Adam Curtis’ new documentary features an experimental game of Pong operated by the ratio of red and green paddles held up by each half of an audience. The experiment was performed on an minimally instructed audience by Loren Carpenter (of Pixar fame) in 1991. Excerpt of the documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wH0W0Mj8U.
Quote from Adam Curtis,
"It was like a switch went in my head," Curtis says. "Carpenter saw it as a world of freedom with order. But I suddenly saw it as the opposite – like old film of workers toiling in a factory. They weren't free – they looked like disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine screen. It was a video game, which made it fun, but it still made me wonder whether power had really gone away in these self-organising systems, or if it was just a rebranding. So we became happy components in systems – and our job is to make those systems stable."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis-computers-documentary
Written up here.
http://www.capatcolumbia.com/reading%20packet/Out%20of%20Control.pdf
Comment:
Curtis’ analysis is naive. We are not individuals either free to pursue our “own” interests or individual caught within the web of group interaction… we aren’t individual at all! Each of us is the accumulation of interactions just as much as the game is the accumulation of individual interacting. It is fractal and hierarchical.
To reductio ad absurdum Curtis I need only point out that he is trapped within the confines of the collective understanding of English. Where is his “individual” if he frees himself from language? Where is the freedom in even generating media that necessarily requires an audience?
The experiment is interesting I need pursue it more. It may be useful to understand the stock market also especially the frequency of oscillations and size of movements induced by slower feedback (less volume), and the fact that bird flocks have faster response rates than individual birds so that groups adapt to signals faster than individuals! Really suggests that there are emergent “entities” (which is an oxymoron since we are discussing the dissolution of selves into groups so what sense in making groups just new individuals).
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