Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus

On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are natives--where you're always going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can learn it. It's what I call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels that way. That's not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on the ability of people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion as a way of life, concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't control anything. At best it's a matter of surfing the whitewater.

  -- John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation
Introduction from the book _Cyberia: Life In The Trenches Of Hyperspace_ (1994) by Douglas Rushkoff

book _Out Of Control: The Rise Of The Neo-Biological Civilization, Social Systems and the Economic World_
authored by Kevin Kelly, editor for _WIRED_ magazine in 1998
Paperback Reprint edition (May 1995)
Perseus Pr; ISBN: 0201483408 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.39 x 9.24 x 6.16

Reviews

In many ways, the 20th century has been the Age of Physics. Out of Control is an accessible and entertaining explanation of why the coming years will probably be the Age of Biology -- particularly evolution and ethology -- and what this will mean to most every aspect of our society. Kelly is an enthusiastic and well-informed guide who explains the promises and implications of this rapidly evolving revolution very well.

Forbes ASAP

...the best of an important new genre. The book offers a pointed reminder that self organization...is the essence of innovation, progress, and life itself. These are eternal ideas -- and ideas whose time has come.

London Spectator
...represents an attempt to comprehend the possible future evolution of everything. This is the wonderful sort of subject which can quickly transform a reader's idle curiosity into an obsessive craving for more knowledge and imaginative interpretation. Kelly offers plenty of both, with hackle-raising enthusiasm, eloquence, and even that scientific rarity, a sense of humor.

Synopsis
In a book about the marriage of the born and the made--the biologicalization of everything from computers to government--the executive editor of Wired chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

The author, www.wired.com/staff/kevin , May 24, 1996
Why you should read this book This is a book about how our manufactured world has become so complex that the only way to create yet more complex things is by using the principles of biology. This means decentralized, bottom up control, evolutionary advances and error-honoring institutions. I also get into the new laws of wealth in a network-based economy, what the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona has or has not to teach us, and whether large systems can predict or be predicted. And more: restoration biology, encryption, a-life, and the lessons of hypertext. Yes, it's a romp, in 520 pages. But the best part, my friends tell me, is the 28-page annotated bibliography. If you have suspected that technology could be better, more life-like, then this book is for you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MADE AND THE BORN

      Neo-biological civilization

      The triumph of the bio-logic

• vivisystems

      Learning to surrender our creations
 

HIVE MIND

Bees do it: distributed governance
 

      The collective intelligence of a mob

      Asymmetrical invisible hands

      Decentralized remembering as an act of perception

      More is more than more, it's different

      Advantages and disadvantages of swarms

      The network is the icon of the 21st century
 

MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE

      Entertaining machines with bodies

      Fast, cheap and out of control

      Getting smart from dumb things
 

   The virtues of nested hierarchies

      Using the real world to communicate

      No intelligence without bodies

      Mind/body black patch psychosis
 

ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY

      Biology: the future of machines

      Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds

      Random paths to a stable ecosystem

      How to do everything at once

      The Humpty Dumpty challenge
 

COEVOLUTION

      What color is a chameleon on a mirror?

      The unreasonable point of life

      Poised in the persistent state of almost falling

      Rocks are slow life

      Cooperation without friendship or foresight
 

THE NATURAL FLUX

      Equilibrium is death

      What came first, stability or diversity?

      Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop

      The origins of variation

      Life immortal, ineradicable

      Negentropy

      The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming
 

EMERGENCE OF CONTROL

      In ancient Greece the first artificial self

      Maturing of mechanical selfhood

      The toilet: archetype of tautology

      Self-causing agencies
 

CLOSED SYSTEMS

      Bottled life, sealed with clasp

      Mail-order Gaia
 

      Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man

      The very big ecotechnic terrarium

      An experiment in sustained chaos

      Another synthetic ecosystem, like California
 

POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE

      Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark

      Migrating to urban weed

      The deployment of intentional seasons

      A cyclotron for the life sciences

      The ultimate technology
 

INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

      Pervasive round-the-clock plug in

      Invisible intelligence

      Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms

      Programming a commonwealth

      Closed-loop manufacturing

      Technologies of adaptation
 

NETWORK ECONOMICS

      Having your everything amputated

      Instead of crunching, connecting

      Factories of information
 

      Your job: managing error

      Connecting everything to everything
 

E-MONEY

      Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins

      The fax effect and the law of increasing returns

      Superdistribution

      Anything holding an electric charge will hold a fiscal charge

      Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks

      Fear of underwire economies
 

GOD GAMES

      Electronic godhood

      Theories with an interface

      A god descends into his polygonal creation

      The transmission of simulacra

      Memorex warfare

      Seamless distributed armies

      A 10,000 piece hyperreality

      The consensual ascii superorganism

      Letting go to win
 

IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM

      An outing to the universal library

      The space of all possible pictures

      Travels in biomorph land

      Harnessing the mutator

      Sex in the library

      Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps

      Tunnelling through randomness
 

ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION

      Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine

      What you can't engineer, evolution can

      Mindless acts performed in parallel

      Computational arms race

      Taming wild evolution

      Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules

      Death is the best teacher

      The algorithmic genius of ants

      The end of engineering's hegemony
 

THE FUTURE OF CONTROL

Cartoon physics in toy worlds

      Birthing a synthespian

      Robots without hard bodies

      The agents of ethnological architecture

      Imposing destiny upon free will

      Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald

      Searching for co-control
 

AN OPEN UNIVERSE

      To enlarge the space of being

      Primitives of visual possibilities

      How to program happy accidents

      All survive by hacking the rules

      The handy-dandy tool of evolution

      Hang-gliding into the game of life

      Life verbs

      Homesteading hyperlife territory
 

THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE

      The revolution of daily evolution

      Bypassing the central dogma

      The difference, if any, between learning and evololution

      The evolution of evolution

      The explanation of everything
 

POSTDARWINISM

      The incompleteness of Darwinian theory

      Natural selection is not enough

      Intersecting lines on the tree of life

      The premise of non-random mutations

      Even monsters follow rules

      When the abstract is embodied
 

    The essential clustering of life

DNA can't code for everything
      An uncertain density of biological search space
 

      Mathematics of natural selection
 

THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS
      Order for free

      Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math

      Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets

      A question worth asking

      Self-tuning vivisystems
 

RISING FLOW

      A 4 billion year ponzi scheme

      What evolution wants

      Seven trends of hyper-evolution

      Coyote trickster self-evolver
 

PREDICTION MACHINERY

      Brains that catch baseballs

      The flip side of chaos

      Positive myopia

      Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability

      Operation Internal Look, Ahead

      Varieties of prediction

      Change in the service of non-change

      Telling the future is what the systems are for

      The many problems with global models

      We are all steering
 

WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES

      What ever happened to cybernetics?

      The holes in the web of scientific knowledge

      To be astonished by the trivial
 

Hypertext: the end of authority

      A new thinking space
 

THE NINE LAWS OF GOD

      How to make something from nothing

      Hijacking the universe
 

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

      A to L

      M to Z
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We're just part of the process of turing mountains into computers.

"A pair of coevolutionary creatures chasing each other in an escalating arms race can only seem to veer out of control. Likewise, a pair of cozy coevolutionary symbionts embracing each other can only seem to lead to stagnant solipsism. But Lovelock saw that if you had a vast network of coevolutionary impulses, such that no creatures could escape creating its own substrate and the substrate its own creatures, then the web of coevolution spread around until it closed a circuit of self-making and self-control."

"...if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? Gaia hovers there, a blue sphere under the stark light, inhaling energy, regulating its internal states, fending off disturbances, complexifying, and ready to transform another planet if given a chance."

• track _Out Of Control_ MP3 by U2 off of _Boy_
• industrial hip hop house track _Edge Of No Control_ MP3 (192k) by Meat Beat Manifesto off of _Edge Of No Control ep_ 12" on Play It Again Sam (1992)

• track _Out Of Control_ MP3 by Rocket From The Crypt off of _Group Sounds_ on Vagrant (2001)
• indie pop underground track _I Don't Want Control Of You_ MP3 (192k) by Teenage Fanclub off of _Songs From Northern Britain_ (1997)
• indie electronic track _According To No Plan_ MP3 (192k) by Broadcast off of _Work & Non Work_ 12" on Drag City/Warp #052 (1997)
• video (mpg)(43.7megs) for track _Out Of Control_ by Chemical Brothers off of _Surrender_ on Astralwerks (1999)
• ambient techno track _Out Of Control_ (192k) by Robert Leiner off of _Visions Of The Past_ CD on Apollo (1993)
• detroit tech house track _Technology's Out Of Control (mixed 6:09)_ MP3 by Green Velvet off of _Globus Mix Vol. 5 - letsallmakemistakes_ MixCD by Matthew Herbert on Tresor #157 (2000)
• tracks _Out Of Control_ & _Slow Life_ by Super Furry Animals off of _Phantom Power_ on XL (2003)
  • "Rocks Are Slow Life" is a chapter heading in the book
• hardcore techno track _Outta Control_ MP3 by Sharkey & Eclipse
• sample: "big brother is not watching you... the reason we're here, is that it's outta control..." from the film _Cube_ (vhs/ntsc)(1997)
• progressive trance track _Lose Control (Inner Sanctuary Mix)_ MP3 (192k) by Lemon 8
• 604 track _Out Of Control_ MP3 by Space Tribe off of _Shapeshifter_ CD on Spirit Zone
• techno track _Out Of Control_ MP3 (192k) by The Cause off of _Primate Endangered Species_ 12" #001 on Primate Endangered Species (2001)
• 604 track _No Conspiracy_ MP3 (192k) by Shakta off of _Order Odonata 6_ compilation on Dragonfly (2001)
• sample: "This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that? Big Brother is not watching you." - from the film _Cube_ (vhs/ntsc) (1997)
• 604 track _Out Of Your Control_ MP3 (192k) by X-Dream off of _Radio_ 12"x2 on Blue Room Released 
• sample: "It slips out of your control, or what you think is your control." - from the documentary _Dialogues With Mad Women_ directed by Allie Light

In Out of Control, the flagship volume of this technological post-Darwinism, Wired editor Kevin Kelly argues that we are heading into a neobiological civilization defined by organic technologies, machinelike biologies, and the prevalence of networks and hive minds. In this Teilhardian world, evolution and engineering become two sides of the same out-of-control force of adaptive learning and holistic feedback loops. Amassing loads of research, Kelly attempts to convince the reader that the spontaneous, symbiotic, and self-organizing capacities of complex systems amount to nothing less than an "invisible hand" of evolution-one that he thinks should be allowed to run riot.

Instead of musty old governments, outmoded humanist philosophies, and moribund social institutions, the creative novelty of the universe itself should guide technological development, economic networks. and human culture. Kelly would bridle at the label of metaphysician. but he closes his book with some neo-biological rules of thumb, bumper-sticker slogans like 'seek persistent disequilibrium' and 'honor your errors' that he calls the "Nine Laws of God." ' Though Kelly himself is a born again Christian, his God is in many ways the polar opposite of the topdown lawgiver of traditional biblical faith. Instead, his Nine Laws recall the process theology that has quietly built up steam in some twentieth century religious circles, a theology that supplants the transcendent one-shot Platonic Creator with a more Taoist and Heraclitan sense of creative evolution and constant becoming.
- Erik Davis - _Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information_ 

"Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible."

- Epictetus, Greek Stoic philosopher

Laney's probably a more conscious metaphor in that what he does with the nodal points is sort of like what I see myself really doing in that part of my work that some people regard as predictive. There are several places in these books where Laney says: "Look, I can't predict the future. But I am sensitive to some areas from which change is emerging." I think that's pretty much the best we can do these days, because change is both exponential and in some weird, either new or newly revealed way, out of control. You know, who's running the show? Well, nobody. That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of being unknowable.

 -William Gibson 

In _Out of Control_, Kevin Kelly discusses "God games" like Populus and SimEarth, which allow players to play demiurge, tweaking creation by altering levels of carbon dioxide or the rate of urban development. Kelly points out that these games parallel the science of artificial life, where researchers "grow" synthetic life-like forms by introducing basic rules of behavior and then letting whole worlds of code evolve inside the computer. "I can't imagine anything more addictive than being a god," he writes. "A hundred years from now nothing will keep us away from artificial cosmos cartridges we can purchase and [then] pop...into a world machine [in order] to watch creatures  come alive and interact on their own accord."

- Erik Davis

track _No Control_ byBad Religion off of _No Control_ 12"   on Epitaph (1989)

Culture was the seed of proliferation but it's gotten melded
Into an inharmonic whole, to an inharmonic whole.
Consciousness has plagued us and we cannot shake it
Though we think we're in control, though we think we're in control.
Questions that besiege us in life are testament of our helplessness.

There's no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
When we all disintegrate it will all happen again.

Time is so rock solid in the minds of the hordes but they can't
Explain why it should slip away, explain why it should slip away.
History and future are the comforts of our curiosity but here we are
Rooted in the present day, rooted in the present day
Questions that besiege us in life are testament of our helplessness.

There's no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
When we all disintegrate it will all happen again
If you came to conquer, you'll be king for a day,
But you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away.
And believe these words you hear when you think your path is clear...

We have no control. We have no control. We have no control, we do not understand.
You have no control, you are not in command. You have no control. We have no control. No control. No control. You have no control.

Note: The "There's no vestige..." line is from Hutton, 1795. So there.

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."   - Jim Dodge

film _Matrix: Reloaded_

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.
Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. Look there, at that woman. My God, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her, so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait... Watch - you see, I have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply, each line of the program creating a new effect, just like poetry. First, a rush... heat... her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand why - is it the wine? No. What is it then, what is the reason? And soon it does not matter, soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the `why.' `Why' is what separates us from them, you from me. `Why' is the only real social power, without it you are powerless. And this is how you come to me, without `why,' without power. Another link in the chain. But fear not, since I have seen how good you are at following orders, I will tell you what to do next. Run back, and give the fortune teller this message: Her time is almost up. Now I have some real business to do, I will say adieu and goodbye.

pOrtal:
Out Of Control Online - the entire book

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