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have their equivalents in any complex systems. He proposed that
such transitions could be found in the history of complex societies.
Langton, along with Thomas Ray, is also one of the main proponents
of Artificial Life, which, following Conway's Game of Life, seeks to
model complex, self-organising systems on the computer.
These ideas and others soon became coralled under the general
term of complexity, which became recognized as an exciting, if
controversial, area of research. In
the Santa Fe Institute was
founded as a non-profit, interdisciplinary research institution
dedicated to complexity research, which attracted scientists from a
diversity of disciplines, including physicist and Nobel laureate
Murray Gell-Mann. The recognition of complexity as an area of
research worth funding was explicitly bound up with the emergence
of post-Fordist capitalism. The Santa Fe Institute itself was funded
by Citibank with the expectation that its research might contribute
to the bank's capacity to understand and manage the complexities of
globalized capital. Much of the work done in the Institute has been
and continues to be concerned with the application of complexity
to economics. To some extent complexity theory represents a kind
of scientific legitimation of the ideology of neo-liberalism. It enables
a conflation of capitalism, nature and technology, and introduces
a new version of Smith's invisible hand, one in which order emerges
out of complex and apparently chaotic situations.
Whatever the no doubt eminently practical reasons for locating
the Institute in Sante Fe, its position gave it an agreeably counter-
cultural gloss. That particular corner of New Mexico had long
attracted those in search of spiritual renewal and inspiration, includ-
ing artists and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and
Ansel Adams. In
1984
one of the most famous hippie communes
was founded in Taos. Part of the draw was the extraordinary land-
scape and the quality of the light, but added to this was the rich
Native American heritage so in evidence in that part of New Mexico.
This offered a set of beliefs about human relations to nature that was
1967
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