Unesco Confused by Facebook (1971)
Posted: February 17th, 2008 | Filed under: Cybernetics on the Prairie |
“(Whereupon the experts, who, really, were only specialists, refused to vote on the proposal. Some argued that it was irrelevant to the meeting’s theme. Some argued that it would offend member states in UNESCO. This argument was flatly denied by the participating representatives of UNESCO, but to no avail.)”
- A concluding explanatory note from Herbert Brun’s essay Technology and the Composer (1970).
Brun originally delivered “Technology and the Composer” as a presentation to UNESCO in Stockholm. A little later, in the Summer of 1971, HvF included it in a small published reader prepared for a seminar at Ivan Illich’s alternative educational institute in Mexico, CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación). The seminar was on “Interpersonal Relational Networks.” This little reader has some very prescient stuff, and I’d like to know more about what happened at the seminar. I’m reading it firstly to try and learn more about the thought of HvF and the BCL, but I also see some potential for connections to my other work on interfaces, for historicizing current work on social networks, and for discovering the potential for radical influence on university research.
HvF introduces the reader with a short description of society as “an organism with distributed sensors and effectors.” He describes certain social ills or bad collective habits (ie, inflation, or the Cold War) in terms of feedback loops within these sensor-effector systems; think of a microphone as a sensor, a speaker as an effector. When you get a mic too close to its speaker, you get a quick amplification of signal that results in a squeal. This is cybernetics-speak, and from what I gather the bread-and-butter of the infamous Macy Conferences.
More interestingly, HvF diagnoses these degenerative feedback loops as suffering from an increased specialization of sensors, wherein sensors have narrower and narrower ranges, at the same time as effectors increase in their scope and power. “Consequently,” HvF writes, “in order to change the characteristics of the system as a whole by attacking its power structure with opposing force (the radical’s proposed solution in the social metaphor) is an uphill struggle that is bound to fail, leaving the system after its successful exercise with increased strength and further reduced vision (back-lash.)” (This diagnosis reminds me of that of Critical Art Ensemble.)
HvF is interested in perception throughout his work, starting with the physiological, moving through the cognitive and even social aspects of perception. His students often cite HvF’s “Blind Spot” lecture as a sort of entry into the BCL world. In this lecture he walks a group through the process of discovering that there is a place at the back of each eye that lacks receptors - where the optic nerve departs for the brain. This in fact leaves a “hole” in our “sensors,” though we don’t perceive it as such. We simply overlook the fact that all the time, we’re looking at/through a sort of “screen” that’s missing pixels in the middle.
In his introduction for the Cuaderno, HvF talks about perception just as physiologically - or perhaps just as mechanically, I can never tell the difference with him. In his metaphor of society as a giant organism with sensors and effectors, the sensors are “determined by the way in which its members perceive each other and themselves.” He describes an individual’s perceptual ability as only as good as her network of relations to others.
From there, he describes a project waiting to be completed, which presumedly his seminar addressed, and which the cuaderno’s essays are intended to illustrate. Here’s where things start to sound really freakin’ current:
“So far no concerted effort has been made to integrate into a unified notion of interpersonal networks the various pieces we possess today of the epistemology of cognition, the theory of active networks, and the visions of social institutions that unite men with one another and with things for the sake of personally defined activity.”
This sounds a whole lot to me like the work people are doing at places like Harvard’s Berkman Center, Illinois’ own Library Science school and the Community Informatics Initiative, or perhaps in Trebor’s project.
Herbert Brun’s paper takes this on home to a description of a project that befuddles his UNESCO audience but which sounds a lot like Facebook - in the worst ways.
Brun was a composer on the faculty at Illinois, a central figure in the pioneering electronic music scene here in the 60’s, when even John Cage was in residence at one time. Brun was also central to the activities and thought of the BCL. Among other things, he brought to BCL the concept of “anticommunication,” an approach to communication that I’ll say more about in another post. He seems to have shared with HvF and others at the BCL a conviction that relations between things were more important than the things themselves, that we might devise more of a science of relations and relationships in our understanding of how knowledge and perception work, our approaches to art and communication. (That’s all part of the study of cybernetics, by the way.)
Brun’s paper “Technology and the Composer,” is the first in the cuaderno. In it, he moves from a discussion of electronic music to musings on the relationship of technology to power, and change. He chalks up such disasters as Hiroshima to the incorrect deployment of technology by politicians, wishes the technologists themselves had more power, and of course ultimately wishes that artists were granted more influence as well. He talks about “anticommunication” and explains how and why artist’s work is not always understood right away. I’ll be glib here for a minute - it sounds like more of the same avant-garde modernist stuff. Celebrations of difficulty, belief in progress, disdain for language as a limitation to ideas. I suspect that what makes his approach more unique is his reliance on metaphors of mechanism and organism, that’s where the cybernetics stuff comes in, but - again - I’ll save that part for later.
After outlining something of his worldview, Brun describes a very specific project. It’s this that I suspect confused his original UNESCO audience, and excited HvF. I’m gonna cite a lengthy passage here:
What if it were true that, as the saying goes in many quarters, the human mind is limited by nature to the potentials we already know, and that we may thus not expect it to ever possess the properties necessary for the creation of what we call an ideal society? If this were true we would need artificial systems that possess those properties to guide us. And if it were true that, as the saying goes in other quarters, the human mind has shown here and there the potential for change and development but that precisely the rarity of such an event generates hostility against it in the many who did not participate in it, then we would need artificial systems that remove the property of rarity by demonstrating the participation of all. No matter on which assumed truth it is based or to which conjectural reality it may be meant to correspond: any such artificial system should possess properties that we either cannot have, or do not yet have, but that we need and thus should be able to imagine or be taught to imagine.
It is quite obvious: any such artificial system will contain a computer installation. But what kind of an installation? Nobody knows yet because it should not be developed before the software, the programs that define the structure of the system, have been written. And these programs should be written, and the assembler code should be constructed, only after a decision has been reached as to what the whole system is supposed to do for the user. The user, however, is not to be seen as a paying consumer, whose demands have to be educated until they fit the available offers.
The word user refers instead to a member of one subset of the set of all possible kinds of input. The first task then is to define this subset until it contains every possible kind of user. Every user is an element of at least two social systems: the social system the user sees and at least one social system that sees the user. The artificial system must be able to insist on getting just so much input from the user as it needs for identifying the social systems in which the user’s existence is definable. The response of the artificial system could then adopt the property of an input to any one or all of the systems defining the user’s existence. The complete set of all possible kinds of input would thus contain all users and all responses by the artificial system. If we roughly define input as something that induces and initiates such changes of state in a system as would not occur without this input, at the moment or possibly ever, then we may expect that the artificial system thus would be capable of supporting what I called corrective action as well as what is called creative acts.
What is asked for is a heterogeneous assembly of input-oriented minds that would define an intelligent society, redefine the user, and develop an artificial system that by its response capability would show its users their roles in an intelligent society so that they may become induced to also want it in reality.
Brun’s words here make him into a sort of Jules Verne of contemporary participatory technologies. I think of the ways in which social networking sites and browser histories construct intimate pictures of each user - I think of the holy grail algorithms for effective product suggestion, Amazon’s “You might like” functions, the ways in which sites like Last.fm or even early Napster channel us down through collective portraits to discover what we always wanted. And not too far away, I think of the pursuit of “Creativity Support Tools” by NSF-sponsored researchers, who use iterative algorithms or even AI agents to complete tasks in unexpected ways, augmenting intuition through anticipating options that are just unexpected but normative enough to be deemed “creative.”
What might Brun make of all this? I wonder if this looks like what he wished for - a surrogate, collective imagination, constructed of a map of all individuals’ desires and demographic contextual conditions. I think he believed that the data, the collected output of many “input-oriented minds” would actually generate new agents, living ideas (memes?) - the BCL folks seem to see data as possibly functioning as do humans or other organisms, reacting to other entities, growing, communicating and evolving. That’s the AI part of the project.
What might we learn from Brun’s dream, and its rejection by his UNESCO audience? How different is this vision from the reality of contemporary social network sites, “creativity support tools,” and distributed intelligence via collective authorship?
First, Brun seems to feel that humans lack imagination or desire enough on their own to conceive of a radical enough utopia. If this deficiency was sole-ly described in terms of the need for social exchange, then Brun would be in line with HvF on this. But Brun goes farther, apparently claiming a fundamental lack or gap in the human capacity for re-imagining society. Brun’s approach to sociality is oddly asocial, retaining an atomistic, individualist approach. His vision also eschews interpersonal conflict in favor of a sort of representative discourse conducted by our thoughts, carried by software - we send in our proxies, and end up “saved” both from our own limited visions and the perils of public debate, humiliation, service.
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