Posts Tagged ‘relativity’
“Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides”*…
Regular readers will have deduced that I am something of a techno-optimist. While I worry that human misapplication (exploitation) of new technologies could create new dangers and/or further concentrate wealth and power in too few hands, I believe that emerging tech could– should– help humanity deal with many of its gravest challenges, certainly including climate change. At the same time, I am disposed to thinking about large issues/problems systemically.
Rianne Riemens shares neither of my enthusiasms; she sounds a critical note on techno-optimism, systems thinking– and more specifically, on the application of the latter to the former…
Today, American tech actors express optimistic ideas about how to fix the Earth and halt climate change. Such “green” initiatives have in common that they capture the world in systems and propose large systemic, and mostly technological, solutions. Because of their reliance on techno-fixes, representatives of Silicon Valley express an ideology of ecomodernism, which believes that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline. In this article, I show how “whole-systems thinking” has become a key discursive element in today’s ecomodernist discourses. This discourse has developed from the 1960s onwards – inspired by cybernetic, ecological and computational theories – within the tech culture of California. This paper discusses three key periods in this development, highlighting key publications: the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the cyberspace manifestoes of the mid 1990s. These periods are key to understand how techno-fixes became a popular answer to the climate crisis, eventually leading to a vision of the world as an ecosystem that can be easily controlled and manipulated, and of technological innovation as harmless and beneficial. I argue that “whole-systems” thinking offers a naive and misleading narrative about the development of the climate crisis, that offers a hopeful yet unrealistic perspective for a future threatened by climate change, built on a misconception of Earth as a datafied planet.
In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Citation2023) venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues why we should all be techno-optimists, especially if we are worried about the future impact of the climate crisis. According to Andreessen, promoting unlimited technological progress is the only option: “there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment”. If we generate unlimited clean energy, we can improve the natural environment, whereas a “technologically stagnant society ruins it” (Andreessen, Citation2023). This is possible, he writes, because technologies enable processes of dematerialization and will eventually lead to material abundance. And, “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system” (Andreessen, Citation2023). The manifesto thus conceptualizes technology as immaterial and the capitalist economy as an evolutionary system: it presents techno-fixes as a harmless form of environmental action, and economic growth as an inevitable process that political powers should not interfere with.
The “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is an example of a form of techno-optimism that places full trust in the potential of capitalist tech companies to help humanity “innovate” its way out of a climate crisis. Andreessen (Citation2023) cites historical figures including Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, Douglas Engelbart and Kevin Kelly as the inspiration for his manifesto, showing that the work of these figures and their communities is being remixed and reappropriated into the future visions of contemporary techno-optimists. In this article, I analyse how the belief in the environmental potential of techno-fixes is engrained in the ideology and history of “Silicon Valley” and is discursively constructed through a language of “whole-systems thinking”. I use the concept of whole-systems thinking as a lens to study how simplified notions taken from whole-systems theory and cybernetics played and still play a key role in techno-environmental discourse in the post-war era in the United States. I zoom in on three key events that help explain the origins and evolution of popular whole-systems thinking: the Whole Earth Catalog community led by Stewart Brand in the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome in the 1970s and the cyberlibertarian community in the 1990s. I will show how a new language emerged that used simplified notions of systems-thinking to promote the idea that technology would help understand, manage and save a planet in peril.
Through a discourse analysis of primary sources and literature review I present a critical reading of these events in the light of today’s techno-optimistic environmental discourse. My corpus exists of a number of primary sources, including the aforementioned “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023), Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., Citation1972), editions of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), texts by Kevin Kelly (Citation1998) and Stewart Brand (Citation2009) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., Citation2015). I have discursively analysed these sources for their discussion of systems thinking as well as environmental concerns. By analysing how whole-systems thinking became a popular way of addressing environmental issues, I aim to provide a “post-war genealogy” (Pedwell Citation2022) of the term and critique today’s promises about how tech can save the climate. As Johnston (Citation2020) has argued, tracing the development of a cultural perception of trust in techno-fixes reveals a complex and multi-sided history. I claim that the environmental dimension of techno-optimistic discourses requires a critical reconsideration of the ideological underpinnings of Silicon Valley, described as the “Californian Ideology” by Barbrook and Cameron (Citation1996). I will demonstrate how ecomodernism, including its belief that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline, allows us to better understand, and critique, the environmental ideology of Silicon Valley.
I will first expand on contemporary ecomodernism and present my thesis that “decoupling” nature from culture has come to underlie whole-systems thinking in contemporary techno-optimistic discourse. In the following three sections, I highlight a few historical moments to demonstrate the development of the cultural perception of techno-fixes, specifically as a means of managing the environment. I show how whole-systems thinking became popularized by the Whole Earth community, got incorporated in environmental debates through the Limits to Growth report and is reflected in cyberutopian dreams about immaterial societies. Building on my necessarily brief history, I argue that techno-fixes can be strategically presented as ideal solutions if the world and environment are imagined as simple systems and technology as immaterial and harmless. Finally, I return to contemporary US tech culture and argue that it is shaped by, and co-shapes, the ideology of ecomodernism in which nature and culture are decoupled. I conclude that this worldview expresses itself today in corporate visions, resulting in a false hope about how to innovate our way out of the climate crisis…
Eminently worth reading in full (if in the end, as for me, less as a wholesale rejection of techno-optimism and systems thinking than as a cautionary counterweight): “Fixing the earth: whole-systems thinking in Silicon Valley’s environmental ideology,” from @WeAreTandF.
(image above: source)
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As we tangle with tech, we might pause to remember a man who bridged our understanding of the systems of the world from one paradigm to another: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS; he died in this date in 1944. An astrophysicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science known for his work on the motion, distribution, evolution and structure of stars, Eddington is probably best remembered for his relationship to Einstein: he was, via a series of widely-published articles, the primary “explainer” of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the English-speaking world; and he was, in 1919, the leader of the experimental team that used observations of a solar eclipse to confirm the theory.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”*…
In an excerpt from his new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, the estimable William Egginton explains the central mystery at the heart of one of the most important breakthroughs in physics–quantum mechanics…
For all its astonishing, mind-bending complexity– for all its blurry cats, entangled particles, buckyballs, and Bell’s inequalities– quantum mechanics ultimately boils down to one core mystery. This mystery found its best expression in the letter Heisenberg wrote to Pauli in the fevered throes of his discovery. The path a particle takes ‘only comes into existence through this, that we observe it.’ This single, stunning expression underlies all the rest: the wave/particle duality (interference patterns emerge when the particles have not yet been observed and hence their possible paths interfere with one another); the apparently absurd liminal state of Schrodinger’s cat ( the cat seems to remain blurred between life and death because atoms don’t release a particle until observed); the temporal paradox (observing a particle seems to retroactively determine the path it chose to get here); and, the one that really got to Einstein, if the observation of a particle at one place and time instantaneously changes something about the rest of reality, then locality, the cornerstone of relativity and guarantee that the laws of physics are invariable through the universe, vanishes like fog on a warming windowpane.
If the act of observation somehow instantaneously conjures a particle’s path, the foundations not only of classical physics but also of what we widely regard as physical reality crumble before our eyes. This fact explains why Einstein held fast to another interpretation. The particle’s path doesn’t come into existence when we observe it. The path exists, but we just can’t see it. Like the parable of the ball in the box he described in his letter to Schrodinger, a 50 percent chance of finding a ball in any one of two boxes does not complete the description of the ball’s reality before we open the box. It merely states our lack of knowledge about the ball’s whereabouts.
And yet, as experiment after experiment has proven, the balls simply aren’t there before the observation. We can separate entangled particles, seemingly to any conceivable distance, and by observing one simultaneously come to know something about the other–something that wasn’t the case until the exact moment of observing it. Like the beer and whiskey twins, we can maintain total randomness up to a nanosecond before one of them orders, and still what the one decides to order will determine the other’s drink, on the spot, even light-years away.
The ineluctable fact of entanglement tells us something profound about reality and our relation to it. Imagine you are one of the twins about to order a drink (this should be more imaginable than being an entangled particle about to be observed, but the idea is the same). From your perspective you can order either a whiskey or a beer: it’s a fifty-fifty choice; nothing is forcing your hand. Unbeknownst to you, however, in a galaxy far, far away, your twin has just made the choice for you. Your twin can’t tell you this or signal it in any way, but what you perceive to be a perfectly random set of possibilities, an open choice, is entirely constrained. You have no idea if you will order beer or whiskey, but when you order it, it will be the one or the other all the same. If your twin is, say, one light-year away, the time in which you make this decision doesn’t even exist over there yet. Any signals your sibling gets from you, or any signals you send, will take another year to arrive. And still, as of this moment, you each know. Neither will get confirmation for another year, but you can be confident, you can bet your life’s savings on it–a random coin toss in another galaxy, and you already know the outcome.
The riddles that arise from Heisenberg’s starting point would seem to constitute the most vital questions of existence. And yet one of the curious side effects of quantum mechanics’ extraordinary success has been a kind of quietism in the face of those very questions. The interpretation of quantum mechanics, deciding what all this means, has tended to go unnoticed by serious physics departments and the granting agencies that support them in favor of the ‘shut up and calculate’ school, leading the former to take hold mainly in philosophy departments, as a subfield of the philosophy of science called foundations of physics. Nevertheless, despite such siloing, a few physicists persisted in exploring possible solutions to the quantum riddles. Some of their ideas have been literally otherworldly.
In the 1950s, a small group of graduate students working with John Wheeler at Princeton University became fascinated with these problems and kept returning to them in late-night, sherry-fueled rap sessions. Chief among this group was Hugh Everett III, a young man with classic 1950s-style nerd glasses and a looming forehead. Everett found himself chafing at the growing no-question zone that proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation had built around their science. Why should we accept that in one quantum reality, observations somehow cause nature to take shape out of a probabilistic range of options, whereas on this side of some arbitrary line in the sand we inhabit a different, classical reality where observations meekly bow to the world out there? What exactly determines when this change takes place? ‘Let me mention a few more irritating features of the Copenhagen Interpretation,’ Everett would write to its proponents: ‘You talk of the massiveness of macro systems allowing one to neglect further quantum effects … but never give any justification for this flatly asserted dogma.’…
A fascinating sample of a fascinating book: “Quantum Mechanics,” from @WilliamEgginton via the invaluable @delanceyplace.
Further to which, it’s interesting to recall that, in his 1921 The Analysis Of Mind, Bertrand Russell observed:
What has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at present in existence. But this position cannot be called materialistic, if, as seems to be the case, physics does not assume the existence of matter…
via Robert Cottrell
See also: “Objective Reality May Not Exist, Quantum Experiment Suggests” (source of the image above).
* Albert Einstein
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As we examine existence, we might spare a thought for Otto Frisch; he died on this date in 1979. A physicist, he was (with Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann) the first to measure the magnetic moment of the proton. With his aunt, Lise Meitner, he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls, he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940.
“Advantage! What is advantage?”*…
Pradeep Mutalik unpacks the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first…
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or second?
Most people instinctively want to go first, and this intuition is usually borne out. In common two-player games, such as chess or tennis, it is a real, if modest, advantage to “win the toss” and go first. But sometimes it’s to your advantage to let your opponent make the first play.
In our February Insights puzzle, we presented four disparate situations in which, counterintuitively, the obligation to move is a serious and often decisive disadvantage. In chess, this is known as zugzwang — a German word meaning “move compulsion.”…
Four fascinating examples: “The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizzas,” from @PradeepMutalik.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
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As we play to win, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that scientists involved in the OPERA experiment (a collaboration between CERN and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso) mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light. OPERA scientists announced the results with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast; accounting for these two sources of error eliminated the faster-than-light results. But even before the sources of the error were discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century.
“If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems)”*…
In a riff on Lewis Mumford, the redoubtable L. M. Sacasas addresses the unraveling of modernity…
The myth of the machine underlies a set of three related and interlocking presumptions which characterized modernity: objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality. More specifically, the presumptions that we could have objectively secured knowledge, impartial political and legal institutions, and technologies that were essentially neutral tools but which were ordinarily beneficent. The last of these appears to stand somewhat apart from the first two in that it refers to material culture rather than to what might be taken as more abstract intellectual or moral stances. In truth, however, they are closely related. The more abstract intellectual and institutional pursuits were always sustained by a material infrastructure, and, more importantly, the machine supplied a master template for the organization of human affairs.
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Just as the modern story began with the quest for objectively secured knowledge, this ideal may have been the first to lose its implicit plausibility. Since the late 19th century onward, philosophers, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and historians have, among others, proposed a more complex picture that emphasized the subjective, limited, contingent, situated, and even irrational dimensions of how humans come to know the world. The ideal of objectively secured knowledge became increasingly questionable throughout the 20th century. Some of these trends get folded under the label “postmodernism,” but I found the term unhelpful at best a decade ago—now find it altogether useless.
We can similarly trace a growing disillusionment with the ostensible impartiality of modern institutions. This takes at least two forms. On the one hand, we might consider the frustrating and demoralizing character of modern bureaucracies, which we can describe as rule-based machines designed to outsource judgement and enhance efficiency. On the other, we can note the heightened awareness of the actual failures of modern institutions to live up to the ideals of impartiality, which has been, in part, a function of the digital information ecosystem.
But while faith in the possibility of objectively secured knowledge and impartial institutions faltered, the myth of the machine persisted in the presumption that technology itself was fundamentally neutral. Until very recently, that is. Or so it seems. And my thesis (always for disputation) is that the collapse of this last manifestation of the myth brings the whole house down. This in part because of how much work the presumption of technological neutrality was doing all along to hold American society together. (International readers: as always read with a view to your own setting. I suspect there are some areas of broad overlap and other instances when my analysis won’t travel well). Already by the late 19th century, progress had become synonymous with technological advancements, as Leo Marx argued. If social, political, or moral progress stalled, then at least the advance of technology could be counted on…
But over the last several years, the plausibility of this last and also archetypal manifestation of the myth of the machine has also waned. Not altogether, to be sure, but in important and influential segments of society and throughout a wide cross-section of society, too. One can perhaps see the shift most clearly in the public discourse about social media and smart phones, but this may be a symptom of a larger disillusionment with technology. And not only technological artifacts and systems, but also with the technocratic ethos and the public role of expertise.
If the myth of the machine in these three manifestations, was, in fact, a critical element of the culture of modernity, underpinning its aspirations, then when each in turn becomes increasingly implausible the modern world order comes apart. I’d say that this is more or less where we’re at. You could usefully analyze any number of cultural fault lines through this lens. The center, which may not in fact hold, is where you find those who still operate as if the presumptions of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality still compelled broad cultural assent, and they are now assailed from both the left and the right by those who have grown suspicious or altogether scornful of such presumptions. Indeed, the left/right distinction may be less helpful than the distinction between those who uphold some combination of the values of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality and those who no longer find them compelling or desirable.
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What happens when the systems and strategies deployed to channel often violent clashes within a population deeply, possibly intractably divided about substantive moral goods and now even about what Arendt characterized as the publicly accessible facts upon which competing opinions could be grounded—what happens when these systems and strategies fail?
It is possible to argue that they failed long ago, but the failure was veiled by an unevenly distributed wave of material abundance. Citizens became consumers and, by and large, made peace with the exchange. After all, if the machinery of government could run of its own accord, what was their left to do but enjoy the fruits of prosperity. But what if abundance was an unsustainable solution, either because it taxed the earth at too high a rate or because it was purchased at the cost of other values such as rootedness, meaningful work and involvement in civic life, abiding friendships, personal autonomy, and participation in rich communities of mutual care and support? Perhaps in the framing of that question, I’ve tipped my hand about what might be the path forward.
At the heart of technological modernity there was the desire—sometimes veiled, often explicit—to overcome the human condition. The myth of the machine concealed an anti-human logic: if the problem is the failure of the human to conform to the pattern of the machine, then bend the human to the shape of the machine or eliminate the human altogether. The slogan of the one of the high-modernist world’s fairs of the 1930s comes to mind: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” What is now being discovered in some quarters, however, is that the human is never quite eliminated, only diminished…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Myth of the Machine, ” from @LMSacasas.
For a deep dive into similar waters, see John Ralston Saul‘s (@JohnRalstonSaul) Voltaire’s Bastards.
[Image above: source]
* Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine
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As we rethink rudiments, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s light-bending prediction– a part of The Theory of General Relativity– using photos of a solar eclipse. Eddington’s paper the following year was the “debut” of Einstein’s theoretical work in most of the English-speaking world (and occasioned an urban legend: when a reporter supposedly suggested that “only three people understand relativity,” Eddington was supposed to have jokingly replied “Oh, who’s the third?”)
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”*…
A curious thing happened at the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th. As European and American industries became increasingly confident in their methods of invention and production, scientists made discovery after discovery that shook their understanding of the physical world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook.
These observations included X-rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons; “leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walter Nernst believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.” Those scientists could not have known that over a century later, we would still be staring at what physicist Dominic Walliman calls the “Chasm of Ignorance” at the edge of quantum theory. But they did initiate “the quantum revolution” in the first Solvay Council, in Brussels, named for wealthy chemist and organizer Ernest Solvay.
“Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day… though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis” writes Mann (in a 2011 article just months before the discovery of the Higgs boson). The inaugural meeting kicked off a series of conferences on physics and chemistry that have continued into the 21st century. Included in the proceedings were Planck, “often called the father of quantum mechanics,” Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, who discovered superconductivity.
Also present were mathematician Henri Poincaré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Einstein, the second youngest member of the group. Einstein described the first Solvay conference (1911) in a letter to a friend as “the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem. Nothing positive came out of it.” The ruined “temple,” in this case, were the theories of classical physics, “which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century.” Einstein understood the dismay, but found his colleagues to be irrationally stubborn and conservative…
For more– and a complete list of attendees in the photo above: ““The Most Intelligent Photo Ever Taken”: The 1927 Solvay Council Conference, Featuring Einstein, Bohr, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger & More.”
* Max Planck (second from the left in the first row of the photo above)
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As we ponder paradigms, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Edward Williams Morley; he was born on this date in 1838. A chemist who was first to precisely determine the atomic weight of oxygen, he is probably best remembered for his collaboration with the physicist Albert A. Michelson. In what we call the Michelson–Morley experiment (actually a number of experiments conducted between April and July in 1887), they attempted to detect the luminiferous aether, a supposed medium permeating space that was thought to be the carrier of light waves; their method was the very precise measurement of the speed of light (in various directions, and at different times of the year, as the Earth revolved in its orbit around the Sun). Michelson and Morley always found that the speed of light did not vary at all depending on the direction of measurement, or the position of the Earth in its orbit– the so-called “null result.”
Neither Morley nor Michelson ever considered that these null results disproved the hypothesis of the existence of “luminiferous aether.” But other scientists began to suspect that they did. Almost two decades later the results of the Michelson–Morley experiments supported Albert Einstein’s strong postulate (in 1905) that the speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames of reference as part of his Special Theory of Relativity.
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