Artwork from Takashi Murakami at the Hong Kong art fair 2010

Sailor Moon (1992 – 1997) transcended Japanese anime and reached a pure state of corrosiveness. Sailor Moon is an artificial flavouring substance: depthless, highly satisfying and addictive. It is more than any artwork of Takashi Murakami the best illustration of his superflat art movement, depicting “the shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture”. The original manga is a little different from the anime and somehow more spiritual. The anime version expunged its scenario of any particularity, leading to the ultimate stereotype of the Japanese girl, flanked with kitsch accessories ready for merchandising, cheap love stories and consumerist lifestyles. The characters were designed as for any animes to appeal both to girls and perverts thanks to a quota of ‘subliminal’ underwear scenes. Their transformations into self-centred wonder women are the climax of every episodes (otherwise rather mediocre in their drawings). The same scenes of transformations are shown again and again, becoming objects of cult, obsessing and hypnotic. They saturate the narrative with their superflat symbolic.

There is a before and an after Sailor Moon, the series imitated many other predecessors, and has been often imitated, but it was the first to reach that level of depthless consumerism worship.

The main female character of Vivre sa vie (1962, Jean-Luc Godard), played by Anna Karina, dancing to escape the boredom of her prostitution.

The final scene of The 400 blows (1959, François Truffaut), the story of a boy exerting his freedom until the very limit.

Scene of love in Breathless (1960, Jean Luc Godard). Contradictory feelings and the intimacy of a couple have rarely been so well captured in a movie…

The movie confronts the reality of human condition to its modern idealization, culminating in a final scene where jazz and spiritedness defeat the order so preciously orchestrated, at least for the time of a dance. Play Time is a post-modernist masterpiece because it plays with the paradoxes of human existence; humour and derision being the only possible postures.

See also the Toronto or Elsewhere video that I did in 2006. I didn’t see the film of Alain Resnais back then but I realize now that the theme was somehow very similar.

ECCS'10 was held in Lisbon, I saw this huge graffiti by the artists Os Gemeos one evening when I went back to my hotel, also about ethics...

Let me conclude my series of posts on the ECCS 2010 with few notes on power and ethics. You will be convinced by reading my previous posts that complex systems theory has many applications. The discipline is relatively new and we are only at the beginning of discovering the impact it will have on our daily life. As for any science, it can lead either to a better world or a nightmarish society, depending on how we use it. I could feel it throughout the week of the conference. Most scientists advocate the positive impacts of their research, but do see the possible misappropriations. Complex systems theory is central in the development of a more sustainable society, as illustrated in innovations such as smart grids and intelligent transport infrastructure, which happen to be decentralized systems. Complex systems theory provide us with a better understanding of our cultures and the way we operate together, which could help us address societal challenges. It could help us better classify knowledge, plan our cities, simplify our laws, reach altogether informed decisions and preserve cultural diversity. But it could also lead to control over public’s opinion, to a wider social gap between influencers and their followers, to a resilience of monopolistic systems, and to partitioned societies. The choice is ultimately to citizens, and it worries me to see that the vast majority doesn’t care much about recent advances in complex systems theory, as in any science, too busy to cope with what has been already decided for them long time ago in other fields. What is necessary to make that change? In the meantime, it seems to me that scientists are left on their own, their only interlocutors being large corporations and short-sighted politics (who cannot carry any public will on the subject because the public doesn’t care). Scientists improvise the best they can social and philosophical criticism of their own research, but it would much more beneficial to have other disciplines involved.

After the inspiring presentation  by Jeffrey Johnson, “Policy and Design of Complex Systems”, I wondered if a form of ethics in social systems analysis might prescribe the modelling of every person involved , including the creators of the model and their commissioners. Self-interest and personal motivations could then become much more apparent than in current researches.

“There is a power struggle for ‘the Truth’ [...] Scientists must model themselves and the politicians, both are inside the system being studied. Modelling the system can change the system!”

http://vimeo.com/15899828

This is what Alexy Khrabrov and George Cybenko attempted to answer at the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon. Here is an introduction that I have slightly edited to make it more accessible.

“Mind Economy: Modeling Influence in Communication Networks with Social Capital.”

by Alexy Khrabrov and George Cybenko

Social scientists, businesses, and governments are interested in summarizing the ongoing social network activity to identify the most influential players capable of creating and maintaining high-impact group behaviours. We would like to have metrics of influence in dynamic systems, and generative models which can explain how this influence is accumulated and maintained. Having identified the “stars” or high-influence individuals, we look at the ways they achieve and maintain their influence, comparing their tweeting behaviour to social capital exchange in proportion to the fans ‘contributions. We propose a family of generative models where social capital is exchanged and generated during interactions, reflecting the players‘utilities – such as self-centred or maximizing group benefit. Using our social capital model, we let a system evolve to accumulate most of the capital in those nodes which can be considered influential. We compare those capital-rich nodes with other metrics of influence and show that our model confirms and explains influence of many important types of players, and reveals the behaviours leading to sustained influence. We model recently uncovered Twitter phenomena such as Justin Bieber‘s ecosystem and other high-intensity processes, showing how efficient star behaviour and group preferences lead to various mind economies in social networks.

http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/khrabrov-twitter-dynamics.pdf

So, even the seemingly chaotic activities of a teenager can be modelled using economic models in which influence and social capital is the currency. Trends on social networks such as twitter and facebook still seem rather unpredictable. But the interests at play in a mind economy are too big to let it go that way. Complex systems theory will undoubtedly be used in an attempt to better target influencers, and shift our attention to a particular subject. The same theory might on the other hand help us making sure that social networks maintain a certain level of social fairness in the mind economy, and diversity in mindshare.

“The objective of I S P A is to promote rigorous philosophical engagement with the subject of architecture by providing an informal platform for parties interested in furthering the cause.” Excellent initiative indeed!

Wikipedia and Linguistic Networks

(“Generating Linguistic Networks Based on Large Corpora of Linguistic Data”)

By Alexander Mehler

With the rise of the web, linguistic networks such as Wikipedia reach a size, structure and complexity that have been widely unknown so far. These networks induce a further level of information structuring above the level of textual aggregates and their constituents. For example, Wikipedia allows the classification of its pages into categories that are defined dynamically by the community. Alexander Mehler analysed these categories and showed some evidences of interesting properties. For example, that pages belonging to a same category can have characteristic text structures recognizable without the need to understand the meaning of the texts. In the same way, the structure that forms Wikipedia in different languages seems characteristic as well. Just by looking at the relations between the categories, one might have a clue of their language, without having to look at the texts! These methods are not accurate enough to be predictive, but they can increase the accuracy of semantic analysis. Findings like these uncover structures of our knowledge that were until now unknown or hypothetical.

Social influence model of language competition

By Wojciech Borkowski and Andrzej Nowak

Many languages that existed not long ago have either died, or are listed as endangered. Researchers concentrate on developing models that can reproduce the empirical distribution of language sizes. Social impact may be responsible for many phenomena known from the study of languages, such as the puzzling correlations between grammar features across different languages.

Poster: language competition model

So, the disappearance of cultures and languages might be no more than the consequence of a game of influence?

A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code.

By Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito

The United States Code is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in various aspects of the Code. Does it get more complex with time? Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito formalized mathematically the notions behind this question, and demonstrated by the analysis of the system that the Code has grown from 2008 to 2010 in its amount of structure, interdependence, and language.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1254777/

Could one day legal texts be analysed scientifically in terms of logic and efficiency?

Simulating opinion dynamics in heterogeneous communication systems

By Walter Quattrociocchi, Rosaria Conte, and Elena Lodi

In this video, Rosaria Conte describes opinion dynamics by means of multi-agent based simulations. Agents (i.e. people) are exposed to different sources of information varying both the contents and the perceived reliability of the messages spread. Agents’ internal opinion is updated either by accessing one of the information sources, namely media and experts, or by exchanging information with one another. They are also endowed with cognitive mechanisms to accept, reject or partially consider the acquired information. The study evaluates the impact that reliable sources and peer-to-peer communication can have on the quality of information.

Simulating Opinion Dynamics in Heterogeneous Communication Systems from Assystcomplexity on Vimeo.

At the third minute of the video, Rosaria Conte starts attacking the Italian media manipulated by Berlusconi. Behind the rather tedious title, this presentation is a fantastic example of political engagement through science, which doesn’t undermine at all the scientific value of the research.

Opinion dynamics

By Anthony Woolcock

Many societies exhibit cultural fragmentation. This is despite individuals trying to reach agreement with those they meet. In the model of Axelrod, individuals that are more similar are more likely to interact (homophily). The mechanism where people become more similar after interaction is termed social influence. Axelrod’s model is interesting because for different parameter choices the opinions of all the individuals will either become all the same (consensus), or frozen fragmented state. A phase transition is observed between these two types of frozen state.

Complex systems theory: opinion dynamics

Bounded confidence model: addressed information maintain diversity of opinion

By Krzysztof Malarz and Krzysztof Kulakowski

Models have already been developed to optimize the frequency of let’s say political advertising on tv in order to get the maximum effect on a public’s opinion (see the Zaller mass opinion model). But they didn’t take into account interpersonal communication, which becomes more and more decisive with the advance of online social media. Krzysztof Malarz and Krzysztof Kulakowski developed a model taking this into account. Their model suggests that individually addressed messages maintain diversity of opinion. See the full paper here.

Model for diversity of opinion

I don’t know many fields that are not confronted with complex systems. Chemistry, physics, maths and all the scientific disciplines I studied at university are dealing with structures that require more than simply understanding their parts. I had the occasion to deal with other types of systems when I was working in business innovation: organisations are made of networks of people, networks of processes and are intricately connected with their economical ecosystem. I have seen many complex systems in culture too: semiotics, linguistics and urbanism just to give few examples. Finally, in the researches I’m currently making on consciousness, systems play also a major part, such as in neuroscience. So, complex systems are everywhere. We are only beginning to understand their mechanisms, and how interdisciplinary their study is. I will publish a series of posts on the subject in the coming weeks, which I hope will interest you as much as I was by the conference.