The Lost History of Cybernetics

Um and this is this is a podcast about things that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are good and how, in fact there can be a society beyond this one, and to talk about some of the shades of what that could look like. I have with me the co host of the General Intellect Unit, Kyle and June, which is as a podcast on the Emancipation Network. That is so this is the tagline the podcast of the Cybernetic Marxists. I am. I

am very excited. Yeah, it's it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely, thank you for coming on. Um yeah, I guess okay, you should start at the the very very beginning, because I don't think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics? Right? Um? So cybernetics is I guess a term that comes from what is it the kaibernetes right, steering, uh, the idea of steering a boat um, so using your ore to navigate the waters um. And so essentially it

is a science of control. And that sounds really scary, but what it means is that it's that kind of connection between the steers person, the or the boat, their body and the water around them and getting all of those things in sync in such a way that the steers person is going where they want to go, the ship or the boat doesn't capsize and they don't lose

the ore um. And so that's what control means. It's a kind of balancing, a kind of connection between the organism and the environment in such a way that it can survive and thrive. And that's what cybernex is focused on. Yeah, the thing I love about them, the steersman metaphor, is that like it's all about it's controlling the sense of regulation. But also like very importantly in cybernetics, it's almost always self regulation m hmm, because like the one of the

kind of core principles. Again, like the because the term usually calls to mind this like kind of terminator like UM, like cyber Gothic kind of domination. It's actually not with the field is about at all. It's UM because one of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given system UM, the only thing that can really control it is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems.

So that like UM, like the kind of like top down external domination of an organism that we all fear is kind of like actually, if you look at the cyber sybanetics literature, that's not not actually really possible because the the the the external controller would never have enough complexity to match what the organism is capable of. UM.

And you know, organisms are self regulating systems. The steersman with his boat is a self regulating system that like regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its course that's directed towards its goal. UM. So it's it's

that's why it's so important. I think that's why we think it's so important for the left and like people who are concerned with these like you know, visions of a politics of autonomy and liberation, they really need to look at this stuff because it turns out there kind of is a science of like autonomous, self guiding organic systems. You know, yeah, no terminator here, yes, and yeah, I mean you know when you see uh, scary videos of militarized robots and they're learning to you know, jump and

fire weapons and all that kind of stuff. There certainly is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind of domain application of cybernetics. Rather than defining what cybernetics is, it's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is what cybernetics is. Yeah, yeah, that that's that That's that's probably worth emphasizing, right that, Like um, um, cybernetics in some ways is a kind of like out of fashion

these days. Like it it kind of evolved into systems thinking and like, um, I guess a lot of its lessons got kind of absorbed in general. But we find there's great value in going back to them, the kind

of originators and like focusing on that field. It's like we on the show, we got into the cybernetics angle by reading Andrew Pickering in his book with the Cybernetic Brain, in which um, he kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split it into two, like there's American cybernetics like which had that kind of like um dour kind of military domination sort of flavor to it. That like it's kind of an earned reputation there. But Pickering

was more concerned with British cybernetics. Um, it's like a lot of British thinkers that and it had a very different flavor there where it was more open ended. It was kind of had more of a focus on kind of liberation than like politics and stuff. And in fact, some of those like Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist, wrote an anarchist um like journals and stuff like that, um.

And for him, like those two things went tant in glove right like that, like um liberatory politics as like um, the politics of like human flourishing, like as human human beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing. To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics.

There was no real distinction there. It was just like these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff. You know, it's like there's there's plenty. I don't know who am I thinking of here? Like them that the Tally, that guy with the like black Swan sort of stuff, like he's biggest system and stuff, but like isn't so much um isn't so much into the liberatory politics. I guess you know, a lot of that angle is kind

of lost. Yeah, And I think this is awesome. This is you know, this is sort of a product of I guess the broader idelogical course that's going on while sort of cyberige comes in and out of fashion. I think I think we should go back a bit to the beginning to sort of situate this because I know, like when when I, like before I ever did any reading,

What's ever next? Like my immediate assumption was that it was it was, you know, this, this is the thing that was entirely just based off of computers, right that this is like this is and that's not really true from might understandtanding of us. Can we go back and sort of like talk about where this came from a bit and how it's sort of moves over this over certain sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you can kind of trace it back in it's sort of European origins

to UM. You could probably say Hagel Uh, you know his his move towards like UM understanding being not just as substance but as subject. I think is moved towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole system as a holistic entity as opposed to just an

individual interacting with an external environment. UM. And you can also see this come up in say there was a ecologist X skill in the German ecologist in the early twentieth century, I believe, who was trying to understand, you know, the organism in its environment. The sort of precursors to

ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics UM. And then when you get to the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or as a discipline UM in the mid twentieth century, it's not exactly about computing, it's UM. It's more about balancing a machine with its environment. So UM.

Sort of prototypical UM machine of this kind was the servo mechanism, which was used to help guide a like an anti aircraft gun in shooting down in any aircraft, so making sure it tracks properly with the target and doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking what it's a very fast moving target.

I mean, you can even think back to like the you know, in World War One, when they discovered, hey, we could actually like sing chronize the timing of the propeller and the timing of our gun on the front of this plane so that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and shooting and we're we're shooting our own planes down with our guns when we're dog fighting, right, Like it's uh, yeah, that's the system's understanding, right, So that's um,

that's that's Norbert Leaner, right and working on the automated gun turret stuff. And that's he coins the term cybernetics to like um given name to the thing he was

starting to discover. And it's like he was kind of pulling together a bunch of rights there, and like one of those kind of important insights is that like, um, like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and accuracy without like basically making the gun turret an agent of its own that like and the like the turret and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would achieve their goal. But like there was there was

there's something strange and spooky about that. And I think that then this feedback mechanism in inside the terrist gives it a sort of weird agency that UM combines with the agency off the gunner to link going to the

whole system towards it goal. UM. Yes, And what it ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space where the distinction between human and machine UH starts to become ambiguous because they both start to possess they're both understood to have a kind of agency, they're both understood to have kinds of like functions, And then you kind of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea, and you can start to bring in all of these

different ideas from like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from ecology UH, and they all start to interact in this domain of cyber addicts. And like the core, the core idea of them that kind of ties everything together is that of feedback UM. So like weener realizes that what he needs to do achieve this goal is is a feedback mechanism I am. That would is error correcting feedback, right, like if the if the gun is slightly too far

to the left, it corrects itself right words and so on. Um. But that as you said, that that connects across all sorts of things, right, Like you start to realize that's present everywhere in ecology, in neurology, in UM, like that

learning is based on feedback, you know. So it's really funny to read to read Norburt Wiener like in the fifties basically describing what would become machine learning, and he's just like he just off the cuff, is like, yeah, like if you could, if a machine could like UM, or if if any system could just like UM analyze its own performance and then feedback onto itself, it would it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to. And he's like, yeah, he turns out he was completely correct.

And that's that's where kind of like gets into like you get a sure thinkers like Ross Ashby who was UM and like other folks like were in in and around psychiatry. We were like really interested in how the

brain worked. And that's that's the other thing that feeds into like cybernetics is like, um, it's It's why Pickering called his book the Cybernetic Brains, because like the brain and nervous systems show up so much in that field, right that, Like the brain being a kind of learning and adapt an adapt adaptation machine attached to the body or whatever, and like, um, yeah, I don't know, there's there's something fascinating there, and like, um, the I mean

there's something kind of possibly troubling and kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever, but like there's also something very compelling and just like recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels, right that, Like um, like you get similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes, and then you know, it turns out like you can kind of do a science on these things and and come up with an even better

planage my frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes, and so it is in a sense about computers. But the computers are really just understood to act like a kind of brain, and that's connected to a nervous system which is connected to you know, like actuators of some kinds, some kinds of like machines that actually do things in the world. So it's not about like say computer science specifically.

It's more about, like, well, computers are a useful way to do cybernetic design because they can act as a control system and they're flexible. It's not that this is about computers really, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like the you brought you brought up something very important there that like, um, in all cases of like cybernetics like thing, the systems that we're considering are not like isolated like braining a box kind of things. They're all the things that are

directly engaged with a world, um like. So it's it's it's not that kind of like monadic kind of rationalism of like computation just happening in a box somewhere and like per perfect intelligence, right, that kind of the kind of stuff these are always, like the separantations, are always working with systems that were engaged in real time emergent situations, UM.

And because of that, they rapidly kind of like acknowledge that for so many of these important like systems, the only way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it UM because you can't like pre compute all the possible outcomes. You know, of these like very sticky and complex real world situations, the best way to figure out what it's going to do

is to let it do it and watch yes. And I think I think that's an interesting sort of like if if you look at where a lot of the sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort of like manipulate so side the technology have gone, it's like, yeah, you get like like blockchain smart contracts, and it's like the blockchain smart contract is like, Okay, we are going to think of literally everything that could possibly happen an attempt to put it in like a very small amount

of code, and if anything like literally anything at all happens, that uh, you know that we didn't expect where now everyone is now screwed because we have just made this thing im beautable and put it in such a way

that we can't change it. So I think that, yeah, that's a I think this is a useful sort of I mean corrective just just in the way that we've we've we've now like like we've gone backwards, like we've we've gotten into this place where you instead of like we need to let these systems play out, we need

to let them control themselves. Have gotten to like we think that we can actually just sort of like you know, turn turn the entire system into code that we can predict ahead of time and have the basis of some sort of social system off of Yeah, I mean it's I think it's something that like the serpetitions and like maybe Pickering would describe as like a kind of perversity of modern thought, like the modern mindset like that that kind of like rational like um kind of mindset right

like um, and like to the serpenetitions that that whole thing with like the blockchain stuff, will be just truly laughable because it's immediate, it's immediately obvious to them that the problem there is like okay, proposing we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process or whatever, smart contracts, whatever, and it's like that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes.

Because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety. There's a there's a there's like a law that's at the house of cybernatics called Ashby's law of requisite variety. And in short, it basically states that given a system, um, the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating it is itself, because a regulator knee needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating if it's gonna like

actually succeeded it um. And so that's that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards, like like when you get to someone like Stafford Beer is his whole model of like organization pushes all a lot of the intelligence downwards to the to the bottom layers, because there is basically the people on the ground on the shop floor are the people who are best informed to actually deal

with their own situation. And that's that sounds like a banal observation, but like it for Beer that was actually quite a step forward to like just admit that like trying to trying to like in his context, it was like often the organization of a firm, like at our company, like trying to manage a company from the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous, Like no nobody there has enough information

to act on They're all dumbasses anyway. So for Beer, it was just like this is where it starts to get interesting, and it connects to the politics, right that like for one of these scientists just observing reality and like you know, using you know, pretty pretty good stray intuitions and like scientific frameworks, just looking at it and going like, oh, it is obviously the case that the

best way for society to organize his bottom up self organization. Um, And that like it's not just a moral point, it's actually a technical point as well. Then like, um, these these top down, bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable, they're also technically inferior to the kind

of like cyber communism we want to institute. Yeah, and I have like one off one of my what if one of my favorite stories about So I worked as a maintenance worker for a while and one day my boss was like, there was some problem with a sink. And my boss was like, no, we don't need the plumbers.

I can do this. And so he goes in there and it's it's what it's like, It's it's like a sink in like a building, right, So it's it's just one of those things where there's like a pipe that connects to the top of the sink to like the wall, and he goes, Okay, here, look at this. I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this valve and this is gonna turn the water off. And what he instead does is he take he takes the pipe off of the wall, and just like a torrent of water is just now shooting

out of this pipe because he has removed the thing. Yeah, he's removed the pipe from the wall. This is you know, this is this is why I think like, yeah, go this this, this, this this, you know this this is like a particularly funny example of how these sort of

top down management systems. And this guy like like used to be a maintenance guy, right, but he just like must a plumber, and so you know, and he accepts into it and he's like, oh no, no, no no, no, no no, hold on, I know, I know how this system works. It's going to be fine. And it just there's a guys, the guys are of water has so much force. It's like it's like pushing our tool cart across the room.

It's like a fighter hydrants coming out this wall. I wanted to I guess beers is an interesting way to go to go into the sort of the politics of what this actually looks like do you want to talk about and I know I briefly talked about this in an episode in The Liberalism a while back, but do you want to go into sort of more detail into what Beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt because of military coup, to try to implement like a

cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure, um. Yeah, So Stafford Beer was a UM management consultant UM he and a cyberneticition. He got his start sort of doing operations research UM, which is kind of a precursor to cybernetics UM that is kind of like interested in logistics and organizing systems UM in the British military UM in World War Two. And then he came out of that and became a corporate UH consultant for operations research and

management UM. And so in working in the corporate world UM, he saw all of the things that were really screwed up with the status quo UM way of doing business and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the way that managing organizations, according to ORG charts which are there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt

to their environments because they get into these kinds of strange neuroses. Um. And you know, just sort of going through all of that and more often than not being unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um address these problems and just sort of like seeing how these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of the broader problems of our society as a whole and

of capitalism, right. Um. And so you know, he had a basis from his time in India during the Second World War in uh kind of like contra uh kind of like you know, Eastern or specifically Indian um, spirituality, yoga, all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had a cult countercultural side to his personality. UM. And he was always doing tinkering strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't

just the straight laced corporate guy. Uh. But it was a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start to develop ideas about how things could be different. And this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were

happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early seventies. Um, So, they reached out to him to come and help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that was focused on the flourishing of workers, uh, and of society as a whole, as opposed to one that was based on sort of you know, resource extraction where everything flows to

the top. Yeah, do you want to explain some more about how that went well? So? Um, yeah, it it went well and then it went badly, I guess. Um. But from from from the reading we've done and from our research, it seems like if basically, if the if the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill them all, um, this this would have worked like it was working, and it was that the project was actually going pretty well. Explained briefly, what like I think it becomes it's called

product Cyberson, But what exactly like what was it doing? So? Um? So, like Beer's big kind of innovation is what we call the viable system model, or VSM and it's a model that's um it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that is kind of taking it's I wouldn't say it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body, but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology and neurology and neuroscience and and cybernetics and just kind

of meshing them all together. Um So, basically like it's like if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous organs that all take care of their own business, plus a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into a workable hole, then you can kind of see the whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical and horizontal aspects. Like on the one hand, it has this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one units are are well autonomous, more or less like the harror

takes harsh takes care of its own thing. The lungs take care of their own thing. But then the nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it can say, oh, hold on too much oxygen, dial it down a bit, and then the organs responds dynamically to those those signals, right, So it's kind of like up down feedback loops, right, where then the lower levels of the system are the

smart bits that are doing all the important work. But there's this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system in the brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all on the rails. Um So, and importantly it's a kind of recursive model. So like a human being is an autonomous unit, and then that it's that unit is composed of more autonomous units, like the organs and the muscles, and then each of those is composed of cells which

are autonomous units, and then you know, so on. But like that latter goes upwards as well, so that like a team is an autonomous unit composed of human beings, a firm, or like a department, is a autonomous unit composed of teams. A firm is composed of departments, like a secretor is composed of firms. And it's the same

kind of struct or at each layer. Um. So that the kind of upside there is that like, um, you don't like you kind of have a unit fairly unifying like set of principles and like a science for doing this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at every level, at every every layer of society. So like in principle, the sort of like the serbonetic principles that get applied to cohering members of a team are the same story

principles that get applied to like sectors in an economy. Um, with the same kind of you know, bottom up kind of feedback going on as well. Um. So Stafford was invited to Chile to by the all end A government in so that was like nineteen seventy, right, Um, that that that election happens. So he arrived in late nineteen seventy I think, Um, I mean certain on the timeline, but we're looking at those those first few years of the seventies as as the time when this is happening. Yeah, yeah,

I d like it in setting negativity. Yeah. So it's towards the end of that year that he's he's invited and he's basically kind of given the task of like, hey, do all this stuff but with this entire economy, and he's like, yeah, I'm sure cool. Um so puts together Project cybersen Um and there's kind of long story there of like and them building out this kind of infrastructure and like it's it's all highly experimental UM and highly tensive.

Like they one of the big problems they run into is that like they don't have very much in the way of like hardware, especially because they're under embargo. So they had like UM a pretty what what at the time was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they ran

the around the software on UM. But like step step one was like UM installing this like huge communications network amongst all the factories and UM like setting like the workers committees and stuff would feed information into it and it would kind of again this like feedback thing where you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them, and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, route some of your product over to this this factory and

it will be better used there. And then you know, you guys over there turn up this dial. You've turned down this dial. So and then if that plan doesn't quite work out, then you've got another layer of feedback tomorrow to say, Okay, that plan didn't quite work here's an adjusted plan. So it's it's just like both bottom

up and top down sort of loop of feedback. That's like I think the phrase pickering is is reciprocal adaptation, where at the economy and its firms and its workers are all kind of adapting to each other in real

time in a kind of in a in a full system. Um. Uh, yes, anything, no, that I mean, that's that's essentially what Cyber said was it was a system designed too largely I think at first supplement the mare kit, although Beer later realizes that like, actually, if you have a good system of this kind, you

probably don't need a market. Um. But essentially it was like, Okay, our economy has been one that has been built around dependence two uh, you know, especially the United States, and it's been organized in that way, and we need to reorganize the economy both to promote the well being of the workers, the autonomy of the workers, realized the ideals of socialism in that way, and also to create a system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism.

And so having this reciprocal adaptation um, having systems in place to connect things that were previously disconnected would allow you to move in that way of increasing autonomy and increasing freedom. Um. And that was generally the idea of Cyber sin Um. Yes, yeah, and there was something very interesting, Like when we were reading the reissue of his book Brain of the Firm, where he has a section the

end that that documents this whole experience in Chile. Um, there's a really interesting parts where towards the end of it he's like and this is like getting up towards the coupe where he's like, um, he and the other cyber sin operatives like on the people are putting this together, realize that like the workers and like people in towns are are like just on their own just like using this stuff and these kind of principles to just like abolish the value form basically like but notably without the

involvement from above, like as in Beer and Company stumble upon this just happening where they're like, oh my god, they're just they're just dismantling the market, and it's like it's all just kind of happening. And that's that there was something really wonderful to that. Then, Like it it indicated like there was there really wants something to it that like you could like as in people working, people could use these tools and this like new way of

organizing themselves. Two just like liquidate market relations and and wage relations like spun spontaneously. But it's it's a spontaneity that's that's not really it does. It's it feels very different from the kind of spontaneity you often get in like the way Left to sort of like anarchists talk about it often like the kind of spontaneity is like a magical sort of thing that is like where freedom

just arrives from out of nowhere. But this this was like installing infrastructure to enable freedom and then it actually kind of happening until the fascists showed up. You know. Yeah, what I think is really interesting about it is that so you know, you have you have like you have this sort of central control center from which a lot of stuff is being run. But you know, yeah, it's it's it's it's a weird system because it's try to link together like a lot of different kinds of firms.

Like you have something saying in private firms, but you have a lot of you have a lot of state run firms. You also have firms that throughout this whole process, people like workers just taking over factories. They're setting up these sort of like call them industrial cordons. I think I'm remembering my Spanish rights, like yeah, they they you know, they start sitting up their own institutions and it's it's this becomes this way is sort of like networking these

groups together. And the thing that's the other thing is it's interesting is you know, so you have you have them on the one hand, like just getting rid of markets and going like okay, well we can just coordinate

production through this and like not have markets. And then the second thing they do is it's the freedom immediately becomes political in the sense that like, yeah, like one of one of the things they do they there that that's what's going on in this period is that and there's Chile has a very very right wing like it's basically like the even today it's like it's like really like one of the only like union like huge unions left in Chile is the truckers unions, and those guys

are extremely right wing. There in this period of being backed by the CIA, they're being trained by f l c i O as I say like every episode, but like yeah, and and they're you know, they're intentionally doing strikes, trying to oversaw the government by blocking production, and you know, like the workers are like, okay, hold on, we can just use this symenetic system to figure out where these blocks are, figure out where materials need to move through, and we can just you know, we can just stop

the kind of revolution. We can just sort of like we can we can just we can just fight our way through it. And and it's interesting, is like this happens, and so then that that like the original plan of using sort of of using these truckers is like the sort of right wing like the first attempt fails, and once that fails, it's like they have to go to the military and the coup eventually works. It's it's hard.

It's hard to resist a coup outbrans, isn't Yeah. Yeah, the thing with the trucker strike is not like yeah, it's you can very well imagine like the CIA and stuff into a thinking that this is what will do. That's right, this will sell it up, but not realizing that the workers actually had in their hands a like

vastly more sophisticated system for out maneuvering them. Yeah, and that system works like a charm, like like clockwork, just like and even like you read the accounts from this thing, like both in eating Medina's cybernetic revelation areas and in Beer's on account, and there's like the sense that was

actually kind of spooky and weird. But I'm like even the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out that way, and that like they were surprised at how effective it is, but that it gets back to the core of cyberneticsent like feedback is weirdly effective at getting things done. You know, these like highly tuned feedback systems, they give you a lot of power to out maneuver

this comebacks, you know. Yeah, And I think in some sense, like this is like people talk a lot about Chile is sort of like the sort of foreclosed future of like antellectual and archetic socialism, But like, I don't think that was the potential of the moment. The potential of the moment was this. And it's interesting thing to me that well, because Beers kind of traces out a political

history that never quite happened, which is so okay. One of the one of the sort of big political trends over the course of the twentie century is you have all these people who were sort of like they they basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during June World War two, because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine, and then you know, some of them go into some of them, you know, essentially stay on in the government

during planning stuff. Beers like goes into corporate world, and the corporations are also you know, they start doing they also start doing this planning stuff. And you know, but Beers is interesting because he he pivots, like he pivots in a direction that the world doesn't, which is he

pivots towards. Okay, the solution to sort of you know, the kind of like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems, whether whether they be like the corporate versions of it or the sort of like state administered like total economic planning from the top up down versions is oh well, okay, we need to have planning from the bottom up and distributed planning. Yeah. Yeah. And he, like everyone involved with Iverson gets murdered. The only reason Beer survives because he

wasn't in the country. And it's it's just really interesting, like like it's just kind of not a story. Everybody got murdered, but some of them did, and some of them were in exile Uh, some of them were imprisoned. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, you know, it was not a good time. Beer got out early and he knew things that we're getting we're getting bad, and everybody around him knew things were getting bad. Um. Yeah, like

he was on him. He was on like a kind of I guess, like it's almost diplomatic mission to like try and get some of the blockade stuff. Like he was trying to. I think he was trying to flog like a container ship full of iron or something. You know, it was shopping shopping it around to try and trying to help out the likely in mine to the world. That's what it was. Yeah. But um, yeah, it's m

hold on, I had a thought there. Um. And then like after afterwards, um, like Beer spent a fair bit of time like trying to catch his his comrades out of out of Chile and get them out of prison and got the Gottam resettled in um in the UK and so on and yeah America as well. M hum.

But yeah, I think that Um, this is like that's a very interesting point about the the you know, the sort of the real value of this moment being that movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society, not towards UH neoliberal engineering of markets and UH sort of reinforcement of private dictatorships, um, but towards a kind of like holistic control system that is still informed by you know,

the principles of autonomy and UH and and and science. UM. It's it's definitely like an answer to the crisis of the seventies which was not taken up. And in that sense it is a foreclosed future, but of course one that we can take lessons from now. Yeah, I think

there's something else. It's very interesting me about this because you know, if if you look at how like if if you look at how the socialist block sort of responds to the crisis and seventies, and you know, they're sort of decaying the eighties, like they have this option available to them, right, they have they have they have made a lot of ways, They have a lot they have a lot better technology than with the lands are using that have more resources, and every single one of

them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions, you know, instead of I think it has to do with there there there's a line. This this is this is like Slightly before this, there's a line in um a debate Maw and Joe and Li are having in I think it's seven. This is like the peak of the sort of workers led part of the culture revolution, like the works have taken Shanghai, and Maw and Joe and I are talking and they're they're trying to figure out,

like what are they gonna do? You know, they they've set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable. And there's there's this line where they're talking about, Okay, well, if if we give if they give them, if we give them a commune, they have to have free elections, and Joe and l is like, well, that would be anarchism.

And then they're just like, oh god, we can't do that, and they never do in the end, you know, the end result of this whole sort of that whole sort of processes that trying to like instead of doing, instead of sort of like devolving any level of control down to like any of the workers who are doing things, they're like, Okay, well we'll just try to we'll just you know, we'll we'll we'll do capitalism instead, Well, will

you will? You know, we'll create markets, will sort of like maintain our firm structure, but you know, the party

countries into it. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's this, it's it's a very interesting thing to me too, because like there have been other like you know, like they're like lots of socialist parties have sort of various like degrees of radicalness have come to power like since nineteen seventy three, and to my knowledge, not a single one of them has ever picked any of this stuff back up, like even even you know, like like the most radical sort of like like you know, like like like early Chavas

never like touches this, like even like I don't like I I don't I don't think like I don't think the easy Lends ever done it, Like I mean, they have fatological issues there, but like it's it's it's it's interesting to me that like basically no one who's ever taken power sense has ever attempted it again m h. Which again is changed because this is you know, one of one of the sort of like this you would think, this is like this is at least a potential solution

to sort of this this this this problem of the stagnation and sort of collapse of the old sort of adults. There's a plenty of economies, but no one takes it up. And I'm just to think what you too think about that?

Like why this doesn't happen? Yeah, there's a I think there's an interesting dimension of Beer's work in Chile that kind of I think um might provide some answers to that, which is that you know, he he was in charge of setting up Cyberson, and Cyberson was kind of a system for optimizing the economy, but he had other concerns and other briefs that he was working on at the

same time. And what he came to realize was that there was a layer of management and experts in the organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort of work on a Cyberson that was designed to improve production numbers, but they had real resistance to the idea of worker autonomy because of the because of of of wanting to maintain their their job privileges, and because of

the prejudices of their their habitats. I guess you could say that what they learned when they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever, and you know, where the people who know things the workers don't know things, they

shouldn't be in charge that kind of thing. And so he starts to he starts to realize that in order to really make cybersen effective as an engine for autonomy, what needs to happen is that um, sort of what you are describing with the Shanghai commune Uh, the the workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves and implement

them through autonomous action. UM. And so he starts to try to kind of like right up, like right pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so that the information that he has as theory is not being filtered through a bureaucracy but is instead, like you know, involved in an educational process of self mode mobilization in among

the workers. UM. And so you know this really uh doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of management and expert knowledge, because in Beer's conception of management, management is something that is done by anyone who has the power to affect an organization or change an organization. So if the workers are able to change their organizations, they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.

For beer, management is a function. It's not a person. In Beer's ideal world, like management would just be these like decision nodes that emerge among among workers. I can like the management. A manager would never be a person. A manager would be like a kind of structural information processing like, um, think that happens among people. Um. Yeah, and so like when you see in for example, the USS are the option of creating a planning network, a

computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. Um, it's basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be very very expensive for them to develop. It would be on the order of of doing you know, their nuclear weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. Uh. And two it is simply at odds with the system of like planning, the command economy that had that had grown up in

the wake of the revolution. Right, it's simply at odds with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners, all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power. And so I think that when you look at the socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I think it's because they it would require the people in power to really rethink their entire role and identity as

members of society. Um. Yeah, and then there's a kind of there's a dreadful irony really and that like it's it's Stafford me or somebody who comes out of like bourgeois like management stuff and is deep in the pocket for that he's the one who actually sincerely pursues the most radical projects in like the socialist history that we've ever seen, vastly more radical in its intent, and it's like kind of it's the beginnings, it's impact than anything

any Leninist has ever done, and it's basically because he actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people, and your average Leninist just doesn't, you know, like again like to go back to the example from earlier, right that like when when under pressure, they will they'll do capitalism before they'll do anything that even resembles um autonomy for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the

right thing. You know. That does speak to the character of the thing, and it's it's it's it's it's it's that class interest basically off those kind of functionaries, right, like, and the thing that makes Beery different is that he sincerely actually wanted to do it, you know, and the worker's autonomy thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him,

you know. Yeah, and when when he starts to come up with these ideas of like thinking like, okay, like an economic planning system is not adequate, we need to go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the social body, he he quickly finds that he's being marginal iised within those circles of planners in the Chilean government because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about.

They're actually quite concerned about this idea. Even if I end would be, you know, all for it, right, because he was he was very sincere about his interest in an autonomy. UM, there were still many people around beer who did not particularly like the idea. UM. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think if we look at it, you know, in terms of why hasn't it happened since then, in in all of these intervening decades, I think you also have to look at, um the international system and the way that countries figure into it, because we have all of these UM neoliberal structures of management and organization that were created in the eighties and nineties and early odds uh, that a socialist government has to contend with if they are to embark on a program like this, which isn't

to say it's impossible, but what it does mean is that there are all these sort of um, highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our societies right now, and it is the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage in a in in uh an effort to kind of you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization, um, because all of these structures are there and you have to kind of like root them out and replace them

with something new, as opposed to having all these ready mades of what's already there, the market centered solutions, the the the kind of autocratic solutions, um, you know, all of the management systems that have been developed with an auto cracy in mind instead of something that is truly democratic and uh kind of self just dating mm hmm.

And I think as well, and there's there's a kind of other thing that like, um, like the left has been kind of in a very weak position for quite a while now, like since then, since the seventies, right, and like, um, yes, like we're we're just we're just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing.

But also like I think there was this kind of long depressive phase at the end of them, at the crossing in the centuries right, where a lot of the like left is kind of and this this this actually gets into like why some of the reasons why we started general into lat unit that like we felt like we needed to bring this kind of like systems thinking and like technical seriousness back to the table after the kind of weird depressive phases where like you know, like

say the alter globalization stuff for the occupy stuff, where people kind of take an almost explicitly anti strategic kind of turn and like a kind of anti technical turn. You know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like oh my god, like capital and it's it's it's technology, is is hegemonic? Like how the fund are we ever

going to get out of this? Like it would have been heard to make an argument for a scientific and like technical kind of fusion with um with the humanist kind of impulses of socialism, But that's I think we're getting to a point where we can start actually having that conversation again, like we're we're seeing a bit more of a turn towards that, and it kind of turn towards like this kind of serious kind of like more and more serious kind of discussion of like hey, like okay,

like okay, like we we we we fucking the current order of things. We want to we want to see it gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with? Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think those kind of conversations are coming back on the table in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties, like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They were impossible a couple of years ago. You know, Yeah, the the market as the fundament of society basically seemed

to be invincible at that time. Um, and there was a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what was and wasn't true about it and about society as a whole. And you know, we've had a lot of chaos in the years since then. That was um that affected not just the countries that we were you know, being restructured by the I m F, but actually really

came in affected the core of the world. Economy as well. Uh, And I think that that that's sort of like, you know, in the same way that World War One kind of disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority. Like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to roost in the core of the world system has has undermined that invincibility, That that that idea that oh, the market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that

could possibly be better. At the same time that we have all of this technological development that's happening, um, you know in our economy that could be used for something different as opposed to you know, I don't know, making n f T s or something. Yeah. Absolutely, that that's

all super important. I think that that kind of refines, like my previous point is refining in my head now like that like right now, Um that that kind of market chaos and especially even the chaos of like the system's response to COVID and stuff really puts um like in general, and for the left in particularly, puts like the question of governance back on the table in a way that it had kind of been off the table

for a while. Like I think there was a there was a period on the left where like left activity was kind of like railing against governance. Like it was like we we want freedom from governance and that sort of thing. Right, And I'm not going to say those are necessarily bad impulses, right, but I think they're also kind of a bit wrong headed as well. Right, But like the kind of reality is that, like, for for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish,

we need governance. And like because like governance actually like as a word has the same route as cybernetics does. So kaibernetes, the Greek word becomes kubernetti, has becomes cybernetics, right, but that's also the root of governor, so kuberner, kubernator, those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics

are one and the same kind of concept. Um And this question of like if we intend to create a world of self governance, um that is effective, it's viable in Beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that

we have to put up with right now. And that's back on the table in a big way that like, because I think especially with with COVID, people look at like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely screwed up systems and in parhats because their goal is

the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back to the goal directed behavior cybernetics, right, Like the steersman steers the boat towards a goal, right, and it's it's always about or like a you know, a cybernetic device like a thermostat has a goal temperature that is trying to regulate the temperature of the water towards um You know,

we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life, for flower shy, They're only suitable for the regulation of this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going, like that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in a position, we're on the left, Like more and more of us are saying, like what we're proposing is not like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're

proposing really, you know, we should have sane governance. And it turns out that same governance is bottom up self organized governance. Um. And that's that's both the moral position and a technical position, and I think they're both of those. The moral and technical valences feed off each other. Like we're we're we're able to be the serious people in

the room. This this is a very big change of pace right for us, because like for a while we were railing against like the very serious people of like the Centrists and like the fucking Blair rights and the Clintonite sort of people. We're the serious people now saying what what this what this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous, and it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt a totally different like feedback snarcus, a different kind of

goal orientation, um. And it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing. And that's it turns out there's a science of doing that, and it's called cybernetics, you know. Well, and we also have a runaway ecological crisis where we learn about we see that you know, like the capitalist market system is absolutely leading us all to death and the earth to death, and so it is human flourishing. But we also are concerned with the flourishing of life

in general. Right, Um, So I think that that that is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in the seventies. You know, I certainly think you know, people were thinking about it. But breaking down this barrier between economics uh and uh ecology, I think is a very cybernetic impulse and I think one that you know, we need to keep working at because, like you know, whenever you think about these things as separate domains, were already uh,

we're already engendering more destruction of the environment. Yeah, yeah, I think cybernetics and also help us in that kind of like um on a kind of for left projects, like on an aggressive footing of like if we recognize that like the capital and its kind of government system, is it is cybernetic, like it has its own feedback circuits and like saying that the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with with ecology, right, Like, how do you

intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits so as to so as to disintegrate the system? Is? Um is something like you can you can learn a lot from cyberennics to to get lessons on how to intervene there. The last thing I want to talk about is just what is the society that is non capitalist and based off of sort of cybernetic government's principles. What

does that look like for just a person? Because I think you know this, this has been one of the big sort of like political challenges of the last you know, fifty years. It's just the complete foreclosure of the ability to even just sort of imagine assistant that's not this mm hmm, yeah, I think it. It means UM In the first instance, it means a different orientation to your workplace and your community, right, because when you grow up in a society where um power is exercise autocratically, it

has an infantilizing effect on on you as an individual. UM. And uh, you know, maybe your relationship to work, is your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing, right, because these are these are reactions, These are natural reactions to being in an abusive environment. UM. But if you are in a system where the work of management is not only open to you but expected of you, you have a different orientation to that workplace,

to the community you're in because it's your responsibility. If you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose your autonomy. And also you're going to have real problems that you have to grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility that comes there. But also like that means an opening up of horizons in terms of well, things don't always have to be the same, Things don't always have to be handed down to you for management

on high. They can actually change, Like you can see the possibilities in front of you, You can plan for the future in your context, and you can have that meaningful freedom in your life and be you know, a a full human being in that sense, right, um, And so I think that that's a very core every day change that you could see, um in terms of you know, sort of your horizons of where you might work or

what you might do. You know, you could expect that there would be more pause abilities for each person to be like quote unquote entrepreneurial, right to to have initiative in their life and be able to envision and create things around them that uh, you know they can't do right now because they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give them that freedom or they are actually not even able to have a job right now where they can have a reasonable expectation of survival because their

workplace is oriented around just making sure the work gets done and you know, the consequences be damned. UM. So I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. UM. And that sort of freedom of management um extends all the way up to uh, you know, working in different

kinds of capacities or jobs. Like some people in kind of a middle middle ranking area in a corporation these days might get shuffled around from department to department to try to kind of get a well rounded understanding of what the corporation is uh and how it functions. But you know, we can kind of expect that these roles would be more open to everybody because again, you know, a system in the v s M is not a person. A system is a function, and that function should be

fulfilled in a way that is as flexible as possible. UM. So there's a lot less kind of well, I'm stuck in accounting and that's my life now, and that's all there that will ever be. Of course, there are limits to education, their limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, it takes time to learn these things, but you could expect some more flexibility there without having that terror of oh yeah, you know, in the neroliberal era, everybody is expected to have like fifteen

jobs in the course of their quote unquote career. But also each of those jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society without a safety net. Right, Um, I think that that's that's you know, those are real

consequences for everybody's life. I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I think like at a very very high level, the way Beer puts that is that we are trapped in this kind of crazy system that like its control variable as profits, like that's the little variable that it's it's like doing feedback onto to maintain um. Whereas what we're proposing is like that the sort of cybernetic future will be a society that's optimizing flourishing Like what what beer Beer?

The word he used as a u demony, which is borrowing from Aristotle, just like flourishing um. And yeah, a lot a lot of stuff flows out from that, Like to imagine a world where because we we all feel it, right that like everything around us is kind of like micro tuned as like a little feedback loop to keep

money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating. Just imagine a world where that's just not true anymore, and the the sort of social infrastructure that you grow up in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. Um, and I I think you know, when we we we look at sort of the broader patterns of society today, we see all of these hair brained schemes that you know, very rich men are embarking

on and they're they're setting the agenda for society. You know, we're that you know, Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that the metaver this is the future, and you just have to get on board with this, even though anyone can

see that this idea is patently ridiculous. Um. And in a society where that kind of management, that kind of money power doesn't exist anymore, Like you don't have to live under that kind of future horizon anymore, where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up, you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them, just like they were following the orders of pharaoh back

in the day. I think, do not be ruled by pharaohs is as kinda places and eat to leave off unless you tell if anything else do you want to get to? Okay, There's there's one little line from Beer's book at what it's actually a set of presentation. It's called designing Freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me up every time I read it, So I'm just gonna read that for the listeners. It gives you a sense of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off the

fucking chats with this stuff. Um. At some point he says, I'm quoting here, every time we hear that a proposal will destroy society, has we know us, we should have the courage to say, thank god at last. Yeah, a real maniac. Yeah. And and and he had this this dictum of if it works, it's out of date. So you know, it's it's like like, yeah, don't be complacent,

you know, don't be a traditionalist. I think also that there's been there's been really horrific consequences of sort of the right being the ones to like take the urge for creative destruction. Just like you know, what was that line there's some I forget some some venture capitalist things like move fast and break things, and it's like, yeah, so when they move fast the things they breaks us. But yes, you know, we can move faster and break

things that are bad. Yeah, definite's to a creative and playful kind of motive, being right that like you you might be able to work, wake up in the morning and think, God, you know, it would be really cool if we could have like a like a child care nurse ory just like like out in the out in the common area between these buildings and stuff, and like go to your go to your local like your your workers council or whatever, and have a really plausible like

the way of actually getting that and like collaborating with people to make that happen, and then being like, Okay, well we'll try it as an experiment for twelve months. We'll keep we'll see how it goes. And then there's a feedback cycle where it's like, Okay, some aspect of

this design didn't really work out. We'll we'll go talk about it some more, and then it aerate on that and that's that's like as it's it's an entrepreneurialism that doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now. It just means that human beings, living real things, real workers, will be able to actually control their environments in this

the substance of their lives and in a meaningful way. Yeah, and like this, I think you know, back in the nineties early odds, sort of before the two thousand eight crisis, in the hoary days of your um it's there was a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation.

But what that always meant was we make decisions about what's going to change, and you have to adapt, right it was it was it was, you know, always this arbitrary power for him outside that would just be changing the social fabric, and you had to be flexible enough

to cope with what you were being subjected to. It's very different if you know, the planning is being done by you for you, and you're moving towards adaptation and flexibility out of a sense of that, oh yeah, this would be better and I'm going to adapt to be in a better state to to work with my environment, uh, in a more healthy and a more flourishing way, as opposed to just like, oh yeah, you've got to work

three jobs now, so figure it out right. That's a very different kind of flexibility, very different kind of adaptation. And you know, those things have sort of become dirty words in some ways, but they are really core to the way that we all exist as organisms in the world and they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse. Mm hmm exactly. Yeah, I think okay, we can take

this as a place to leave off. Yeah, do you two have stuff you want to log and I know you you want to plug, but plug the things that you want people to listen to because they are Um. Yeah, we're General Intellecting us um e cou to General Intellecting a totness and it's got all the episodes on there around Twitter, ask gunice pod um. Yeah, you can find us on all the podcast things. Um. We're also part of a podcast network called Emancipation and so that's emancipation

dot Network on the web. UM. And yeah, some really excellent shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats and um, Mortal Science, from Alpha to Omega, Jumpsy in Utopia. They're they're really wonderful shows that are all Um. It's it's a variety of different sort of takes on things, but like, um, there's a sort of common there's a sort of a spiritual common grounds they all have. Um yeah,

we we all were all interested in thinking systematically. We're all interested in emancipation, as the network name says, and we're all interested in sort of building something going forward, trying to construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting caught up in day to day politics or getting caught up in uh dum mentality. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's systematic, it's critical, but it's also constructive and I think that's what we're all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, Well,

thank you too both for coming on. Thank you it's been wondering, Thanks for having us. Yeah, this has been Make it happen here you can find us that happened here pod in places. There's also stuff at quals on Media that you can also find in those same places and possibly also different ones. We have a we have a website. Everyone asked me for my sources every single

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