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All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace Analysis

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Shannon Keel October 31, 2016 Anthropology 102 Dr. Fazzino Discussion 4: Approaches to the Environment and Climate Change “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 2” highlights the main theory of cybernetics, and all of its faults. This second episode looks at how ecological theories would later inform the growth of computer systems. This episode further discusses how mechanical concepts such as cybernetics and systems theory were once applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that nature is perfectly balanced. Cybernetics is a fantasy view of nature. A monstrous push was made for cybernetics to be applied to humanity as a way of building societies with no central control. This idea of a self organized …show more content…

Wanting to understand his dream, Tansley then studied the works of Sigmund Freud. However, one part of Freud's theory was the idea that the human brain works as an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystems, which he believed were inherently stable and self-correcting, and which regulated nature as if it were a machine. The episode then ends with the rise of social media in the twenty-first century. With his focus shifting from MIT computer theorists, hippy communes and even ecological surveys on the Colorado plains, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis finds a believable link between completely separate moments in …show more content…

The results were reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: all members of these communes were free, but some were more free than others. Most of the communes collapsed within three years or less, after bitter feuds and accusations of bullying tore the community apart. After many studies, ecologists began to realize their earlier ideas of nature as an economic system had turned out to be wrong. A specialized study of the animals lurking in the grasses of a small field in Colorado revealed that ecosystems are actually chaotic and impossible to predict. Curtis thereby suggests that our modern network of personal computers is a modern attempt to replicate the utopian ideals of a hippy commune on a larger scale. In Curtis’ opinion, we’re all nodes in a network, plugged into a vast global system. Although it is a gloomy worldview, the documentary is balanced by Curtis’ delightful way of editing together bizarre archive footage, his eye for a memorable caption or title (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace comes from a rather spooky poem by Richard Brautigan), and his choice of

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