6 SYSTEMS SEDUCTION: THE AESTHETICS OF DECENTRALIZATION

• Published in: Against Reduction
• Main Authors: Arista, Noelani, Costanza-Chock, Sasha, Ghazavi, Vafa, Kite, Suzanne, Klusmeier, Cathryn, Lewis, Jason Edward, Pechawis, Archer, Sawyer, Jaclyn, Zhang, Gary Zhexi, Zhang, Snoweria
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: MIT Press 2021

Ecology in the widest sense turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences) in circuits. 1 How do we deal with unimaginable complexity? Today, the prospect of ecological crisis looms over our every move, as new technologies unfurl absentmindedly into the political realm, somehow managing to disrupt a biosphere in the process. In so many areas of art and science, our situation demands that we think in terms of heterogenous systems and porous boundaries. Today, as the artist Hito Steyerl once put it, "an upload comes down as a shitstorm." 2 The 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, which warned that the world system would collapse in one hundred years given "business as usual," served timely, epochal notice on our vision of exponential "progress." 3 Moreover, its use of Jay Forrester's World3 model of planetary systems dynamics prefigured our contemporary obsession with data and simulation for understanding where we are, and where we're headed. As Joichi Ito's "Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto" suggests, the once unpopular interdisciplinary science of cybernetics has returned as a paradigm through which to understand knotted social, technological, and environmental issues. 4 A cybernetic vision of open systems and regulatory feedback seems to offer a conceptual schema through which we might negotiate a more hopeful future, or at the very least, weather the shitstorm. Meanwhile, the internet has brought information networks out of the realm of military engineering and metaphysics and into the fabric of social life itself. Unpredictable networks and ecological entanglements confront us daily, from fake news to climate change, to remind us of our lack of control—a little hubris goes a long way. The challenge is to develop new strategies, polities, and intelligences that can engage in these complex systems with humility and care.