Kevin Kelly (2003) Out of Control, London: Fourth Estate.


The increasing biological influence on technology is described by Kevin Kelly as 'the marriage of the born and the made' (2003). The machine is seen to work like an organism and vice versa but in a more convincing and complex fashion: 'human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and [...] life is becoming more engineered' (2003: 17). Kelly enthuses about the technological future but one that is informed by biology (if not biologically-determinist). The 'out of control' of the book's title refers to these systems as emergent and relatively autonomous. As opposed to mechanical systems or the factory assembly line modelled on the clock, other systems are ordered in parallel operations, with no obvious chain of command, as a network. Kelly says: 'What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model' sometimes referred to as complex adaptive systems (2003: 39). The enthusiastic reception of this logic goes out of control in itself, when applied to other fields of interest, to justify lack of control as somehow natural. 

This network logic 'revolutionizes' social practices under the conditions of what Kelly calls 'network economics'. He neglects to talk about surplus value when he describes companies 'combining well-educated human beings and networked computer intelligence into one seamless companywide network to ensure uncompromised quality' (2003: 236) - and profit of course. This is the vision of the networked and modular factory of the global marketplace as a self-perpetuating system (and ideology). It is a 'pure network' that exhibits distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive behaviours. Kelly's concerns around adaptive systems are not ideological but around understanding them, controlling them and optimising them. 

Under the conditions of network economics, companies take on the character of software with bugs in the system (Kelly, 2003: 244). The example is Microsoft's new operating system (at that time) with 4 million lines of code. Despite Bill Gates reassurances that bugs have been eliminated, users know better. It is probably inevitable in such complex systems and offers hope to those less convinced than Kelly about the motivations for operating these systems. It follows that companies invest heavily in developing the manufacturing process not the product. Perhaps this further proves the point about the motivating force of the economic system, and makes software, or more accurately object-orientated software, a suitable metaphor for these processes. It enables a more rational approach according to Kelly:  
'Object-oriented programs create a mild distributed intelligence in software. Like other distributed beings, it is resilient to errors, it heals faster (remove the object), and it grows by incrementally assembling working subunits.' (2003: 248) 
Analogous to a subunit, the worker becomes ever more immaterial in such a scenario.

If the worker looks ever more unlikely to throw off their chains and their role as agents of change contested, it is perhaps also significant that the idea of revolution or discontinuity has become commonplace. Unlike the 'ordered change' of nature, revolutionary 'disordered change' is the realm of technology. Kelly claims that 'technology introduced the concept of revolution as an ordinary mode of change. [...] Science and commerce now seek to capture change - to instill it in a structured way so that it works steadily, producing a constant tide of microrevolutions instead of dramatic and disruptive macrorevolutions. How can we implant change into the artificial so that it is both ordered and autonomous?' (2003: 431) - depressing stuff! Some lies in his later assertion that 'Learning plus evolution is basically the recipe for culture.' (2003: 437) If his technological utopian could be transferred to the social realm, things aren't so bleak after all.