All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, and also the title of his fifth poetry compendium, which was distributed for free in 1967. In it Brautigan has visions of a ‘cybernetic’ utopia where computers are assisting humans in natural settings.
Brautigan essentially sees the post-industrial world, as Western society was increasingly becoming by the mid 1960s, as unnatural. Indeed, industrialisation had only begun some 200 years before he was active as a writer, so in a historical context, humans using machines is unnatural. But what Brautigan was aiming at is that the final phase of the industrialisation is that the machines that humans had invented would assist them in returning to their natural state.
The poem is linked to 1960s counterculture in that it promotes a sense of peace and harmony against an increasingly technocratic world. Meanwhile, computers were in their infancy, but clearly being used by the US Government on the Apollo Programme.
From his perspective in 1967, Brautigan showed a remarkable optimism about the potential of computers and ‘cybernetics’ to allow humans to return to nature. A deep seated fear of AI tearing through the fabric of society through displacing millions of workers appears to be a more widespread sentiment nearly 60 years later.
But Brautigan still has a point. If we invent thinking machines that can solve humanities greatest problems – global warming particularly) and free us from labour, then won’t humans be better for it? Is this an impossibly optimistic stance? We don’t think so.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
The title of the poem has been used in several other works. In the United Kingdom, documentary film maker Adam Curtis used the exact title for a 2011 series. Curtis’ view is rather less optimistic than Brautigan’s and he argues that computers have ‘distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.’
