The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 107

to tornadoes in the United States. 16 His work led to research into
the long-term behaviour of systems that exhibited unpredictable
and chaotic behaviour. In John Conway, a mathematician at

Cambridge, England, developed what he called the 'Game of Life'.
This was a rule-based cellular automaton, which, through the
application of a number of simple but subtle rules, could generate
complex and fascinating states over time. This seemed to demon-
strate that complexity and order could be generated out of sets of
simple rules. Similar conclusions could be drawn from the work
of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, which led to his concept of
fractal geometry. This term was first proposed by Mandelbrot
when working at IBM. In a paper entitled 'How Long is the Coast
of Britain?' 17 he showed that the answer depends on the scale of
measurement used and that, in theory, it could be infinite in length.
Mandelbrot's research led him to develop ideas about geometry
based on work by earlier mathematicians such as Helge von Koch,
Waclaw Sierpinski, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia, each of whom had
proposed mathematically generated figures of great complexity,
which they had been unable to represent visually. Using the then
newly available power of computers to represent complex coloured
images Mandelbrot produced extraordinary visual objects, such as
the Mandelbrot Set (illus.

1970

) - a paisley-like arabesque pattern, the
complexity of which remains constant at whatever scale or detail it
is projected - which were generated out of simple algorithms. These
various developments demonstrated the potential for computers to
be far more than simply calculating machines.
The capacity to produce spontaneous order through algorithmic
processes resonated within ideas gaining prominence in another
field. In the section on economics in The Last Whole Earth Catalog
an excerpt from Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom 18 can
be found. At first the presence of such a text in a counter-culture
document such as the Catalog is surprising. Friedman was one
of the principle advocates of neo-liberal economic theory, which

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