a way of treating systems that respects their complexity - treating them as ‘black boxes’ where we can only observe what they do, how they react to certain stimuli, environments; we don’t understand their inner workings The Unaccountability Machine

History

First wave

Norbert Wiener John von Neumann Claude Shannon W Ross Ashby

Second wave

Stafford Beer

Second-order Cybernetics

Francisco Varela Humberto Maturana

Critical

Bookchin The Philosophy of Social Ecology p.50-

But cybernetics, too, is uncritically presupposed. That cybernetics could simply be another form of mechanism—€lectronic rather than mechani cal—eludes him, as it seems to elude most of its acolytes. Feed back loops are as mechanistic as flywheels, however different the physics involved may be. Cyberneticians engage in a reduc tionism similar to that which guided mechanical thinking i n Newton’s day, except that Newton’s was based on matter rather than energy. The ecological cybernetics of Howard Odum, whose tunnel vision perceives only the flow of calories through an ecosystem, is as shallow philosophically as it is useful practically within its own narrow limits. For its more mystical acolytes, cybernetics combines with Eastern and Native American spirituality to become a “spiritual mechanism” that eerily parallels the failings of materialist mechanism, without the latter’s contact with reality. A deadening vocabulary of information, in puts, outputs, feedback, and energy-terminology largely born from wartime research on radar and servo-mechanisms for military hTUidance systemsl8-replaces such once-vibrant words as knowledge, diillogue, explilltiltion, wisdom, and vitality.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis