What
was it like playing guitar with Pink Floyd, and whether or not you know
any 'insider information' behind the Pubilus legend?
DouglasAdams: What was it like?
Well, I can see why they do it. I don'
DouglasAdams: don't know anything
about the Publius thing. Whatever the truth it wasn't very interesting.
The music was better.
-Douglas Adams
on his new game Starship Titanic]
If you've forgotten, or if you haven't noticed, that feedback (implying interaction, participation, reciprocal communication, etc.) is what this enigma theory is all about go here.
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of The Internet: the last battleground of the twentieth century, presented by Douglas Adams, (listed in TDB credits) and hear Douglas express towards the end of Programme I his "own little speculative vision", which is "best described by analogy". The analogy, of course, is totally cybernetic, involving piloting a plane, thermostats, and revolves around the concept of "feedback loops". (the essence of cybernetics) Adams concludes that "My belief, perhaps I should say my hope, is that the speed of response will reintroduce us to that from which our political systems have separated us for so long, i.e. the consequences (outputs) of our own actions (inputs). Feedback loops will be the foundation of an entirely new form of electronic democracy."
But wait! There's more--much more!...
How do you see the Internet changing your world?
"Tight feedback loops. As a novel writer I’m used to feedback loops of about a year. As we at The Digital Village start to produce interactive content for the web, I’ll be able to respond to feedback loops measured in minutes. Feedback loops are the most powerful process we know of, being responsible for everything from guitar howlround to the evolution of life. As their power begins to invade all of the electronic transactions of our lives, the effect will be, I’m convinced, as fundamental as the invention of printing, broadcasting, and telephony."
-Douglas Adams, AppleMasters
...
"'One of the most powerful forces in nature is about to come into view in the online medium: the feedback loop - where the input stage of one iteration is the output stage of another iteration,' Adams says. 'Feedback loops are what drive evolution...'"
-Fast Company, The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy
...
"He establishes points that are so fundamental, most people will probably have not even stopped to consider them.
Interactive may be a term severely lampooned by those sick of e-this and e-that hype.
But 'interactive' makes for individual empowerment. Where the telephone is one-to-one communication and newspapers and television are one-to-many, the Internet is many-to-many."
Growing through evolution
"The Net is like the British constitution, not set in stone but constantly evolving. And while feedback through the polling booth is a slow, grinding process, the Internet allows for immediate reaction with what Adams calls feedback loops."
-UK Hitch-hiker's guide to the Internet
...
Also check out www.douglasadams.com and locate the Articles by DNA section...
"This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of
those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but
the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first
time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded
music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre,
music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully
silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama
they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we
don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head."
"Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally,
what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this
natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or
resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television
or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’"
[Trust, skepticism, resources, work, answer back]
"Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome
new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even
know to have names for them."
-How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, from The Sunday Times on August 29th 1999
...
[Wiener and Bigelow looked more closely at other servomechanisms, including
self-steering mechanisms as simple as thermostats, and concluded that feedback is
the concept that connects the way brains, automatic artillery, steam engines,
autopilots, and thermostats perform their functions.
-Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought
...
"This was the original premise of purposive systems as expounded by Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow in 1943: intelligent behavior evolves as a consequence of the ability to measure and keep account of the effects of a given signal through feedback loops that return a message signifying the magnitude of the result. These principles are common to automatic anti-aircraft guns firing at a moving target, neurons seeking to make the right connections inside the brain, laboratory animals facing a maze, corporations facing a free-market economy, or any other situation where it is possible to place a value on an objective at which to aim."
-George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines
...
"The result of Wiener's book (Cybernetics) was that the notion of
feedback penetrated almost every aspect of technical culture. Though the central concept was both old and commonplace in specialized circumstances, Wiener gave the idea legs by generalizing the effect into a universal principle..."
-Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.
...
"Wiener saw feedback as far more than a clever mechanical trick; he regarded it as an essential characteristic of mind and of life... Wiener was claiming nothing less than that, in perfecting feedback and the means of rapid data manipulation, the science of cybernetics was gaining a deeper understanding of life itself as being, at its core, the processing of information."
-Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information]
...
"It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood
through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which
belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and
between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever increasing part."
-Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and Society (1954)
And things just continue falling into place...
"I have always
understood that the Internet was founded on the precepts of
respecting other community members..." -Publius
...
"At the same time as McCarthy was proposing a new form of
computing, -- i.e. time-sharing and interactive computing --
another computer pioneer, J.C.R. Licklider, who would play an
important role in the developing computer revolution, was working
on a paper exploring the concept of human-computer interaction that
Norbert Wiener had stressed was so crucial."
-Ronda Hauben, Cybernetics, Time-sharing, Human-Computer Symbiosis and On-line Communities Creating a Supercommunity of On-Line Communities
...
"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through
a machine than face to face.
That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion... And
we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able
to interact with the richness of living information--not merely in the passive
way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as
active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through
our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our
connection to it."
-The Computer as a Communication Device, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert
Taylor (1968)
It says: 
The image is from The Computer as a Communication Device. (pdf)
...
"The dominant communications media do not respond directly to feedback from their audiences, do not deliver what the
audience wants or needs at the moment when the audience wants or needs it -- in short, they are not interactive. They are also
basically discrete; if they complement one another, it is accidental, and more often they merely duplicate one another's
information. There is no way for the audience easily to call up and compare media sources; people are bombarded with
messages and find themselves unable to sort, store, and evaluate them effectively. Cybermedia would be a medium that
responded to its audience. It would deliver useful information in reply to the messages it received from that audience."
-Wiener (as in Norbert Wiener) Ideas
To see how fun and absurd the enigma looks (not much unlike the Hitchhiker's Guide) in light of the concept of feedback and all that that implies see here.
["Let Douglas Adams give you a steer...
Can computers dominate man, or will we always retain ultimate control?"]
Don't miss the
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy web project.
(very enigma-esque)
Also of interest might be Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation.
"A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first
against the wall when the revolution comes."
[keywords: cyberspace, Xanadu, Kubla Khan, Dirk Gently, Doctor Who, time-machine]
Recall the beginning of the Pulse video and think:
A pleasure dome for the digital dreamer?
Hyperland?
The Internet?
"The assembled crew included, amongst other equally smart people, the biologist Richard Dawkins, the 'father' of the Artificial Life field Chris Langton, and the novelist Douglas Adams. Complementing this eclectic trio were other writers, founder A-lifers, AI researchers and virtual world experts, to name but a few."
"It wasn’t my intention to start a whole new field-that would demand a great deal more scientific foundation than I am able to offer... However, I did want to suggest a shift of viewpoint, to a more 'cybernetic', systems approach to Biology, AI and life in general. To cut a long story very short, I wanted to suggest that it was time for us to throw off the shackles imposed by three hundred years of highly successful Newtonian thought."
"When the universe is viewed as a set of inter-related phenomena, whose continued existence can be explained in terms of various forms of self-maintenance through feedback, we see a small set of common building blocks turning up time and time again. The way a cloud persists, the way an intelligent organism exploits its ability to predict future events, the way societies form and reform, all involve the same basic operators, albeit arranged in different ways and instantiated in different structures. A synapse, an enzyme reaction, a transistor and an import tax are all examples of the same thing-a modulator. This is just a re-statement of the principles of Cybernetics, as formulated by Weiner."
-Steve Grand, Of Mountains and Molehills
"So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover something else we can make out of sand—silicon. We make the silicon chip—and suddenly, what opens up to us is a Universe not of fundamental particles and fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the, as it turns out, very very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop which lies at the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that happens in evolution—that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model, not for a while because early machines are terribly slow and clunky, but gradually we accumulate a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or deduce—and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counter-intuitive, particularly to as proud a species as we."
-Douglas Adams, Is there an Artificial God?
[Speech at Digital Biota
2, Cambridge U.K. - September 1998]
Old news rediscovered here
Publius wrote:
"Though the
newsgroup discourse is generally moving in a positive direction,
examine in particular the posts of Matt Denault, mcginni, John Take
and Evan Coyne Maloney for helpful clues. Well done people!"
Evan Coyne Maloney wrote:
"First of all, has anyone wondered if Publius could be Douglas Adams???
He certainly has the band connection and the internet connection. And,
as a writer, would certainly be interested in the meanings of things.
Hell, Gilmour's letting him play guitar, why wouldn't he allow
'[Enigma] Publius' to be spelled out in lights."
John Take wrote:
"Is it possible that Douglas Adams (who
we know is familiar with Usenet, etc..., alerted Pink Floyd
to alt.music.pink-floyd, thus leading to the >>>>>MESSAGE
thread? It's possible..."
On the enigma DNA wrote:
"You have to remember that rock musicians, however
talented, are just a bunch of human beings playing guitars, like
novelists are a just a bunch of people who stare blearily at a word
processor in the morning and maybe trying to think of something that's
a bit funny without being embarrassingly stupid. All this secret
message stuff is just blah..."
