(this essay is an ongoing work in progress)
“With the tendential autonomization of the cybernetic instruments and machines vis-a-vis markets, firms, and states, information technology aspires to form the sole basis of both value and power. Quantification and evaluation become both essential and ordinary operations of collective life. The digitalization of organizations, then that of domestic space, currently in the process of completion, are seen as one of the principal vectors of this great transformation. What used to be called “private”, intimate life, subjectivity, the body and all of living existence are now invested and colonized by capitalistic and state powers to a degree that would have appeared unthinkable and intolerable to previous generations.” – Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Manifesto (emphasis added)
“Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.” – Christopher Little, quoted in The DevOps Handbook.
Cybernetics as a formal academic discipline was founded by American scientist and former-gifted-student extraordinaire Norbert Weiner in his 1948 book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. [1] In this book, Weiner makes public several insights from his WWII research into anti-aircraft systems. The book remains a foundational text in control systems theory – the science of making physical systems behave in a predictable fashion. Examples include the operation of a basic home thermostat, or the process by which a ship is steered (cybernetics comes from κυβερνήτης, “kubernetes”, the Greek word for a ship’s helmsman or pilot. [2] The orchestration software came later. [3]) Its key insight is that by feeding the output of the system back into the input controller, the controller can determine the distance between desired and actual output and adjust its input to the physical process accordingly. Today, control systems govern processes from your thermostat and automatic cruise control to nuclear reactors, missile targeting systems and Boston Dynamics mechanical hounds. Despite its ominous name and somewhat intimidating mathematics (shown at the beginning of this essay), it’s a fairly straightforward concept to understand, provided you’re not the one responsible for actually tuning the control loop.
Weiner, however, was not content to simply find a new way to describe and analyze mechanical systems. As the title of his book suggests, his cybernetics was not simply the science of feedback loops, but a proposed unifying theory of machine, animal, and human behavior. In his Cybernetics and other books, including The Human Use of Human Beings, a non-mathematical introduction to cybernetics intended for a popular audience, he constantly stressed that what he discovered was nothing less than the fundamental process by which sufficiently complex systems process information about the world to make decisions. This is how control systems theory, a falsifiable science underpinning our modern industrial world, was stretched and mutated to produce something else, a nonfalsifiable theory of all human behavior which some have called the cybernetic hypothesis.
What is the Cybernetic Hypothesis? As it turns out, Tiqqun is not particularly interested in giving a specific definition, preferring to instead rant about Blooms and young girls and theories of resistance that only work for the relatively privileged. In fact, they seem to only define it as the successor to the now-defunct liberal hypothesis, so this is where I will begin. If the liberal hypothesis is that every human being, regardless of circumstances, should be treated by the state as both a unique individual and a citizen with common rights and responsibilities, a first definition of the cybernetic hypothesis is that human beings can and should be modeled according to the principles of cybernetics – feedback loops adjusting their behavior according to the information they consume about the world. This, as we shall see, has disastrous consequences.
Second Definition of Cybernetics – All problems of unpredictable behavior can be resolved through a combination of increased data collection and increased control of various decision points throughout the system, including the creation of new decision points.
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” — Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes [Travels of Prudent Men]
Third Definition of Cybernetics – Uncertainty should be removed from human life and society as much as is possible. (Related – the ideal state preserves itself in perpetuity)
“In human hands and as a historical tool, control has been exercised merely as domination, and manifest only in its centralized and vertical forms. Domination is a version of control, but also its confinement, its obstacle: even self-control is conceived by man as the achievement of domination. Only with the cybernetic system does self-control no longer entail being placed beneath or under something: there is no ‘self’ to control man, machine or any other system: instead, both man and machine become elements of a cybernetic system which is itself a system of control and communication. This is the strange world to which Ada’s programming has led: the possibility of activity without centralized control, an agency, of sorts, which has no need of a subject position.” – Sadie Plant, The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.
“Cybernetic systems are excited by military technology, security and defence. Still confident of his own indisputable mastery over them, man continues to turn them on. In so doing he merely encourages his own destruction. Every software development is a migration of control, away from man, in whom it has been exercised only as domination, and into the matrix, or cyberspace, ‘the broad electronic net in which virtual realities are spun’…The matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place for historical man: he was merely its tool, and his agency was itself always a figment of its loop.” – Sadie Plant
“Cybernetics is warfare directed against all that lives and all that lasts for a time.” – Tiqqun
NOTES
[1] Specifically, Weiner’s obsession with his childhood as a professional prodigy and his own anxieties as to whether he had lived up to his promise. See Gleick.
[2] See Weiner, Cybernetics
[3] https://kubernetes.io/ The name was presumably chosen for this project for the same reason Weiner chose it for his project – for its association with steering and control. Another possibility is that it is a direct reference to Weiner’s cybernetics; as we shall see, the two seemingly disparate technologies have several ideological connections
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley.
Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Pantheon Books, 2011.
Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Touchstone, 1998.
Kim, Gene, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis.The DevOps Handbook. IT Revolution Press, 2016.
Plant, Sadie. “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics” The Information Society Reader, edited by Frank Webster and Raimo Blom. Routledge Student Readers, 2004.
Tiqqun. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Translated by Robert Hurley, Semiotext(e), 2020.
Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris, (Hermann & Cie) & Camb. Mass. (MIT Press), 1948, 2nd revised ed. 1961.
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