All watched over by machines (by machines of loving grace)

I'm watching a documentary (Wired.com pos-men) dispelling the myth of self-regulating systems, ecologies and communities. The title refers to the comforting sense of optimism with which progressive people took from cybernetics and nature, and applied to politics. The argument is that there is no nature, no self-regulating whole. The negative feedback and the positive feedbackdo not add to balance. And so, power will find ways to undo equality. Other's Regulations will always overrule self-regulation.

It seems a little to overstate the case trying to be more grounded, more realist, more brutal. There are times of balance in which changes are bounded and may be cyclic, although they may be lost at any time if the system gets into catastrophe space. But there are seasons, and ceolocanths. The unstable can behave regularly indefinitely.

There are some ideas that sit well with Tim Morton's Hegelian, Romantic Dark Ecology. Time to sit up and see the dark of the forest around the little clearing of self-regulation.

The title is from a poem (link).

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