasons) and
brilliant exposition. Dawkins also introduces his equally original secondary
idea of memes (ideas that replicate for their own reasons).

• The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton, 1987.

Perhaps the most neodarwinian of all books. Dawkins presents the case for a
"universe without design" based entirely on natural selection. And he writes so
well and clearly that his forceful ideas are hard to argue with. At the very
least, this book is probably the best general introduction to orthodox
evolutionary theory anywhere. Full of clever examples.

• Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

The key essay in this compendium should be required reading for all Americans
graduating from high school. It's about the real, the fake, and the hyperreal.

• Foerster, Heinz von. “Circular Causality: Fragments.” Intersystems Publications, ca. 1980.

A short chronology of the Macy Conference and the participants at each meeting,
and an introduction to the seed idea of emergent "telos" or goal and purpose.

• Observing Systems. Intersystems Publications, 1981.

An anthology of von Foerster's papers. These range from mathematical treatise
to philosophical rants. All point to von Foerster's law that observers are part
of the system.

• Heims, Steve J. The Cybernetics Group. The MIT Press, 1991.

An incredibly thorough history of the agenda and flavor of the Macy Conferences
and vignettes of some of the illustrious participants.

• Kauffman, Stuart A. “Antichaos and Adaptation.” Scientific American, August

A very accessible summation of Kauffman's important major ideas, with nary an
equation in it. Read this one first.

• Koestler, Arthur. Janus: A Summing Up. Random House, 1978.

No critic of Darwin in modern times has been as literate or influential as the
brilliant Koestler. He spends the latter third of this book summing up his
objections to Darwinism, and offering some suggestions for alternatives. His
agile thinking on the subject loosened up my mind.

• Lipset, David. Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Prentice-Hall,

Bateson was interested in all things mysteriously complex. This biography of
him and his interests illuminates the range of complexities that might be
understood by looking at language, learning, the unconscious, and evolution.

• Margalef, Ramon. Perspectives in Ecological Theory. The University of Chicago Press, 1968.

The best treatment of ecosystems as cybernetic systems.

• McCulloch, Warren S. An Account of the First Three Conferences on Teleological Mechanisms. Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1947.

A dense summary of the first three Macy conferences, which covered an amazing
range of topics, all before they hit upon the term "cybernetics."

• Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1985.

In 270 very readable one-page essays, Minsky presents a society of ideas about
the society of mind. It is true Zen. Every page is a mob of astounding and
mind-changing ideas. And at every point in thinking about complex systems I
would come back to Minsky. This is the book that eventually led me to write
this book.

• Pimm, Stuart L. The Balance of Nature? University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Pimm treats food-webs as if they were cybernetic circuits, and out of both
simulated and real food-webs has derived some of the freshest ecological news
in a decade.

• Toffoli, Tommaso, and Norman Margolus. Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling. The MIT Press, 1987.

Tiny universes created by simple rules as a means to explore world-making.
This is the most comprehensive text on the science of cellular automata.

• Vernon, Jack A. Inside the Black Room. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1963.

An early follow-up to Hebb's original experiments in sensory deprivation at
McGill University, Vernon did his at Princeton University during the late '50s
in a soundproof room in the basement of the psychology building.

• Warrick, Patricia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. The MIT Press, 1980.

Science fiction has enlarged the thought space for imagining cybernetic
possibilities, which science proper can later fill.

• Weinberg, Gerald M., and Daniela Weinberg. General Principles of System Design. Dorset House Publishing, 1979.

Perhaps the best book on modern cybernetics. Works well in a classroom because
it includes cybernetic exercises.

• Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetic, or control and communication in the animal and the machine. John Wiley, 1961.

The germ of all cybernetic texts. Except for the preface, it is unexpectedly
technical and mathematical. But worth delving into.

• Zubek, John P., ed. Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen years of research. Meridth Corporation, 1969.

A compendium of survey articles reviewing the literature of sensory deprivation
up to 1969, when this topic was fashionable. The effects of SD are about as
elusive as those of hypnosis, and all the hopes for the field have evaporated
as uneven data piled up.

• Self-Organizing Systems. Pergamon Press, 1959.

The fascinating proceedings of a major conference with an all-star line up of
principal cybernetic pioneers. After each paper is a revealing record of the
panel discussions, where the true learning happens. Why don't other books do
this?

page 626:

'The Nine Laws of God': Kevin Kelly's Out of Control TechnoUtopic Program for a
WIRED World

by William Grassie
Temple University

• A critique of the book. Nice to see it included to give at least some space for the other side of the coin. The argument is rather moral and theologistic, but it does mention an oligarchically tiered society. One that was already present in the mid-90s affluent WIRED magazine readership juxtaposed against low income laborers toiling on the floor beneath the WIRED office.