Out of Control – Trance-Scripts

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Former Wired executive editor Kevin Kelly might say, however, that steampunk’s past and our own are not so different after all — not as divergent as Caius, in his youth, had supposed.

“The immense surrogate slave power released by the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution. But a second, more important revolution piggybacked on it unnoticed,” writes Kelly in his 1994 book Out of Control. Cybernetic self-regulation through feedback is for Kelly key to this revolution.

“There could not have been an industrial revolution without a parallel (though hidden) information revolution at the same time, launched by the rapid spread of the automatic feedback system. If a fire-eating machine, such as Watt’s engine, lacked self-control, it would have taken every working hand the machine displaced to babysit its energy. So information, and not coal itself, turned the power of machines useful and therefore desirable. The industrial revolution…was not a preliminary primitive stage required for the hatching of the more sophisticated information revolution. Rather, automatic horsepower was, itself, the first phase of the knowledge revolution. Gritty steam engines, not teeny chips, hauled the world into the information age” (Kelly 115).

Circles, rotations, revolutions. “Whirling wheels and spinning shafts.” Flyball governors, thermostats. Though “An alien power in nature,” as Kelly claims, these strange loops of self-address are the very lifeblood of self-governing machines: systems that sense their own attributes and self-adjust in pursuit of a goal.

What matters, claims Kelly, is the informational metaphor. And hence the possibility of machines that learn.

By the time of Norbert Wiener, we have pilots merged with the servomechanisms of their gunships. Cybernetic feedback systems fuse statesmen with ships of state. Together they steer.

“But not every automatic circuit yields…ironclad instantaneity,” warns Kelly. “Every unit added onto a string of connected loops increases the likelihood that the message traveling around the greater loop will arrive back at its origin to find that everything has substantially changed during its journey. […]. Delayed by the long journey across many nodes…it arrives missing its moving mark […]. This then is the bane of the simple auto-circuit. It is liable to ‘flutter’ or ‘chatter,’ that is, to nervously oscillate from one overreaction to another, hunting for its rest” (Out of Control, p. 122).

Caius imagines a post ahead titled “The SBs: Stewart Brand and Stafford Beer.”

Sunday June 6, 2021

As I continue to read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, I learn of digital hyperobjects like “boids.” Apply three or four simple rules to these objects, he reports, and complex patterns emerge in their behavior, their movement together in groups. Yunkaporta claims that these patterns “cannot be programmed, but must emerge within the system organically — a process that is called ‘random’ in western worldviews but is in fact following the patterns of creation” (135). Patterns of right relation can arise in any complex, self-organizing system, he suggests. Kevin Kelly wrote of such patterns in his book Out of Control. For Yunkaporta, however, such patterns are excuses not for free markets but for heterarchies: complex, self-organizing learning communities where members “operate autonomously under three or four basic rules” (136). Heterarchies are systems “composed of equal parts interacting together” (137). There’s a moment in the book when Yunkaporta says, “If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions” (144). In no way, though, should this be read as a defense of what capitalists themselves mean by “the free market.” I admit wanting to tug a bit on this part of Yunkaporta’s yarn. The Marxist in me wants him to turn up the base.

Saturday September 2, 2017

A cool wind sweeps over me, reminding me on this eve of another birthday that, as always, I’m headed north of the wall. One year closer. Local villains, I’m told, are acting out again. A conversation over beers takes a turn toward the fantastic when a friend and I catch ourselves imagining a character named Johnny Apple-Semen who, like a tall-tale, weird-porn version of Sven Birkerts, fights to win a future for books by rubbing inklings of himself over the exteriors of editions in libraries. We also, this friend and I, imagine the quarry here in town becoming the setting for True Detective, Season Three. At some point in the conversation, the friend leans forward and says, “Check out Cibo Matto’s ‘Sugar Water.’” Make sure, though, he warns, that you watch only when your head is elevated, and your consciousness is well on its way toward bliss. The point of “Johnny Apple-Semen,” we assure ourselves, is to imagine an alternate reality where violence is taboo rather than sex. The most questionable aspect of the project, however, is its presumption of an audience. But that, too, is the point. Critique is always an exercise of hope, however bitter, as it assumes first and foremost that one can conjure an audience through naught but the magic of speech. Anyway, following that advice, stoned I get, and (hello? “Sugar Water”?) watch I do. And it’s a doozy, temporally and perspectivally, little by little. Brilliantly multi-dimensional in ways similar to Michel Gondry’s video for The Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be.”

Sweet lord, those late 90s Chemical Brothers videos. Psychedelic to the max. “Out of Control,” for instance, anticipates the Glorious Acid Communist Revolution of the Future by almost two decades. We must look, though, not just toward that which is coming into being but as well toward that which is. “And we affirm,” as did Socrates in Plato’s Republic, “that this is the good.” Except on some days, less so. Obligations pile up and feel like terrible impositions. Should the wage slave in me up and seek a new employer? That would require mesmerization and ventriloquy, wouldn’t it? It would require a voice and a presence speaking outward to a roomful of its peers, at the very least. Then again, perhaps it’s just a matter of smiling and nodding one’s way to victory, with a “rest upon thy laurels” finish.