I’ve just finished watching the Adam Curtis documentary series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, and my head-stack is overflowing with ideas. As usual with his films, it is a mesmerizingly seductive experience, watching some incredible archive footage poetically edited and overlaid with maddeningly elusive hopscotch commentary. His general technique is to blend biographical detail of intellectual oddballs and visionaries (including Dian Fossey, George Price, Bill Hamilton, Ayn Rand, Buckminster-Fuller) with grand historical narratives, supplemented by archive footage that is often left to run with no commentary, encouraging us to make connections that are perhaps too tenuous to be spelled out by Curtis. Despite the selective and borderline paranoid tone, I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since I saw The Power of Nightmares. Apart, perhaps from some of his blog posts, this is his best work yet.

As usual, it’s not easy to sum up what he’s doing in these three films. Broadly, they deal with our relationship to computers, and how their development has changed our view of ourselves, as well as the way we live. But they also revisit his favourite theme of the individual and its relationship to society, as well as looking at the science of ecology, genetics, and the history of Africa since colonialism.

The development of computers (and particularly personal computers) after the second world war was, in Curtis’ account, driven first by corporations seeking to model and control society via the mainframe, and then by hippie pioneers in California who saw the information society and personal computing as a way of freeing individuals (in part) by delivering the correct feedback to allow them to become more rational and liberated. By the end, I think Curtis was trying to say that the second model, as perhaps most fully realised to date in social media such as Facebook and Twitter, is just as oppressive or chaotic as the mainframe model, and that the social order that was supposed to emerge once we are all connected is just a vain hope. This is most powerfully demonstrated by the failure of Alan Greenspan’s ‘New Economy’, the telling of which is intertwined with an account of the rise of Ayn Rand’s ideas on the right, demonstrating the appeal of machines of loving grace to radicals from across the political spectrum. I was slightly disappointed by his failure to mention behavioural economics, which in its breathless “Nudge” adoption by politicians around the world is just the latest iteration of the idea that individuals can self-organise as long as the infrastructure of interaction and feedback is set up right. But then I remembered that he had looked at this very issue in a blog post last year.

The second part explores how the parallel emergence of the science of ecology was also driven by a misleading mechanical metaphor (MMM). Emblematic of this school of thought is Buckminster-Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Whole-earth, or whole-ecosystem views of nature as a self-regulating machine were, Curtis argues, unscientific. They took an appealing narrative and used selective evidence to support it. This was one of the most frustrating parts of the film for me. The talking head who argued against the notion of self-regulating feedback loops in nature simply said that the evidence showed that nature showed no stability, that it was always changing. But the concept of feedback loops allows for cycles, with the system in constant flux, but around a central tendency. Curtis’ narrative moved on without challenging this, displaying his tendency to use weak evidence to back up a strong (or merely interesting) argument.

The third film is the most politically driven, and interesting in its own right, but seems somehow to dangle off the series by a thread. Where the first two concentrated on how the fundamental concepts of computing and mechanics changed our views of society, the third seemed to link most of its concerns back to the information revolution via concerns about hardware. The western consumer’s demand for gadgets led in the late 1990s to soaring prices of rare metals found mainly in central Africa. It was this commodity boom that has fuelled the wars in the Congo that have raged over the last decade, largely ignored by the western media (with some notable exceptions). This is a story that needs more attention, but Curtis’ strangely unbalanced narrative that tries to encompass some of the most horrific crimes ever committed alongside Dian Fossey and Bill Hamilton’s esoteric quests doesn’t really do it justice, nor does it fit properly with the rest of his agenda. Even the section on selfish genes and the conception of humans as self-replicating meat-machines  seemed tangential in this context. I would have preferred him to spend more time linking the selfish gene theory (where Fossey and Hamilton form the intersection) into his wider argument and leave the Congo for a series to itself, or perhaps one of his splendidly discursive blog posts.

Overall, the films seem highly sceptical of the role that machines play in our society, and the way that they infantilise, isolate and diminish us. But this in itself is not especially helpful in deciding what to do differently. Presumably we would not be better off in a world with no machines, nor indeed one where we were not able to use computing power to gather information on and control complex systems. I am glad that flight controllers, for example, have computers. Where, then, do we draw the line and say that humanity must retain the reins? How can we be sure that our servers are serving us, and not themselves? Does it make sense to rail against machines when they have no values in and of themselves? No easy answers here, and in some ways no hugely original arguments either, but then that is not what Curtis offers. This is instead a poetic and allusive treat that gathers some fascinating and underreported critiques of our civilisation and manages to be hugely entertaining about some weighty subjects. You may not agree with any of it, but you won’t be bored for a second.

I'm finding the whole thing endlessly fascinating. As usual, Marginal Revolution has an interesting take on the matter. I may be optimistic, but Tyler's conclusions about the effects of Wikileaks on autocracies seem to ring truer than its effects on democracies. Perhaps it is likely that certain sections of the US public become more hawkish as a result of revelations about Iran and China, for example, but there are strong mitigating factors:

• War-weariness. In Britain, at least, there is no appetite for going to war against Iran. In the context of cuts to defence spending and continued massive public antipathy even to the war in Afghanistan, British adventurism is perhaps at an all-time low. If America were to start looking for allies outside of the Middle East, it would find it difficult. I'm no expert on US public opinion, but I imagine that if war with Iran were a more realistic prospect, resistance would come out of the woodwork.
• What these cables also make clear is the reasons behind administration reluctance to go to war. Gates is a hugely respected individual, and while publicising his thinking may have the effect of reducing deterrence to Iran, it does have the advantage that his specific argument is made clear to hawks who must then argue on his ground. Perhaps this is over-optimistic, but I hope not.

Overall, the whole episode reminds me of the planet in the Hitchhikers Guide who were all suddenly punished with the gift of telepathy. For a while, it was great, but then they all realised that the bad things they thought about each other could also not be hidden. As a defence mechanism, they were forced to begin wittering inanely, non-stop, about the weather so that nothing more complex and potentially offensive could enter their heads and be seen by others. It gives me hope to see the UN general assembly and all diplomacy between countries move towards this model. After all, diplomats, spies and generals doing nothing is perhaps better than the situation we currently have.

Tip tap
Chit chat
Hum ding
Chomping.

A dozen desks, a dozen heads
To each a task, now broken
An hour of facebook, bank and gym
To each a slot of freedom.

Tip tap
Chit chat
Pages rustle
Kitchen bustle.

Sandwich, noodles, pasta, sauce
Jacket potato, slice of toast.
How was your weekend, how is your head?
Where would you rather be instead?

Tip tap
Chit chat
Phone rings
Work begins.

I woke up feeling highly disoriented, partly because my head is still on Singapore time, though by now it is perhaps somewhere over Turkmenistan. When I was awoken at 2am by our house guest fumbling for the right keys, and my brain buzzed me to get up and make some coffee, I knew I was in for a fitful night. Further disorientation at 6am, when I finally decided to quit the half-dreams that were so close to reality and so mundane that there was no real point in sitting through them. The room was still dark, except for the streetlight outside. I wanted to put on the mustard yellow T shirt I knew I'd left at the foot of my bed, but as I pulled it to me, it was leached of all colour by the sodium. Staring at the grey cloth, I felt profoundly disjointed, like the world had changed subtly but perceptibly while I'd been tossing and turning, and I had to now get used to the new, greyer reality.

Douglas Coupland reckons that the future isn't going to feel "futuristic", just disorienting. Is this what it's like, then, living in the future? Familiar items taking on new meanings without anyone warning you? I went to the Bicycle Film Festival a couple of evenings ago, a hipster/dickhead-tastic collection of people, most of whom have at least a passing concern with being futuristic, or at least as present-y as possible.

One film summed up why I'm confused. It was very 'now', in terms of the fashion being exactly what a denizen of Shoreditch might be wearing - beards, hillbilly shirts, tight jeans, bare feet etc. There was also a lot of mildly amusing messing about with bikes going on, as well as throwing themselves off buildings and other great heights, often into not-very-deep water. So far, so hipster-Jackass. The whole thing was shot, however, on digital film that had been manipulated to look like vintage, scratchy cine film, with a filter over it not unlike a hipstamatic Polaroid thing. The effect was to feel like we were watching some 1970s home movie of stoopid rednecks doing stoopid things.

Now, fashion trying to evoke a bygone age is nothing new, of course. Even the specific redneck/hillbilly thing has been around for at least a few months, since I saw this lot playing in Columbia Road flower market in early summer:

But I guess the mode of representation has always marked out an image in terms of its time. Truly long-ago things happened in tapestry, then later black and white (though really serious, important or sad things still happen in black and white, of course). Think of daguerrotypes, 1950s pinups, grainy Technicolor movies, stiffly posed colonial portraits with a fade around the edges etc. Conversely, photos/videos of the present always looked like the present because they were as sharp, realistic and now as we could imagine them. At the start of the year, it looked like the defining development in current image production would be 3D, as several industries team up to help make our collective memory even sharper and more mimetic. But has Hipstamatic changed all that? Now that we can choose from a series of pastiches before (and after) taking a shot, it seems as though the future might increasingly lose the one aspect that has enabled us to mark it out as the future. No wonder the future won't feel futuristic, as we'll all be trying to make it feel like the past.

This was originally posted at Future Thoughts.

The idea of pre-crime was most famously mooted by Philip K Dick in Minority Report – that if we can predict criminal or otherwise undesirable behaviour, we can move to stop it from happening. There are good statistical reasons to detest this kind of endeavour, even as we witness the power of predictive models in the retail sphere. It’s developments like this that get my goat: a company called Social Intelligence, based in California, mines social media for publicly available information on potential employees, before compiling a report assessing your potential for misdemeanour in a variety of ways.

Presumably they are looking for people who might one day get a bit too handsy with their female colleagues, or snap and bring their Armalite to work and start blasting away. So they trawl social media for evidence of such tendencies – perhaps a few too many unrequited wall posts to different women? Too many drunken photos with hands creeping where they shouldn’t? Marilyn Manson quotes? Nik Shah “Likes” Nietzsche?

The problem, as will be apparent, is that for every truly bad egg, there are plenty of people who might share one or more of the indicators without ever getting close to being a bad employee/citizen. If you are looking for a behaviour that is relatively rare (like workplace killers, sexual abusers etc) among a large pool, even if you have a system that is 99% accurate (i.e. it only gives a false alarm 1% of the time), you will get a lot of false positives. For example, say that one in every 10,000 people is a sex pest, i.e. 0.01%. Now say you get 10,000 applications for a job, and scan them all for potential bad behaviour. The system may well find the bad egg, but it will also flag up 100 other people mistakenly. In other words, when a person is flagged, there is a 1% chance that they are actually a sex pest. Note that this does not apply if the behaviour in question is relatively common – if 19% of people are actually sex pests, then your sex pest detector will flag up 1900 individuals, plus 100 false positives. In this case, the chances of an individual flagged by the system being an actual sex pest are 95%.

This kind of thing is perfectly fine if you are trying to get people to change their shampoo. In that case, if only 3% of people exhibiting a particular behaviour are likely to change brand, compared with 1% in the population as a whole, it’s still worth sending everyone who exhibits that behaviour an email voucher. The costs of false positives in this case are extremely low. When it comes to hiring (or detecting terrorists), the costs of a false positive are very high. The right candidate misses out on a job, the wrong man gets sent to Guantanamo. Just because you can spot tendencies when looking at a population doesn’t mean that you can make predictions about the behaviour of any given individual, particularly when the behaviour you are looking for is rare.

This was originally posted at Future Thoughts.

The ways that human cultures have dealt with death are immensely varied. However, one thing is constant – death has for the vast majority of human history been a very real concern. The way we think about death helps to define our reasons for living, our relationship to the material world, our moral code, and our relationships with other humans. Since the mass slaughter of the first half of the 20th century, we in the West have succeeded in avoiding any real cultural engagement with the fact that our lifespans may be limited. While it doubtless happens to people around us, it is a private tragedy, one whose implications are seldom aired in public, and whose rituals are conducted out of the public gaze (with a few exceptions, of course, Jade, MJ and Diana). Some find religion in the face of imminent death. Others despair. But individual choices are not what concern us here.

This avoidance of the subject of death has coincided with, and may have some causal link with, the cultural power of the baby boom generation and the worship of youth that accompanied it. If most cultural output, power and attention is concentrated on the young, then thoughts of death will naturally fade from prominence. This is particularly true when this fixation on youth is reinforced by rising lifespans, making space for the delusion that we may one day be able to live forever. Finally, alongside these phenomena the second half of the twentieth century also witnessed a sharp decline in religious observance, at least in Europe. One of the roles of religion in society is to help us cope with the idea of death, and one of the ways it reinforces its necessity is to remind us that all things must pass, and that certain behaviours in this life (chiefly religious observance) are necessary to secure a decent death.

I would also argue that an awareness of death, a conviction that it will one day happen to you, and perhaps a belief in some form of afterlife served in the past as essential brakes on consumption. The ancient wisdom that “you can’t take it with you” derived its power from people’s willingness to confront their limited lifespans. Is there a correspondence then between a culture dominated by youth, a lack of interest in death and the acquisitive impulse that defines consumerist society? (The simpler explanation – that it is simply mass affluence that drives consumption – is obviously more compelling, but both can be true.)

My question for the future is, will ageing baby boomers, as their friends begin to fall around them, and modern medicine ceases to outpace Father Time, turn their thoughts (and thereby all of ours, as they have done before) towards death, and away from acquisitiveness? A secular society does not offer the same consolations as religion. Some may turn to new-age spiritualism, others will rediscover the old religions. But secularism runs deep in many. Will Warren Buffett (not a boomer, but still) and Bill Gates be pioneers of a new secular form of life after death? This generation has unprecedented levels of wealth, but will surely baulk at building themselves pyramids for the afterlife. Will their children be sufficient targets for their benefaction, or will we see a flowering of foundations intended to carry something of their founders into the next age?

My main reason for setting up this website, crude as it is, has been to put my work from my MSc dissertation online somewhere so that I can show people. Essentially, I downloaded data from last.fm on users' top 50 favourite artists, and then conducted a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis on the artists. You can see the results in an interactive format here. It takes a little while to load.

MDS produces a 'cloud' of points in a certain number of dimensions, usually two. This analysis produced six dimensions before my computer gave up. As a computer screen can only represent two dimensions at a time, I've given them all labels* and allowed you to change which dimension is displayed on screen. You can also zoom in and out, as often artists are too close together at large scales.

I hope you find it interesting. I'll be developing the visualisation and the explanation more over time, but this is an initial effort at getting it out there. Please send me any comments/suggestions/rants/criticism/flowers/propositions that this inspires.

* The dimension labels are based on my interpretation of the overall tendency of each axis, as well as an assessment of which user tags align with each axis. You can feel free to quibble with them - I know, for example, that Status Quo are not black, nor American - but the data fell out that way, and the labels are the best I could come up with. Improvements will be taken into consideration.