Programmed Catastrophe:

the accidental architecture of control

Steve Goodman

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

Year 2000 or year 00? A time bomb is ticking- the M-bug rushes in from the future threatening a planetary system malfunction in which the actual is catastrophically infiltrated by the virtual- the ultimate accident. As the whole world converges on this singular event which will bring the new millennium in with a crash, the architecture of control fluidifies to cope with the turbulence. Past a certain point of destratification, control switches into its own worst enemy and is carried off by cascades of positive feedback warping the parallel lines of identity with the torque of a vortical cybernetic culture. In this climate, the digital simulation of the channels of security strips control down to the frequency modulation of emergency, the intensity irrigation of an accidental culture teetering with techno-ecological dread on the edge of social meltdown via bio-technical recombination. A new dawn. A new dread.

As computer clocks around the planet fail to register the new millennium and assorted time cults fight a counter-Gregorian battle against the restoration of a calendar which proceeds into the 2000s, a whole series of accidents are forecast to bring down the lumbering mainframe networks in every sphere of circulation, agentless information bombs dropped into the bandwidths of the net, taking down radar guidance systems, triggering still greater financial cascade effects, and accelerating the already panic ridden swirl of megalopian earth. As with effects separated from causes in the fog of war, information bombs launched into this secure-ality infrastructure haze into accidents.

If the hype on Y2K is already exceeding paranoid extremes, then you haven't seen anything yet. No matter the extent of planetary interference it creates or correspondingly, the lack of an intelligent response which reaches beyond the purely technical efforts at Gregorian restoration, Y2K is still fundamentally an anti-climax, an undetected mine of World War 3 which has been occurring in cyberspace since the 1940s. An anti-climax but nevertheless a chrono-political singularity in the slow burn extermination of reality initiated by the post World War 2 emergence of cybernetics into the contemporary period of ubiquitous computation.

Whether or not Y2K will trigger accidentally all Chinas nuclear arsenal on every Occidental conurbation as some apocalyptic commentators prophecize, there is little doubt that the already preoccupied global war machinery and its policing operations in the new world disorder will be severely stretched by Y2K as informational perturbation. US Department of Defence systems using old programming languages such as CS-1, CMS-2, JOVIAL, TACPOL and NELIAC are almost certainly not millennium compliant, while the 24 Navstar Satellites between which GPS systems string their orbital digital tracings, look certain to make the Year 2000 a navigational nightmare.

The shockwaves of Y2K will generate a fluid landscape of undecidabiltiy for which a wide range of neo-vorticist collectivities are already preparing. Twisting these digital tracings against themselves by re-rerouting them into base cartographical meshworks, a Y2K positive posture can be tracked emerging from hypermaterialist diagrams of cataplex dynamics and the general accident of reality. These cataplex diagrams simultaneously participate in and map the phase compressions of population turbulence and yearn the transition from hyperregulated flows of activity into mutant recombination, melting reality into streams of liquid silicon trickling across the planet's desktops, diverted along the polished surfaces of a planetary urbanism becoming airport. Intricate ripples, folds and cusps as streams of intensive matter seep into actuality, short-circuiting the order of corpo-reality. As Melanie Newton of the Cybernetic culture research unit explains, "[f]orecasting the pattern of Y2K devastation is complicated by its (artificial) nature, which explodes in spirals. As a highly chaotic singularity it is characterized by extreme sensitivity to microvariables, the absence of precedent, and anticipatory looping through its own potentials. It occurs in advance of itself, punctually switches to an unknown climate, and spreads contagiously through networks. Modelling it adds complexity and noise (which feed it). Though entirely semiotic, it already amounts to the most expensive accident in history (whatever happens). $3.6 trillion and counting."(Newton 12-13)

2. Accident and Emergency: some conceptual viruses.

In this climate, theory is sucked into the domain of information warfare in its production of logic bomb lauched into a short sighted culture of passive nihilism and chronopolitical reactivity. Some precursors to a Y2K positive position can be delineated with concepts snatched from the toolkits of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Virilio has comes closest to a direct engagement with the millenium bug through his theoretical obsessions with information bombs, accidents and emergencies.

Picking up from Michel Foucault's terminal critique of criminology in Discipline & Punish, but nagging him for not going far enough, Paul Virilio's writing pushes Foucault's microphysics further down into a base flow chart of differential velocity circuits, dissolving the cartography of postmodern penality into a materialist chaos physics.

Launching a kind of theoretical terrorism against the State machinery of thought, Virilio demands that we reassess the traditional philosophical tenet which holds that the "accident is relative and contingent and substance absolute and necessary. The word accident, derived from the Latin accidens, signals the unanticipated, that which unexpectedly befalls the mechanism, system or product, its surprise failure or destruction. As if the failure were not programmed into the product from the moment of its production or implementation . . . [and it follows from this that the] breakdown or failure is less the deregulation of production than the production of a specific failure, or even a partial or total destruction."(Virilio 1993 211) The production of substance is therefore recognised by Virilio as simultaneously the invention of the substance's accident. Corresponding to this runs his critique of the orientation to speed and stratified tactics of Occidental, military-driven, progressive techno-culture. Virilio traces the carceral continuum into silicon, follows its liquidation of reality and calls for a realignment of viral attack into what he describes as a 'prospective of the accident' that prioritises the invented accident over its substance.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's counter-social theory or cataplex theory can be seen to converge and push further Virilio's orientation to the 'accident'. Stripping away the remnants of functionalist transcendence, they state that "it is in order to function that a social machine must not function well."(Deleuze & Guattari 1983 151) In this mutant neo-functionalism, megamachines function by breaking down; "Far from being a pathological consequence, the disequilibrium is functional and fundamental."(150) Turning the optic of State philosophy inside out to reveal the libidinal infrastructure which deposits the social, function is dismantled shifting the focus to accidents as productive singularities feeding what Kodwo Eshun describes as the 'futureshock braking system' of the strata.

The impulse to compress the distinction between order and chaos into a field populated by attractor generated emergent pattern is shared by perhaps Deleuze and Guattari's most creative critic, Jean Baudrillard. In his melancholy rant on the Gulf War and the implosion of actuality, Baudrillard assists in reinstating the logic of the accident through his discussion of virtual reality and the non-euclidean geometry of simulation; "The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual."(Baudrillard 1995 27)

What all these positions emphasise when applied to a rigorous examination of the Millenium bug phenomena is that the logic of the accident is more complex than a simple interruption of normative structure of temporal norms. Rather than a deviation from a taken for granted organization of reality, the accident is denegativized. Deleuze and Guattari's anti-capitalism is different, for example, from a typical left wing conception of resistance. If one takes seriously their suggestion that the accleration of the global system itself proliferates escape routes from the prevailing stratified logic of corpo-reality, then this surely prioritizes those trapdoors in the system which are commonly known as technological accidents. Cybernetic capitalism has infact flattened out the distinction between the natural disaster and the technological catastrophe to the extent that a Y2K positive position begins to converge with some of the most persistent elements of guerrilla stategy and protracted warfare from Sun Tzu to Mao Tse-Tung to Giap Vo Nguyen. As Virilio points out in contrast to the hi-tech speed rushes of the global cybernetic war machine, the "ancient Oriental military-rural apparatus. . .tends to increase the time of war by mobilizing the population around active or passive- direct or indirect- survival objectives, natural catastrophes, accidents and restrained conflicts"(Virilio 1994 22) become part of the same continuum of war stretching into the microphysical fabric of everyday life.

3. Programmed Catastrophe

Such a realignment of perspective on Y2K has precursors in these theorists' approaches to the architecture of the carceral continuum, that networked archipelago of control institutions which constitute the regulatory cutting edge of social cybernetics. Indeed, the dominant logic of reactions to the millennium bug is highly consistent with a model of security which has been put in place, byte by byte for decades. It is "a new conception of security as materialised war, as organised insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe. (A Thousand Plateaus 467)" This cybernetic secure-ality consists of a current flowing between the mutually exciting poles of programmed catastrophe and turbulence simulation and their respective turfs, the accidental continuum (planomenon) and the carceral continuum (ecumenon).

Like an apocalypse that never comes and a 'plague that never ends', programmed catastrophe is a slow motion riot unfolding to the preset unpredictability of a simulated liquid. If turbulence simulation is the abstract dynamic of cybernetic control societies, then programmed catastrophe is control losing control, unintended consequences feeding back to disturb the laminated order of late capitalist urban populations. It corresponds to C3I or the military-electronic network which proliferates the concretisation of pure war in virtual actuality. Attempts to control escalation itself, to control every peturbation in the Human security system, feed the disorder itself as we can see from patterns of English and American intervention in global drugs networks since the 19th century. Programmed catastrophe denotes a batch of parallel phase shifts from surveillance to monitor, from discipline to control and from welfare to warfare. Computer techniques of modelling non-linearity have, as megamachinic intelligence has accumulated, been adopted by agencies of control and security in the hope of warding off the threat of social turbulence.

The model spreads like a virus from the war machine infecting the slower components of the state, dissolving control into the matrix and actuality into the vortical dynamics of population turbulence, cascading from micro to global scales. Detailing the work done of chaos theory and war, Manuel Da Landa notes how the outbreak of military conflict is mathematically speaking related to the events at the onset of turbulence. Critical points in weather patterns, in the size of urban masses or in the distribution of political and economic forces, could be among the contributing factors in the self-assembly of different armies in history. . .Thus, in the case of the nomads a cyclic singularity in the weather [called a periodic attractor] signalled the onset of turbulent behaviour. [Da Landa 21]

The military cybernetic complex subsumes the technical instruments of penal systems. In their heavily Foucauldian discussion of postmodern penality, Feely and Simon point to the transformation of the US criminal justice machinery to a mode of cybernetic governmentality which they describe as actuarial justice. Emphasizing the programmed management of the population as a statistical aggregation, actuarialism marks a general transition to the transcarceration of what Deleuze terms control societies. It is a shift towards the strategic interchangability and continuous control of the carceral continuum; "Indeed the distinctive claim of operations research is that it offers generic insights and techniques for managing seemingly different phenomena and systemic processes- airports, communications, manufacturing, criminal justice." Feeley and Simon argue that this systems approach adopts a 'funnel of justice' flow chart with the primary protocol the efficient management of danger and the threat of turbulence in population flows; it is an orientation "that invites us to think about the elimination of bottlenecks, pre-trial diversion, 'early case assessment' bureaus to weed out 'junk cases', 'fast track' prosecution bureas to go after career criminals, use of probation and parole revocations to avoid the 'trial lopp', 'selective incapacitation' to deploy limited prison space more efficiently. . ."(188)

By deploying Paul Virilio's emphasis on circulation, Foucault's cartographies of confinement can be unfolded so that the regulation of flows are seen as the basic logic of social systems. Paul Virilio points out that this function of flow regulation is also the abstract logic of police. The primary surface of flow in modernity is taken by Virilio as the street, emphasing the nomadic potential and turbulence of the riot, of holding the street, as a key dynamic in anti-state movements. But the question opens up in cybernetic society whether the street is any longer the seething pool of potential resistance but relative to the environment of the virtual class, a low velocity sedentary structure. Is the street overexposed in an era of hyper-surveillant control?

The core control establishments of the planet are now run on insights derived from chaos theory. Organizations from the military to business are now mutating to survive 'far from equilibrium' in a techno economic system out of control. It si a system in which we must take as basic fact that the agencies of regulation have at least learnt one fundamental and sinister fact well known in the art of war- the only effective way to track your enemy is to become it. The most efficient technique of social control requires not waiting for the onset of turbulence, but instigating it like a computer generated tornado sent into actuality.

The manifestation of turbulence simulation is the mathematics of social modulation.

An example of the deployment of such virtual tactics onto actual control architectures occurred at a Scottish prison near Glasgow. This controversial project conducted by Christopher Zeeman in the 1970s at Gartree Prison, Glasgow involved an attempt using the protocols of catastrophe theory to develop a model to help predict and prevent the ignition of institutional rioting. We can see in Zeeman's application of catastrophe theory to institutional disturbance an orientation towards control which permeates the non-linear sciences from weather forcasting to economic modelling. Disturbance becomes a statistical flow, graduated in relation to magnitudes of tension [frustration, distress] and alienation [division, lack of communication, polarization. From this gridwork, a warped surface is visualized out of the axioms that disorder increases with tension and secondly, that an upswing of alienation is accompanied by an increased likelihood of sporadic, sudden emergence of violence. This graphical shape is described by the researchers as a cusp catastrophe, contending that institutions have the tendency to avoid the attractors of 'quiet' and 'disturbance'; "the institution may be said to have an overall homeostatic tendency to keep within a 'moderate level of disorder'. But as the authors admit, with this contention the model still remains deterministic. Within their model therefore, giving it a sensitivity to contingent reality, 'external events- or internal incidents within the institution can be represented as stochastic noise." (Zeeman 1978)

This case is strongly emblematic of the imperatives of programmed catastrophe and turbulence simulation as a fluidification of control. As with the sciences on which it is based and despite a newly found orientation away from Newtonian order and predictability, programmed catastrophe still takes its central protocol as predictability of crisis. As with chaos theory's application in meteorological simulation and its increasing importance in governmental modelling of the dynamics of civilian populations, they all constitute attempts to shape or run the future, warding off critical cusp points where laminar flow begins to self-organise, thereby threatening the organisation.

Hence the idea which suggests that the application of postmodern sciences to governmentality will correspond to a easing of control begins to appear somewhat misguided. Rather than a "withering away of state violence . . .it has also been fluidified and intensified. The rapid deployment force is the model of late capitalist state violence, on all fronts: the ability to descend 'out of nowhere', anywhere, at a moments notice. . ." Programmed catastrophe, as Brian Massumi therefore denotes a "virtualization of state violence, its becoming immanent to every co-ordinate of the social field, as unbounded space of fear."(Massumi 29)

When such claustrophobic dread space leaks everywhere, crime control becomes a reverse forensics, tracing the future at the level of code into the semiotics of hyperurban architecture, designing the street into a smooth relay of cybernetic capital. Y2K is a glitch in this matrix of control scrambling future forensics and pushing its computations into overload. The veneer of perfected control intelligence is eroded by fluid undercurrents continuously undermining attempts to superimpose simulation scenarios onto a y2paniKed populous. This is the darkside infrastructure of programmed catastrophe, the unintended consequences of turbulence simulation, interrupting the deification of high tech and breeding vortical collectivities whose time goes round and round.

"Is Y2K just a scratch on the vinyl of history?" [Hyper-C terro-wrist 00/00/00]

References

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