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