Speaker 1: Cybernetics. All right, this is this is me Christopher Wong,
Speaker 1: realizing that I have done like sixteen consecutive actual real
Speaker 1: introductions and that if I keep doing them, everyone's going
Speaker 1: to expect that I do a real introduction every time
Speaker 1: instead of like randomly yelling something. So yeah, well, welcome
Speaker 1: to it could happen here. I am trying to make
Speaker 1: my job function as it should and not professionalize it.
Speaker 1: Um and this is this is a podcast about things
Speaker 1: that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about
Speaker 1: things that are good and how, in fact there can
Speaker 1: be a society beyond this one, and to talk about
Speaker 1: some of the shades of what that could look like.
Speaker 1: I have with me the co host of the General
Speaker 1: Intellect Unit, Kyle and June, which is as a podcast
Speaker 1: on the Emancipation Network. That is so this is the
Speaker 1: tagline the podcast of the Cybernetic Marxists. I am. I
Speaker 1: am very excited. Yeah, it's it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on. Um yeah, I guess okay,
Speaker 1: you should start at the the very very beginning, because
Speaker 1: I don't think most people know any of this. What
Speaker 1: is cybernetics? Right? Um? So cybernetics is I guess a
Speaker 1: term that comes from what is it the kaibernetes right, steering, uh,
Speaker 1: the idea of steering a boat um, so using your
Speaker 1: ore to navigate the waters um. And so essentially it
Speaker 1: is a science of control. And that sounds really scary,
Speaker 1: but what it means is that it's that kind of
Speaker 1: connection between the steers person, the or the boat, their
Speaker 1: body and the water around them and getting all of
Speaker 1: those things in sync in such a way that the
Speaker 1: steers person is going where they want to go, the
Speaker 1: ship or the boat doesn't capsize and they don't lose
Speaker 1: the ore um. And so that's what control means. It's
Speaker 1: a kind of balancing, a kind of connection between the
Speaker 1: organism and the environment in such a way that it
Speaker 1: can survive and thrive. And that's what cybernex is focused on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing I love about them, the steersman metaphor, is
Speaker 1: that like it's all about it's controlling the sense of regulation.
Speaker 1: But also like very importantly in cybernetics, it's almost always
Speaker 1: self regulation m hmm, because like the one of the
Speaker 1: kind of core principles. Again, like the because the term
Speaker 1: usually calls to mind this like kind of terminator like UM,
Speaker 1: like cyber Gothic kind of domination. It's actually not with
Speaker 1: the field is about at all. It's UM because one
Speaker 1: of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any
Speaker 1: given system UM, the only thing that can really control
Speaker 1: it is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems.
Speaker 1: So that like UM, like the kind of like top
Speaker 1: down external domination of an organism that we all fear
Speaker 1: is kind of like actually, if you look at the
Speaker 1: cyber sybanetics literature, that's not not actually really possible because
Speaker 1: the the the the external controller would never have enough
Speaker 1: complexity to match what the organism is capable of. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, organisms are self regulating systems. The steersman
Speaker 1: with his boat is a self regulating system that like
Speaker 1: regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its
Speaker 1: course that's directed towards its goal. UM. So it's it's
Speaker 1: that's why it's so important. I think that's why we
Speaker 1: think it's so important for the left and like people
Speaker 1: who are concerned with these like you know, visions of
Speaker 1: a politics of autonomy and liberation, they really need to
Speaker 1: look at this stuff because it turns out there kind
Speaker 1: of is a science of like autonomous, self guiding organic systems.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, no terminator here, yes, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you know when you see uh, scary videos of
Speaker 1: militarized robots and they're learning to you know, jump and
Speaker 1: fire weapons and all that kind of stuff. There certainly
Speaker 1: is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind of
Speaker 1: domain application of cybernetics. Rather than defining what cybernetics is,
Speaker 1: it's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is
Speaker 1: what cybernetics is. Yeah, yeah, that that's that That's that's
Speaker 1: probably worth emphasizing, right that, Like um, um, cybernetics in
Speaker 1: some ways is a kind of like out of fashion
Speaker 1: these days. Like it it kind of evolved into systems
Speaker 1: thinking and like, um, I guess a lot of its
Speaker 1: lessons got kind of absorbed in general. But we find
Speaker 1: there's great value in going back to them, the kind
Speaker 1: of originators and like focusing on that field. It's like
Speaker 1: we on the show, we got into the cybernetics angle
Speaker 1: by reading Andrew Pickering in his book with the Cybernetic Brain,
Speaker 1: in which um, he kind of acknowledged that like there's
Speaker 1: he kind of split it into two, like there's American
Speaker 1: cybernetics like which had that kind of like um dour
Speaker 1: kind of military domination sort of flavor to it. That
Speaker 1: like it's kind of an earned reputation there. But Pickering
Speaker 1: was more concerned with British cybernetics. Um, it's like a
Speaker 1: lot of British thinkers that and it had a very
Speaker 1: different flavor there where it was more open ended. It
Speaker 1: was kind of had more of a focus on kind
Speaker 1: of liberation than like politics and stuff. And in fact,
Speaker 1: some of those like Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist,
Speaker 1: wrote an anarchist um like journals and stuff like that, um.
Speaker 1: And for him, like those two things went tant in
Speaker 1: glove right like that, like um liberatory politics as like um,
Speaker 1: the politics of like human flourishing, like as human human
Speaker 1: beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and
Speaker 1: of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing.
Speaker 1: To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics.
Speaker 1: There was no real distinction there. It was just like
Speaker 1: these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you
Speaker 1: lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like there's there's plenty. I don't know
Speaker 1: who am I thinking of here? Like them that the Tally,
Speaker 1: that guy with the like black Swan sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: like he's biggest system and stuff, but like isn't so
Speaker 1: much um isn't so much into the liberatory politics. I
Speaker 1: guess you know, a lot of that angle is kind
Speaker 1: of lost. Yeah, And I think this is awesome. This
Speaker 1: is you know, this is sort of a product of
Speaker 1: I guess the broader idelogical course that's going on while
Speaker 1: sort of cyberige comes in and out of fashion. I
Speaker 1: think I think we should go back a bit to
Speaker 1: the beginning to sort of situate this because I know,
Speaker 1: like when when I, like before I ever did any reading,
Speaker 1: What's ever next? Like my immediate assumption was that it
Speaker 1: was it was, you know, this, this is the thing
Speaker 1: that was entirely just based off of computers, right that
Speaker 1: this is like this is and that's not really true
Speaker 1: from might understandtanding of us. Can we go back and
Speaker 1: sort of like talk about where this came from a
Speaker 1: bit and how it's sort of moves over this over
Speaker 1: certain sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you can kind
Speaker 1: of trace it back in it's sort of European origins
Speaker 1: to UM. You could probably say Hagel Uh, you know
Speaker 1: his his move towards like UM understanding being not just
Speaker 1: as substance but as subject. I think is moved towards
Speaker 1: a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole
Speaker 1: system as a holistic entity as opposed to just an
Speaker 1: individual interacting with an external environment. UM. And you can
Speaker 1: also see this come up in say there was a
Speaker 1: ecologist X skill in the German ecologist in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, I believe, who was trying to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: the organism in its environment. The sort of precursors to
Speaker 1: ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics UM. And
Speaker 1: then when you get to the kind of development of
Speaker 1: cybernetics as a science or as a discipline UM in
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century, it's not exactly about computing, it's UM.
Speaker 1: It's more about balancing a machine with its environment. So UM.
Speaker 1: Sort of prototypical UM machine of this kind was the
Speaker 1: servo mechanism, which was used to help guide a like
Speaker 1: an anti aircraft gun in shooting down in any aircraft,
Speaker 1: so making sure it tracks properly with the target and
Speaker 1: doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in
Speaker 1: operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object
Speaker 1: that has trouble tracking what it's a very fast moving target.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can even think back to like the
Speaker 1: you know, in World War One, when they discovered, hey,
Speaker 1: we could actually like sing chronize the timing of the
Speaker 1: propeller and the timing of our gun on the front
Speaker 1: of this plane so that our guns aren't destroying our
Speaker 1: propellers and shooting and we're we're shooting our own planes
Speaker 1: down with our guns when we're dog fighting, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's uh, yeah, that's the system's understanding, right, So that's um,
Speaker 1: that's that's Norbert Leaner, right and working on the automated
Speaker 1: gun turret stuff. And that's he coins the term cybernetics
Speaker 1: to like um given name to the thing he was
Speaker 1: starting to discover. And it's like he was kind of
Speaker 1: pulling together a bunch of rights there, and like one
Speaker 1: of those kind of important insights is that like, um,
Speaker 1: like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and
Speaker 1: accuracy without like basically making the gun turret an agent
Speaker 1: of its own that like and the like the turret
Speaker 1: and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination
Speaker 1: would achieve their goal. But like there was there was
Speaker 1: there's something strange and spooky about that. And I think
Speaker 1: that then this feedback mechanism in inside the terrist gives
Speaker 1: it a sort of weird agency that UM combines with
Speaker 1: the agency off the gunner to link going to the
Speaker 1: whole system towards it goal. UM. Yes, And what it
Speaker 1: ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space
Speaker 1: where the distinction between human and machine UH starts to
Speaker 1: become ambiguous because they both start to possess they're both
Speaker 1: understood to have a kind of agency, they're both understood
Speaker 1: to have kinds of like functions, And then you kind
Speaker 1: of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea,
Speaker 1: and you can start to bring in all of these
Speaker 1: different ideas from like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from
Speaker 1: ecology UH, and they all start to interact in this
Speaker 1: domain of cyber addicts. And like the core, the core
Speaker 1: idea of them that kind of ties everything together is
Speaker 1: that of feedback UM. So like weener realizes that what
Speaker 1: he needs to do achieve this goal is is a
Speaker 1: feedback mechanism I am. That would is error correcting feedback, right,
Speaker 1: like if the if the gun is slightly too far
Speaker 1: to the left, it corrects itself right words and so on. Um.
Speaker 1: But that as you said, that that connects across all
Speaker 1: sorts of things, right, Like you start to realize that's
Speaker 1: present everywhere in ecology, in neurology, in UM, like that
Speaker 1: learning is based on feedback, you know. So it's really
Speaker 1: funny to read to read Norburt Wiener like in the
Speaker 1: fifties basically describing what would become machine learning, and he's
Speaker 1: just like he just off the cuff, is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like if you could, if a machine could like UM,
Speaker 1: or if if any system could just like UM analyze
Speaker 1: its own performance and then feedback onto itself, it would
Speaker 1: it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to.
Speaker 1: And he's like, yeah, he turns out he was completely correct.
Speaker 1: And that's that's where kind of like gets into like
Speaker 1: you get a sure thinkers like Ross Ashby who was
Speaker 1: UM and like other folks like were in in and
Speaker 1: around psychiatry. We were like really interested in how the
Speaker 1: brain worked. And that's that's the other thing that feeds
Speaker 1: into like cybernetics is like, um, it's It's why Pickering
Speaker 1: called his book the Cybernetic Brains, because like the brain
Speaker 1: and nervous systems show up so much in that field,
Speaker 1: right that, Like the brain being a kind of learning
Speaker 1: and adapt an adapt adaptation machine attached to the body
Speaker 1: or whatever, and like, um, yeah, I don't know, there's
Speaker 1: there's something fascinating there, and like, um, the I mean
Speaker 1: there's something kind of possibly troubling and kind of melting
Speaker 1: down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever,
Speaker 1: but like there's also something very compelling and just like
Speaker 1: recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels,
Speaker 1: right that, Like um, like you get similar behaviors and
Speaker 1: similar kind of outcomes, and then you know, it turns
Speaker 1: out like you can kind of do a science on
Speaker 1: these things and and come up with an even better
Speaker 1: planage my frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so it is in a sense about computers. But
Speaker 1: the computers are really just understood to act like a
Speaker 1: kind of brain, and that's connected to a nervous system
Speaker 1: which is connected to you know, like actuators of some kinds,
Speaker 1: some kinds of like machines that actually do things in
Speaker 1: the world. So it's not about like say computer science specifically.
Speaker 1: It's more about, like, well, computers are a useful way
Speaker 1: to do cybernetic design because they can act as a
Speaker 1: control system and they're flexible. It's not that this is
Speaker 1: about computers really, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like the you
Speaker 1: brought you brought up something very important there that like, um,
Speaker 1: in all cases of like cybernetics like thing, the systems
Speaker 1: that we're considering are not like isolated like braining a
Speaker 1: box kind of things. They're all the things that are
Speaker 1: directly engaged with a world, um like. So it's it's
Speaker 1: it's not that kind of like monadic kind of rationalism
Speaker 1: of like computation just happening in a box somewhere and
Speaker 1: like per perfect intelligence, right, that kind of the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff these are always, like the separantations, are always
Speaker 1: working with systems that were engaged in real time emergent situations, UM.
Speaker 1: And because of that, they rapidly kind of like acknowledge
Speaker 1: that for so many of these important like systems, the
Speaker 1: only way to figure out what it's going to do
Speaker 1: is to let it do it UM because you can't
Speaker 1: like pre compute all the possible outcomes. You know, of
Speaker 1: these like very sticky and complex real world situations, the
Speaker 1: best way to figure out what it's going to do
Speaker 1: is to let it do it and watch yes. And
Speaker 1: I think I think that's an interesting sort of like
Speaker 1: if if you look at where a lot of the
Speaker 1: sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort
Speaker 1: of like manipulate so side the technology have gone, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you get like like blockchain smart contracts, and it's like
Speaker 1: the blockchain smart contract is like, Okay, we are going
Speaker 1: to think of literally everything that could possibly happen an
Speaker 1: attempt to put it in like a very small amount
Speaker 1: of code, and if anything like literally anything at all happens,
Speaker 1: that uh, you know that we didn't expect where now
Speaker 1: everyone is now screwed because we have just made this
Speaker 1: thing im beautable and put it in such a way
Speaker 1: that we can't change it. So I think that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a I think this is a useful sort of
Speaker 1: I mean corrective just just in the way that we've
Speaker 1: we've we've now like like we've gone backwards, like we've
Speaker 1: we've gotten into this place where you instead of like
Speaker 1: we need to let these systems play out, we need
Speaker 1: to let them control themselves. Have gotten to like we
Speaker 1: think that we can actually just sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: turn turn the entire system into code that we can
Speaker 1: predict ahead of time and have the basis of some
Speaker 1: sort of social system off of Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: I think it's something that like the serpetitions and like
Speaker 1: maybe Pickering would describe as like a kind of perversity
Speaker 1: of modern thought, like the modern mindset like that that
Speaker 1: kind of like rational like um kind of mindset right
Speaker 1: like um, and like to the serpenetitions that that whole
Speaker 1: thing with like the blockchain stuff, will be just truly
Speaker 1: laughable because it's immediate, it's immediately obvious to them that
Speaker 1: the problem there is like okay, proposing we're going to
Speaker 1: use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process
Speaker 1: or whatever, smart contracts, whatever, and it's like that thing
Speaker 1: has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes.
Speaker 1: Because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a there's like a law that's at
Speaker 1: the house of cybernatics called Ashby's law of requisite variety.
Speaker 1: And in short, it basically states that given a system, um,
Speaker 1: the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating
Speaker 1: it is itself, because a regulator knee needs as much
Speaker 1: variety as the thing it's regulating if it's gonna like
Speaker 1: actually succeeded it um. And so that's that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that nudges everyone towards, like like when you
Speaker 1: get to someone like Stafford Beer is his whole model
Speaker 1: of like organization pushes all a lot of the intelligence
Speaker 1: downwards to the to the bottom layers, because there is
Speaker 1: basically the people on the ground on the shop floor
Speaker 1: are the people who are best informed to actually deal
Speaker 1: with their own situation. And that's that sounds like a
Speaker 1: banal observation, but like it for Beer that was actually
Speaker 1: quite a step forward to like just admit that like
Speaker 1: trying to trying to like in his context, it was
Speaker 1: like often the organization of a firm, like at our company,
Speaker 1: like trying to manage a company from the boardroom is
Speaker 1: just fucking ludicrous, Like no nobody there has enough information
Speaker 1: to act on They're all dumbasses anyway. So for Beer,
Speaker 1: it was just like this is where it starts to
Speaker 1: get interesting, and it connects to the politics, right that
Speaker 1: like for one of these scientists just observing reality and
Speaker 1: like you know, using you know, pretty pretty good stray
Speaker 1: intuitions and like scientific frameworks, just looking at it and
Speaker 1: going like, oh, it is obviously the case that the
Speaker 1: best way for society to organize his bottom up self organization. Um,
Speaker 1: And that like it's not just a moral point, it's
Speaker 1: actually a technical point as well. Then like, um, these
Speaker 1: these top down, bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not
Speaker 1: only morally objectionable, they're also technically inferior to the kind
Speaker 1: of like cyber communism we want to institute. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I have like one off one of my what if
Speaker 1: one of my favorite stories about So I worked as
Speaker 1: a maintenance worker for a while and one day my
Speaker 1: boss was like, there was some problem with a sink.
Speaker 1: And my boss was like, no, we don't need the plumbers.
Speaker 1: I can do this. And so he goes in there
Speaker 1: and it's it's what it's like, It's it's like a
Speaker 1: sink in like a building, right, So it's it's just
Speaker 1: one of those things where there's like a pipe that
Speaker 1: connects to the top of the sink to like the wall,
Speaker 1: and he goes, Okay, here, look at this. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna turn this valve and this is gonna turn
Speaker 1: the water off. And what he instead does is he
Speaker 1: take he takes the pipe off of the wall, and
Speaker 1: just like a torrent of water is just now shooting
Speaker 1: out of this pipe because he has removed the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's removed the pipe from the wall. This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is why I think like, yeah, go
Speaker 1: this this, this, this this, you know this this is
Speaker 1: like a particularly funny example of how these sort of
Speaker 1: top down management systems. And this guy like like used
Speaker 1: to be a maintenance guy, right, but he just like
Speaker 1: must a plumber, and so you know, and he accepts
Speaker 1: into it and he's like, oh no, no, no no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: hold on, I know, I know how this system works.
Speaker 1: It's going to be fine. And it just there's a guys,
Speaker 1: the guys are of water has so much force. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like pushing our tool cart across the room.
Speaker 1: It's like a fighter hydrants coming out this wall. I
Speaker 1: wanted to I guess beers is an interesting way to
Speaker 1: go to go into the sort of the politics of
Speaker 1: what this actually looks like do you want to talk
Speaker 1: about and I know I briefly talked about this in
Speaker 1: an episode in The Liberalism a while back, but do
Speaker 1: you want to go into sort of more detail into
Speaker 1: what Beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt
Speaker 1: because of military coup, to try to implement like a
Speaker 1: cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure, um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Stafford Beer was a UM management consultant UM he
Speaker 1: and a cyberneticition. He got his start sort of doing
Speaker 1: operations research UM, which is kind of a precursor to
Speaker 1: cybernetics UM that is kind of like interested in logistics
Speaker 1: and organizing systems UM in the British military UM in
Speaker 1: World War Two. And then he came out of that
Speaker 1: and became a corporate UH consultant for operations research and
Speaker 1: management UM. And so in working in the corporate world UM,
Speaker 1: he saw all of the things that were really screwed
Speaker 1: up with the status quo UM way of doing business
Speaker 1: and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic
Speaker 1: power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the
Speaker 1: way that managing organizations, according to ORG charts which are
Speaker 1: there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all
Speaker 1: kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt
Speaker 1: to their environments because they get into these kinds of
Speaker 1: strange neuroses. Um. And you know, just sort of going
Speaker 1: through all of that and more often than not being
Speaker 1: unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um
Speaker 1: address these problems and just sort of like seeing how
Speaker 1: these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of
Speaker 1: the broader problems of our society as a whole and
Speaker 1: of capitalism, right. Um. And so you know, he had
Speaker 1: a basis from his time in India during the Second
Speaker 1: World War in uh kind of like contra uh kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, Eastern or specifically Indian um, spirituality, yoga,
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had
Speaker 1: a cult countercultural side to his personality. UM. And he
Speaker 1: was always doing tinkering strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't
Speaker 1: just the straight laced corporate guy. Uh. But it was
Speaker 1: a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his
Speaker 1: growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start
Speaker 1: to develop ideas about how things could be different. And
Speaker 1: this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were
Speaker 1: happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early seventies. Um, So,
Speaker 1: they reached out to him to come and help out
Speaker 1: with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary
Speaker 1: process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles
Speaker 1: of imperialist dependency and create a society that was focused
Speaker 1: on the flourishing of workers, uh, and of society as
Speaker 1: a whole, as opposed to one that was based on
Speaker 1: sort of you know, resource extraction where everything flows to
Speaker 1: the top. Yeah, do you want to explain some more
Speaker 1: about how that went well? So? Um, yeah, it it
Speaker 1: went well and then it went badly, I guess. Um.
Speaker 1: But from from from the reading we've done and from
Speaker 1: our research, it seems like if basically, if the if
Speaker 1: the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill them all, um,
Speaker 1: this this would have worked like it was working, and
Speaker 1: it was that the project was actually going pretty well.
Speaker 1: Explained briefly, what like I think it becomes it's called
Speaker 1: product Cyberson, But what exactly like what was it doing? So? Um? So,
Speaker 1: like Beer's big kind of innovation is what we call
Speaker 1: the viable system model, or VSM and it's a model
Speaker 1: that's um it's a model for these like autonomous social
Speaker 1: systems that is kind of taking it's I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body,
Speaker 1: but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology
Speaker 1: and neurology and neuroscience and and cybernetics and just kind
Speaker 1: of meshing them all together. Um So, basically like it's
Speaker 1: like if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous
Speaker 1: organs that all take care of their own business, plus
Speaker 1: a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into
Speaker 1: a workable hole, then you can kind of see the
Speaker 1: whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical
Speaker 1: and horizontal aspects. Like on the one hand, it has
Speaker 1: this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one units
Speaker 1: are are well autonomous, more or less like the harror
Speaker 1: takes harsh takes care of its own thing. The lungs
Speaker 1: take care of their own thing. But then the nervous
Speaker 1: system meshes them together in layers so that it can say, oh,
Speaker 1: hold on too much oxygen, dial it down a bit,
Speaker 1: and then the organs responds dynamically to those those signals, right,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like up down feedback loops, right,
Speaker 1: where then the lower levels of the system are the
Speaker 1: smart bits that are doing all the important work. But
Speaker 1: there's this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system in the
Speaker 1: brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all
Speaker 1: on the rails. Um So, and importantly it's a kind
Speaker 1: of recursive model. So like a human being is an
Speaker 1: autonomous unit, and then that it's that unit is composed
Speaker 1: of more autonomous units, like the organs and the muscles,
Speaker 1: and then each of those is composed of cells which
Speaker 1: are autonomous units, and then you know, so on. But
Speaker 1: like that latter goes upwards as well, so that like
Speaker 1: a team is an autonomous unit composed of human beings,
Speaker 1: a firm, or like a department, is a autonomous unit
Speaker 1: composed of teams. A firm is composed of departments, like
Speaker 1: a secretor is composed of firms. And it's the same
Speaker 1: kind of struct or at each layer. Um. So that
Speaker 1: the kind of upside there is that like, um, you
Speaker 1: don't like you kind of have a unit fairly unifying
Speaker 1: like set of principles and like a science for doing
Speaker 1: this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at every level,
Speaker 1: at every every layer of society. So like in principle,
Speaker 1: the sort of like the serbonetic principles that get applied
Speaker 1: to cohering members of a team are the same story
Speaker 1: principles that get applied to like sectors in an economy. Um,
Speaker 1: with the same kind of you know, bottom up kind
Speaker 1: of feedback going on as well. Um. So Stafford was
Speaker 1: invited to Chile to by the all end A government
Speaker 1: in so that was like nineteen seventy, right, Um, that
Speaker 1: that that election happens. So he arrived in late nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy I think, Um, I mean certain on the timeline,
Speaker 1: but we're looking at those those first few years of
Speaker 1: the seventies as as the time when this is happening. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I d like it in setting negativity. Yeah. So it's
Speaker 1: towards the end of that year that he's he's invited
Speaker 1: and he's basically kind of given the task of like, hey,
Speaker 1: do all this stuff but with this entire economy, and
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, I'm sure cool. Um so puts together
Speaker 1: Project cybersen Um and there's kind of long story there
Speaker 1: of like and them building out this kind of infrastructure
Speaker 1: and like it's it's all highly experimental UM and highly tensive.
Speaker 1: Like they one of the big problems they run into
Speaker 1: is that like they don't have very much in the
Speaker 1: way of like hardware, especially because they're under embargo. So
Speaker 1: they had like UM a pretty what what at the
Speaker 1: time was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they ran
Speaker 1: the around the software on UM. But like step step
Speaker 1: one was like UM installing this like huge communications network
Speaker 1: amongst all the factories and UM like setting like the
Speaker 1: workers committees and stuff would feed information into it and
Speaker 1: it would kind of again this like feedback thing where
Speaker 1: you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them,
Speaker 1: and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, route
Speaker 1: some of your product over to this this factory and
Speaker 1: it will be better used there. And then you know,
Speaker 1: you guys over there turn up this dial. You've turned
Speaker 1: down this dial. So and then if that plan doesn't
Speaker 1: quite work out, then you've got another layer of feedback
Speaker 1: tomorrow to say, Okay, that plan didn't quite work here's
Speaker 1: an adjusted plan. So it's it's just like both bottom
Speaker 1: up and top down sort of loop of feedback. That's
Speaker 1: like I think the phrase pickering is is reciprocal adaptation,
Speaker 1: where at the economy and its firms and its workers
Speaker 1: are all kind of adapting to each other in real
Speaker 1: time in a kind of in a in a full system. Um. Uh, yes, anything, no,
Speaker 1: that I mean, that's that's essentially what Cyber said was
Speaker 1: it was a system designed too largely I think at
Speaker 1: first supplement the mare kit, although Beer later realizes that like, actually,
Speaker 1: if you have a good system of this kind, you
Speaker 1: probably don't need a market. Um. But essentially it was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: our economy has been one that has been built around
Speaker 1: dependence two uh, you know, especially the United States, and
Speaker 1: it's been organized in that way, and we need to
Speaker 1: reorganize the economy both to promote the well being of
Speaker 1: the workers, the autonomy of the workers, realized the ideals
Speaker 1: of socialism in that way, and also to create a
Speaker 1: system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism.
Speaker 1: And so having this reciprocal adaptation um, having systems in
Speaker 1: place to connect things that were previously disconnected would allow
Speaker 1: you to move in that way of increasing autonomy and
Speaker 1: increasing freedom. Um. And that was generally the idea of
Speaker 1: Cyber sin Um. Yes, yeah, and there was something very interesting,
Speaker 1: Like when we were reading the reissue of his book
Speaker 1: Brain of the Firm, where he has a section the
Speaker 1: end that that documents this whole experience in Chile. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a really interesting parts where towards the end of
Speaker 1: it he's like and this is like getting up towards
Speaker 1: the coupe where he's like, um, he and the other
Speaker 1: cyber sin operatives like on the people are putting this together,
Speaker 1: realize that like the workers and like people in towns
Speaker 1: are are like just on their own just like using
Speaker 1: this stuff and these kind of principles to just like
Speaker 1: abolish the value form basically like but notably without the
Speaker 1: involvement from above, like as in Beer and Company stumble
Speaker 1: upon this just happening where they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: they're just they're just dismantling the market, and it's like
Speaker 1: it's all just kind of happening. And that's that there
Speaker 1: was something really wonderful to that. Then, Like it it
Speaker 1: indicated like there was there really wants something to it
Speaker 1: that like you could like as in people working, people
Speaker 1: could use these tools and this like new way of
Speaker 1: organizing themselves. Two just like liquidate market relations and and
Speaker 1: wage relations like spun spontaneously. But it's it's a spontaneity
Speaker 1: that's that's not really it does. It's it feels very
Speaker 1: different from the kind of spontaneity you often get in
Speaker 1: like the way Left to sort of like anarchists talk
Speaker 1: about it often like the kind of spontaneity is like
Speaker 1: a magical sort of thing that is like where freedom
Speaker 1: just arrives from out of nowhere. But this this was
Speaker 1: like installing infrastructure to enable freedom and then it actually
Speaker 1: kind of happening until the fascists showed up. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what I think is really interesting about it is that
Speaker 1: so you know, you have you have like you have
Speaker 1: this sort of central control center from which a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff is being run. But you know, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a weird system because it's try to
Speaker 1: link together like a lot of different kinds of firms.
Speaker 1: Like you have something saying in private firms, but you
Speaker 1: have a lot of you have a lot of state
Speaker 1: run firms. You also have firms that throughout this whole process,
Speaker 1: people like workers just taking over factories. They're setting up
Speaker 1: these sort of like call them industrial cordons. I think
Speaker 1: I'm remembering my Spanish rights, like yeah, they they you know,
Speaker 1: they start sitting up their own institutions and it's it's
Speaker 1: this becomes this way is sort of like networking these
Speaker 1: groups together. And the thing that's the other thing is
Speaker 1: it's interesting is you know, so you have you have
Speaker 1: them on the one hand, like just getting rid of
Speaker 1: markets and going like okay, well we can just coordinate
Speaker 1: production through this and like not have markets. And then
Speaker 1: the second thing they do is it's the freedom immediately
Speaker 1: becomes political in the sense that like, yeah, like one
Speaker 1: of one of the things they do they there that
Speaker 1: that's what's going on in this period is that and
Speaker 1: there's Chile has a very very right wing like it's
Speaker 1: basically like the even today it's like it's like really
Speaker 1: like one of the only like union like huge unions
Speaker 1: left in Chile is the truckers unions, and those guys
Speaker 1: are extremely right wing. There in this period of being
Speaker 1: backed by the CIA, they're being trained by f l
Speaker 1: c i O as I say like every episode, but
Speaker 1: like yeah, and and they're you know, they're intentionally doing strikes,
Speaker 1: trying to oversaw the government by blocking production, and you know,
Speaker 1: like the workers are like, okay, hold on, we can
Speaker 1: just use this symenetic system to figure out where these
Speaker 1: blocks are, figure out where materials need to move through,
Speaker 1: and we can just you know, we can just stop
Speaker 1: the kind of revolution. We can just sort of like
Speaker 1: we can we can just we can just fight our
Speaker 1: way through it. And and it's interesting, is like this happens,
Speaker 1: and so then that that like the original plan of
Speaker 1: using sort of of using these truckers is like the
Speaker 1: sort of right wing like the first attempt fails, and
Speaker 1: once that fails, it's like they have to go to
Speaker 1: the military and the coup eventually works. It's it's hard.
Speaker 1: It's hard to resist a coup outbrans, isn't Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing with the trucker strike is not like yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you can very well imagine like the CIA and
Speaker 1: stuff into a thinking that this is what will do.
Speaker 1: That's right, this will sell it up, but not realizing
Speaker 1: that the workers actually had in their hands a like
Speaker 1: vastly more sophisticated system for out maneuvering them. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that system works like a charm, like like clockwork, just
Speaker 1: like and even like you read the accounts from this thing,
Speaker 1: like both in eating Medina's cybernetic revelation areas and in
Speaker 1: Beer's on account, and there's like the sense that was
Speaker 1: actually kind of spooky and weird. But I'm like even
Speaker 1: the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out
Speaker 1: that way, and that like they were surprised at how
Speaker 1: effective it is, but that it gets back to the
Speaker 1: core of cyberneticsent like feedback is weirdly effective at getting
Speaker 1: things done. You know, these like highly tuned feedback systems,
Speaker 1: they give you a lot of power to out maneuver
Speaker 1: this comebacks, you know. Yeah, And I think in some sense,
Speaker 1: like this is like people talk a lot about Chile
Speaker 1: is sort of like the sort of foreclosed future of
Speaker 1: like antellectual and archetic socialism, But like, I don't think
Speaker 1: that was the potential of the moment. The potential of
Speaker 1: the moment was this. And it's interesting thing to me
Speaker 1: that well, because Beers kind of traces out a political
Speaker 1: history that never quite happened, which is so okay. One
Speaker 1: of the one of the sort of big political trends
Speaker 1: over the course of the twentie century is you have
Speaker 1: all these people who were sort of like they they
Speaker 1: basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during June World War two,
Speaker 1: because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine,
Speaker 1: and then you know, some of them go into some
Speaker 1: of them, you know, essentially stay on in the government
Speaker 1: during planning stuff. Beers like goes into corporate world, and
Speaker 1: the corporations are also you know, they start doing they
Speaker 1: also start doing this planning stuff. And you know, but
Speaker 1: Beers is interesting because he he pivots, like he pivots
Speaker 1: in a direction that the world doesn't, which is he
Speaker 1: pivots towards. Okay, the solution to sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems,
Speaker 1: whether whether they be like the corporate versions of it
Speaker 1: or the sort of like state administered like total economic
Speaker 1: planning from the top up down versions is oh well, okay,
Speaker 1: we need to have planning from the bottom up and
Speaker 1: distributed planning. Yeah. Yeah. And he, like everyone involved with
Speaker 1: Iverson gets murdered. The only reason Beer survives because he
Speaker 1: wasn't in the country. And it's it's just really interesting,
Speaker 1: like like it's just kind of not a story. Everybody
Speaker 1: got murdered, but some of them did, and some of
Speaker 1: them were in exile Uh, some of them were imprisoned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, it was, it was, you know, it was
Speaker 1: not a good time. Beer got out early and he
Speaker 1: knew things that we're getting we're getting bad, and everybody
Speaker 1: around him knew things were getting bad. Um. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: he was on him. He was on like a kind
Speaker 1: of I guess, like it's almost diplomatic mission to like
Speaker 1: try and get some of the blockade stuff. Like he
Speaker 1: was trying to. I think he was trying to flog
Speaker 1: like a container ship full of iron or something. You know,
Speaker 1: it was shopping shopping it around to try and trying
Speaker 1: to help out the likely in mine to the world.
Speaker 1: That's what it was. Yeah. But um, yeah, it's m
Speaker 1: hold on, I had a thought there. Um. And then
Speaker 1: like after afterwards, um, like Beer spent a fair bit
Speaker 1: of time like trying to catch his his comrades out
Speaker 1: of out of Chile and get them out of prison
Speaker 1: and got the Gottam resettled in um in the UK
Speaker 1: and so on and yeah America as well. M hum.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think that Um, this is like that's
Speaker 1: a very interesting point about the the you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of the real value of this moment being that
Speaker 1: movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society, not towards
Speaker 1: UH neoliberal engineering of markets and UH sort of reinforcement
Speaker 1: of private dictatorships, um, but towards a kind of like
Speaker 1: holistic control system that is still informed by you know,
Speaker 1: the principles of autonomy and UH and and and science. UM.
Speaker 1: It's it's definitely like an answer to the crisis of
Speaker 1: the seventies which was not taken up. And in that
Speaker 1: sense it is a foreclosed future, but of course one
Speaker 1: that we can take lessons from now. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there's something else. It's very interesting me about this because
Speaker 1: you know, if if you look at how like if
Speaker 1: if you look at how the socialist block sort of
Speaker 1: responds to the crisis and seventies, and you know, they're
Speaker 1: sort of decaying the eighties, like they have this option
Speaker 1: available to them, right, they have they have they have
Speaker 1: made a lot of ways, They have a lot they
Speaker 1: have a lot better technology than with the lands are
Speaker 1: using that have more resources, and every single one of
Speaker 1: them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions,
Speaker 1: you know, instead of I think it has to do
Speaker 1: with there there there's a line. This this is this
Speaker 1: is like Slightly before this, there's a line in um
Speaker 1: a debate Maw and Joe and Li are having in
Speaker 1: I think it's seven. This is like the peak of
Speaker 1: the sort of workers led part of the culture revolution,
Speaker 1: like the works have taken Shanghai, and Maw and Joe
Speaker 1: and I are talking and they're they're trying to figure out,
Speaker 1: like what are they gonna do? You know, they they've
Speaker 1: set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable. And there's
Speaker 1: there's this line where they're talking about, Okay, well, if
Speaker 1: if we give if they give them, if we give
Speaker 1: them a commune, they have to have free elections, and
Speaker 1: Joe and l is like, well, that would be anarchism.
Speaker 1: And then they're just like, oh god, we can't do that,
Speaker 1: and they never do in the end, you know, the
Speaker 1: end result of this whole sort of that whole sort
Speaker 1: of processes that trying to like instead of doing, instead
Speaker 1: of sort of like devolving any level of control down
Speaker 1: to like any of the workers who are doing things,
Speaker 1: they're like, Okay, well we'll just try to we'll just
Speaker 1: you know, we'll we'll we'll do capitalism instead, Well, will
Speaker 1: you will? You know, we'll create markets, will sort of
Speaker 1: like maintain our firm structure, but you know, the party
Speaker 1: countries into it. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's this, it's
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting thing to me too, because like
Speaker 1: there have been other like you know, like they're like
Speaker 1: lots of socialist parties have sort of various like degrees
Speaker 1: of radicalness have come to power like since nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: and to my knowledge, not a single one of them
Speaker 1: has ever picked any of this stuff back up, like
Speaker 1: even even you know, like like the most radical sort
Speaker 1: of like like you know, like like like early Chavas
Speaker 1: never like touches this, like even like I don't like
Speaker 1: I I don't I don't think like I don't think
Speaker 1: the easy Lends ever done it, Like I mean, they
Speaker 1: have fatological issues there, but like it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: interesting to me that like basically no one who's ever
Speaker 1: taken power sense has ever attempted it again m h.
Speaker 1: Which again is changed because this is you know, one
Speaker 1: of one of the sort of like this you would think,
Speaker 1: this is like this is at least a potential solution
Speaker 1: to sort of this this this this problem of the
Speaker 1: stagnation and sort of collapse of the old sort of adults.
Speaker 1: There's a plenty of economies, but no one takes it up.
Speaker 1: And I'm just to think what you too think about that?
Speaker 1: Like why this doesn't happen? Yeah, there's a I think
Speaker 1: there's an interesting dimension of Beer's work in Chile that
Speaker 1: kind of I think um might provide some answers to that,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, he he was in charge
Speaker 1: of setting up Cyberson, and Cyberson was kind of a
Speaker 1: system for optimizing the economy, but he had other concerns
Speaker 1: and other briefs that he was working on at the
Speaker 1: same time. And what he came to realize was that
Speaker 1: there was a layer of management and experts in the
Speaker 1: organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort
Speaker 1: of work on a Cyberson that was designed to improve
Speaker 1: production numbers, but they had real resistance to the idea
Speaker 1: of worker autonomy because of the because of of of
Speaker 1: wanting to maintain their their job privileges, and because of
Speaker 1: the prejudices of their their habitats. I guess you could
Speaker 1: say that what they learned when they were educated as
Speaker 1: engineers or managers or whatever, and you know, where the
Speaker 1: people who know things the workers don't know things, they
Speaker 1: shouldn't be in charge that kind of thing. And so
Speaker 1: he starts to he starts to realize that in order
Speaker 1: to really make cybersen effective as an engine for autonomy,
Speaker 1: what needs to happen is that um, sort of what
Speaker 1: you are describing with the Shanghai commune Uh, the the
Speaker 1: workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves and implement
Speaker 1: them through autonomous action. UM. And so he starts to
Speaker 1: try to kind of like right up, like right pamphlets
Speaker 1: that can be distributed to the workers so that the
Speaker 1: information that he has as theory is not being filtered
Speaker 1: through a bureaucracy but is instead, like you know, involved
Speaker 1: in an educational process of self mode mobilization in among
Speaker 1: the workers. UM. And so you know this really uh
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does
Speaker 1: mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of
Speaker 1: management and expert knowledge, because in Beer's conception of management,
Speaker 1: management is something that is done by anyone who has
Speaker 1: the power to affect an organization or change an organization.
Speaker 1: So if the workers are able to change their organizations,
Speaker 1: they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.
Speaker 1: For beer, management is a function. It's not a person.
Speaker 1: In Beer's ideal world, like management would just be these
Speaker 1: like decision nodes that emerge among among workers. I can
Speaker 1: like the management. A manager would never be a person.
Speaker 1: A manager would be like a kind of structural information
Speaker 1: processing like, um, think that happens among people. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so like when you see in for example, the
Speaker 1: USS are the option of creating a planning network, a
Speaker 1: computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. Um, it's
Speaker 1: basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be
Speaker 1: very very expensive for them to develop. It would be
Speaker 1: on the order of of doing you know, their nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. Uh. And two
Speaker 1: it is simply at odds with the system of like planning,
Speaker 1: the command economy that had that had grown up in
Speaker 1: the wake of the revolution. Right, it's simply at odds
Speaker 1: with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes
Speaker 1: it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power.
Speaker 1: And so I think that when you look at the
Speaker 1: socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I
Speaker 1: think it's because they it would require the people in
Speaker 1: power to really rethink their entire role and identity as
Speaker 1: members of society. Um. Yeah, and then there's a kind
Speaker 1: of there's a dreadful irony really and that like it's
Speaker 1: it's Stafford me or somebody who comes out of like
Speaker 1: bourgeois like management stuff and is deep in the pocket
Speaker 1: for that he's the one who actually sincerely pursues the
Speaker 1: most radical projects in like the socialist history that we've
Speaker 1: ever seen, vastly more radical in its intent, and it's
Speaker 1: like kind of it's the beginnings, it's impact than anything
Speaker 1: any Leninist has ever done, and it's basically because he
Speaker 1: actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people,
Speaker 1: and your average Leninist just doesn't, you know, like again
Speaker 1: like to go back to the example from earlier, right
Speaker 1: that like when when under pressure, they will they'll do
Speaker 1: capitalism before they'll do anything that even resembles um autonomy
Speaker 1: for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the
Speaker 1: right thing. You know. That does speak to the character
Speaker 1: of the thing, and it's it's it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: that class interest basically off those kind of functionaries, right, like,
Speaker 1: and the thing that makes Beery different is that he
Speaker 1: sincerely actually wanted to do it, you know, and the
Speaker 1: worker's autonomy thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and when when he starts to come
Speaker 1: up with these ideas of like thinking like, okay, like
Speaker 1: an economic planning system is not adequate, we need to
Speaker 1: go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the
Speaker 1: social body, he he quickly finds that he's being marginal
Speaker 1: iised within those circles of planners in the Chilean government
Speaker 1: because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about.
Speaker 1: They're actually quite concerned about this idea. Even if I
Speaker 1: end would be, you know, all for it, right, because
Speaker 1: he was he was very sincere about his interest in
Speaker 1: an autonomy. UM, there were still many people around beer
Speaker 1: who did not particularly like the idea. UM. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: And I think if we look at it, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of why hasn't it happened since then, in
Speaker 1: in all of these intervening decades, I think you also
Speaker 1: have to look at, um the international system and the
Speaker 1: way that countries figure into it, because we have all
Speaker 1: of these UM neoliberal structures of management and organization that
Speaker 1: were created in the eighties and nineties and early odds uh,
Speaker 1: that a socialist government has to contend with if they
Speaker 1: are to embark on a program like this, which isn't
Speaker 1: to say it's impossible, but what it does mean is
Speaker 1: that there are all these sort of um, highly complex
Speaker 1: regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our
Speaker 1: societies right now, and it is the path of least
Speaker 1: resistance to not attempt to engage in a in in
Speaker 1: uh an effort to kind of you know, let the
Speaker 1: market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization, um,
Speaker 1: because all of these structures are there and you have
Speaker 1: to kind of like root them out and replace them
Speaker 1: with something new, as opposed to having all these ready
Speaker 1: mades of what's already there, the market centered solutions, the
Speaker 1: the the kind of autocratic solutions, um, you know, all
Speaker 1: of the management systems that have been developed with an
Speaker 1: auto cracy in mind instead of something that is truly
Speaker 1: democratic and uh kind of self just dating mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And I think as well, and there's there's a kind
Speaker 1: of other thing that like, um, like the left has
Speaker 1: been kind of in a very weak position for quite
Speaker 1: a while now, like since then, since the seventies, right,
Speaker 1: and like, um, yes, like we're we're just we're just
Speaker 1: starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing.
Speaker 1: But also like I think there was this kind of
Speaker 1: long depressive phase at the end of them, at the
Speaker 1: crossing in the centuries right, where a lot of the
Speaker 1: like left is kind of and this this this actually
Speaker 1: gets into like why some of the reasons why we
Speaker 1: started general into lat unit that like we felt like
Speaker 1: we needed to bring this kind of like systems thinking
Speaker 1: and like technical seriousness back to the table after the
Speaker 1: kind of weird depressive phases where like you know, like
Speaker 1: say the alter globalization stuff for the occupy stuff, where
Speaker 1: people kind of take an almost explicitly anti strategic kind
Speaker 1: of turn and like a kind of anti technical turn.
Speaker 1: You know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like
Speaker 1: oh my god, like capital and it's it's it's technology,
Speaker 1: is is hegemonic? Like how the fund are we ever
Speaker 1: going to get out of this? Like it would have
Speaker 1: been heard to make an argument for a scientific and
Speaker 1: like technical kind of fusion with um with the humanist
Speaker 1: kind of impulses of socialism, But that's I think we're
Speaker 1: getting to a point where we can start actually having
Speaker 1: that conversation again, like we're we're seeing a bit more
Speaker 1: of a turn towards that, and it kind of turn
Speaker 1: towards like this kind of serious kind of like more
Speaker 1: and more serious kind of discussion of like hey, like okay,
Speaker 1: like okay, like we we we we fucking the current
Speaker 1: order of things. We want to we want to see
Speaker 1: it gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with?
Speaker 1: Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think
Speaker 1: those kind of conversations are coming back on the table
Speaker 1: in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties,
Speaker 1: like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They
Speaker 1: were impossible a couple of years ago. You know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the market as the fundament of society basically seemed
Speaker 1: to be invincible at that time. Um, and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what
Speaker 1: was and wasn't true about it and about society as
Speaker 1: a whole. And you know, we've had a lot of
Speaker 1: chaos in the years since then. That was um that
Speaker 1: affected not just the countries that we were you know,
Speaker 1: being restructured by the I m F, but actually really
Speaker 1: came in affected the core of the world. Economy as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I think that that that's sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: in the same way that World War One kind of
Speaker 1: disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority.
Speaker 1: Like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to
Speaker 1: roost in the core of the world system has has
Speaker 1: undermined that invincibility, That that that idea that oh, the
Speaker 1: market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that
Speaker 1: could possibly be better. At the same time that we
Speaker 1: have all of this technological development that's happening, um, you
Speaker 1: know in our economy that could be used for something
Speaker 1: different as opposed to you know, I don't know, making
Speaker 1: n f T s or something. Yeah. Absolutely, that that's
Speaker 1: all super important. I think that that kind of refines,
Speaker 1: like my previous point is refining in my head now
Speaker 1: like that like right now, Um that that kind of
Speaker 1: market chaos and especially even the chaos of like the
Speaker 1: system's response to COVID and stuff really puts um like
Speaker 1: in general, and for the left in particularly, puts like
Speaker 1: the question of governance back on the table in a
Speaker 1: way that it had kind of been off the table
Speaker 1: for a while. Like I think there was a there
Speaker 1: was a period on the left where like left activity
Speaker 1: was kind of like railing against governance. Like it was
Speaker 1: like we we want freedom from governance and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Right, And I'm not going to say those
Speaker 1: are necessarily bad impulses, right, but I think they're also
Speaker 1: kind of a bit wrong headed as well. Right, But
Speaker 1: like the kind of reality is that, like, for for
Speaker 1: human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish,
Speaker 1: we need governance. And like because like governance actually like
Speaker 1: as a word has the same route as cybernetics does.
Speaker 1: So kaibernetes, the Greek word becomes kubernetti, has becomes cybernetics, right,
Speaker 1: but that's also the root of governor, so kuberner, kubernator,
Speaker 1: those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics
Speaker 1: are one and the same kind of concept. Um And
Speaker 1: this question of like if we intend to create a
Speaker 1: world of self governance, um that is effective, it's viable
Speaker 1: in Beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're
Speaker 1: proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that
Speaker 1: we have to put up with right now. And that's
Speaker 1: back on the table in a big way that like,
Speaker 1: because I think especially with with COVID, people look at
Speaker 1: like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of
Speaker 1: our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely
Speaker 1: screwed up systems and in parhats because their goal is
Speaker 1: the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back
Speaker 1: to the goal directed behavior cybernetics, right, Like the steersman
Speaker 1: steers the boat towards a goal, right, and it's it's
Speaker 1: always about or like a you know, a cybernetic device
Speaker 1: like a thermostat has a goal temperature that is trying
Speaker 1: to regulate the temperature of the water towards um You know,
Speaker 1: we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're
Speaker 1: just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life,
Speaker 1: for flower shy, They're only suitable for the regulation of
Speaker 1: this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going, like
Speaker 1: that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now
Speaker 1: in a position, we're on the left, Like more and
Speaker 1: more of us are saying, like what we're proposing is
Speaker 1: not like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're
Speaker 1: proposing really, you know, we should have sane governance. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that same governance is bottom up self
Speaker 1: organized governance. Um. And that's that's both the moral position
Speaker 1: and a technical position, and I think they're both of those.
Speaker 1: The moral and technical valences feed off each other. Like
Speaker 1: we're we're we're able to be the serious people in
Speaker 1: the room. This this is a very big change of
Speaker 1: pace right for us, because like for a while we
Speaker 1: were railing against like the very serious people of like
Speaker 1: the Centrists and like the fucking Blair rights and the
Speaker 1: Clintonite sort of people. We're the serious people now saying
Speaker 1: what what this what this system actually does is absurd
Speaker 1: and ludicrous, and it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt
Speaker 1: a totally different like feedback snarcus, a different kind of
Speaker 1: goal orientation, um. And it needs to be oriented towards
Speaker 1: human flourishing. And that's it turns out there's a science
Speaker 1: of doing that, and it's called cybernetics, you know. Well,
Speaker 1: and we also have a runaway ecological crisis where we
Speaker 1: learn about we see that you know, like the capitalist
Speaker 1: market system is absolutely leading us all to death and
Speaker 1: the earth to death, and so it is human flourishing.
Speaker 1: But we also are concerned with the flourishing of life
Speaker 1: in general. Right, Um, So I think that that that
Speaker 1: is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in
Speaker 1: the seventies. You know, I certainly think you know, people
Speaker 1: were thinking about it. But breaking down this barrier between
Speaker 1: economics uh and uh ecology, I think is a very
Speaker 1: cybernetic impulse and I think one that you know, we
Speaker 1: need to keep working at because, like you know, whenever
Speaker 1: you think about these things as separate domains, were already uh,
Speaker 1: we're already engendering more destruction of the environment. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think cybernetics and also help us in that kind
Speaker 1: of like um on a kind of for left projects,
Speaker 1: like on an aggressive footing of like if we recognize
Speaker 1: that like the capital and its kind of government system,
Speaker 1: is it is cybernetic, like it has its own feedback
Speaker 1: circuits and like saying that the explosive feedback circuit that
Speaker 1: we're on with with ecology, right, Like, how do you
Speaker 1: intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits
Speaker 1: so as to so as to disintegrate the system? Is?
Speaker 1: Um is something like you can you can learn a
Speaker 1: lot from cyberennics to to get lessons on how to
Speaker 1: intervene there. The last thing I want to talk about
Speaker 1: is just what is the society that is non capitalist
Speaker 1: and based off of sort of cybernetic government's principles. What
Speaker 1: does that look like for just a person? Because I
Speaker 1: think you know this, this has been one of the
Speaker 1: big sort of like political challenges of the last you know,
Speaker 1: fifty years. It's just the complete foreclosure of the ability
Speaker 1: to even just sort of imagine assistant that's not this
Speaker 1: mm hmm, yeah, I think it. It means UM In
Speaker 1: the first instance, it means a different orientation to your
Speaker 1: workplace and your community, right, because when you grow up
Speaker 1: in a society where um power is exercise autocratically, it
Speaker 1: has an infantilizing effect on on you as an individual. UM.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, maybe your relationship to work, is
Speaker 1: your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or
Speaker 1: of tantrum throwing, right, because these are these are reactions,
Speaker 1: These are natural reactions to being in an abusive environment. UM.
Speaker 1: But if you are in a system where the work
Speaker 1: of management is not only open to you but expected
Speaker 1: of you, you have a different orientation to that workplace,
Speaker 1: to the community you're in because it's your responsibility. If
Speaker 1: you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose
Speaker 1: your autonomy. And also you're going to have real problems
Speaker 1: that you have to grapple with as an individual. So
Speaker 1: there is a responsibility that comes there. But also like
Speaker 1: that means an opening up of horizons in terms of well,
Speaker 1: things don't always have to be the same, Things don't
Speaker 1: always have to be handed down to you for management
Speaker 1: on high. They can actually change, Like you can see
Speaker 1: the possibilities in front of you, You can plan for
Speaker 1: the future in your context, and you can have that
Speaker 1: meaningful freedom in your life and be you know, a
Speaker 1: a full human being in that sense, right, um, And
Speaker 1: so I think that that's a very core every day
Speaker 1: change that you could see, um in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: sort of your horizons of where you might work or
Speaker 1: what you might do. You know, you could expect that
Speaker 1: there would be more pause abilities for each person to
Speaker 1: be like quote unquote entrepreneurial, right to to have initiative
Speaker 1: in their life and be able to envision and create
Speaker 1: things around them that uh, you know they can't do
Speaker 1: right now because they either are stuck in a job
Speaker 1: that doesn't give them that freedom or they are actually
Speaker 1: not even able to have a job right now where
Speaker 1: they can have a reasonable expectation of survival because their
Speaker 1: workplace is oriented around just making sure the work gets
Speaker 1: done and you know, the consequences be damned. UM. So
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. UM.
Speaker 1: And that sort of freedom of management um extends all
Speaker 1: the way up to uh, you know, working in different
Speaker 1: kinds of capacities or jobs. Like some people in kind
Speaker 1: of a middle middle ranking area in a corporation these
Speaker 1: days might get shuffled around from department to department to
Speaker 1: try to kind of get a well rounded understanding of
Speaker 1: what the corporation is uh and how it functions. But
Speaker 1: you know, we can kind of expect that these roles
Speaker 1: would be more open to everybody because again, you know,
Speaker 1: a system in the v s M is not a person.
Speaker 1: A system is a function, and that function should be
Speaker 1: fulfilled in a way that is as flexible as possible. UM.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot less kind of well, I'm stuck
Speaker 1: in accounting and that's my life now, and that's all
Speaker 1: there that will ever be. Of course, there are limits
Speaker 1: to education, their limits to specialization, all of that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Like, you know, it takes time to learn
Speaker 1: these things, but you could expect some more flexibility there
Speaker 1: without having that terror of oh yeah, you know, in
Speaker 1: the neroliberal era, everybody is expected to have like fifteen
Speaker 1: jobs in the course of their quote unquote career. But
Speaker 1: also each of those jobs is going to be interspersed
Speaker 1: with a period of absolute terror as they live with
Speaker 1: unemployed in a society without a safety net. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: I think that that's that's you know, those are real
Speaker 1: consequences for everybody's life. I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I think like at a very very high level, the
Speaker 1: way Beer puts that is that we are trapped in
Speaker 1: this kind of crazy system that like its control variable
Speaker 1: as profits, like that's the little variable that it's it's
Speaker 1: like doing feedback onto to maintain um. Whereas what we're
Speaker 1: proposing is like that the sort of cybernetic future will
Speaker 1: be a society that's optimizing flourishing Like what what beer Beer?
Speaker 1: The word he used as a u demony, which is
Speaker 1: borrowing from Aristotle, just like flourishing um. And yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of stuff flows out from that, Like
Speaker 1: to imagine a world where because we we all feel it,
Speaker 1: right that like everything around us is kind of like
Speaker 1: micro tuned as like a little feedback loop to keep
Speaker 1: money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating. Just
Speaker 1: imagine a world where that's just not true anymore, and
Speaker 1: the the sort of social infrastructure that you grow up
Speaker 1: in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing
Speaker 1: of life. Yeah. Um, and I I think you know,
Speaker 1: when we we we look at sort of the broader
Speaker 1: patterns of society today, we see all of these hair
Speaker 1: brained schemes that you know, very rich men are embarking
Speaker 1: on and they're they're setting the agenda for society. You know,
Speaker 1: we're that you know, Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that
Speaker 1: the metaver this is the future, and you just have
Speaker 1: to get on board with this, even though anyone can
Speaker 1: see that this idea is patently ridiculous. Um. And in
Speaker 1: a society where that kind of management, that kind of
Speaker 1: money power doesn't exist anymore, Like you don't have to
Speaker 1: live under that kind of future horizon anymore, where it's
Speaker 1: like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up,
Speaker 1: you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them,
Speaker 1: just like they were following the orders of pharaoh back
Speaker 1: in the day. I think, do not be ruled by
Speaker 1: pharaohs is as kinda places and eat to leave off
Speaker 1: unless you tell if anything else do you want to
Speaker 1: get to? Okay, There's there's one little line from Beer's
Speaker 1: book at what it's actually a set of presentation. It's
Speaker 1: called designing Freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me
Speaker 1: up every time I read it, So I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: read that for the listeners. It gives you a sense
Speaker 1: of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off the
Speaker 1: fucking chats with this stuff. Um. At some point he says,
Speaker 1: I'm quoting here, every time we hear that a proposal
Speaker 1: will destroy society, has we know us, we should have
Speaker 1: the courage to say, thank god at last. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: real maniac. Yeah. And and and he had this this
Speaker 1: dictum of if it works, it's out of date. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's like like, yeah, don't be complacent,
Speaker 1: you know, don't be a traditionalist. I think also that
Speaker 1: there's been there's been really horrific consequences of sort of
Speaker 1: the right being the ones to like take the urge
Speaker 1: for creative destruction. Just like you know, what was that
Speaker 1: line there's some I forget some some venture capitalist things
Speaker 1: like move fast and break things, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so when they move fast the things they breaks us.
Speaker 1: But yes, you know, we can move faster and break
Speaker 1: things that are bad. Yeah, definite's to a creative and
Speaker 1: playful kind of motive, being right that like you you
Speaker 1: might be able to work, wake up in the morning
Speaker 1: and think, God, you know, it would be really cool
Speaker 1: if we could have like a like a child care
Speaker 1: nurse ory just like like out in the out in
Speaker 1: the common area between these buildings and stuff, and like
Speaker 1: go to your go to your local like your your
Speaker 1: workers council or whatever, and have a really plausible like
Speaker 1: the way of actually getting that and like collaborating with
Speaker 1: people to make that happen, and then being like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll try it as an experiment for twelve months.
Speaker 1: We'll keep we'll see how it goes. And then there's
Speaker 1: a feedback cycle where it's like, Okay, some aspect of
Speaker 1: this design didn't really work out. We'll we'll go talk
Speaker 1: about it some more, and then it aerate on that
Speaker 1: and that's that's like as it's it's an entrepreneurialism that
Speaker 1: doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now.
Speaker 1: It just means that human beings, living real things, real workers,
Speaker 1: will be able to actually control their environments in this
Speaker 1: the substance of their lives and in a meaningful way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like this, I think you know, back in the
Speaker 1: nineties early odds, sort of before the two thousand eight crisis,
Speaker 1: in the hoary days of your um it's there was
Speaker 1: a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation.
Speaker 1: But what that always meant was we make decisions about
Speaker 1: what's going to change, and you have to adapt, right
Speaker 1: it was it was it was, you know, always this
Speaker 1: arbitrary power for him outside that would just be changing
Speaker 1: the social fabric, and you had to be flexible enough
Speaker 1: to cope with what you were being subjected to. It's
Speaker 1: very different if you know, the planning is being done
Speaker 1: by you for you, and you're moving towards adaptation and
Speaker 1: flexibility out of a sense of that, oh yeah, this
Speaker 1: would be better and I'm going to adapt to be
Speaker 1: in a better state to to work with my environment, uh,
Speaker 1: in a more healthy and a more flourishing way, as
Speaker 1: opposed to just like, oh yeah, you've got to work
Speaker 1: three jobs now, so figure it out right. That's a
Speaker 1: very different kind of flexibility, very different kind of adaptation.
Speaker 1: And you know, those things have sort of become dirty
Speaker 1: words in some ways, but they are really core to
Speaker 1: the way that we all exist as organisms in the
Speaker 1: world and they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm exactly. Yeah, I think okay, we can take
Speaker 1: this as a place to leave off. Yeah, do you
Speaker 1: two have stuff you want to log and I know
Speaker 1: you you want to plug, but plug the things that
Speaker 1: you want people to listen to because they are Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're General Intellecting us um e cou to General Intellecting
Speaker 1: a totness and it's got all the episodes on there
Speaker 1: around Twitter, ask gunice pod um. Yeah, you can find
Speaker 1: us on all the podcast things. Um. We're also part
Speaker 1: of a podcast network called Emancipation and so that's emancipation
Speaker 1: dot Network on the web. UM. And yeah, some really
Speaker 1: excellent shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats
Speaker 1: and um, Mortal Science, from Alpha to Omega, Jumpsy in Utopia.
Speaker 1: They're they're really wonderful shows that are all Um. It's
Speaker 1: it's a variety of different sort of takes on things,
Speaker 1: but like, um, there's a sort of common there's a
Speaker 1: sort of a spiritual common grounds they all have. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: we we all were all interested in thinking systematically. We're
Speaker 1: all interested in emancipation, as the network name says, and
Speaker 1: we're all interested in sort of building something going forward,
Speaker 1: trying to construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting
Speaker 1: caught up in day to day politics or getting caught
Speaker 1: up in uh dum mentality. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's systematic,
Speaker 1: it's critical, but it's also constructive and I think that's
Speaker 1: what we're all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you too both for coming on. Thank you it's
Speaker 1: been wondering, Thanks for having us. Yeah, this has been
Speaker 1: Make it happen here you can find us that happened
Speaker 1: here pod in places. There's also stuff at quals on
Speaker 1: Media that you can also find in those same places
Speaker 1: and possibly also different ones. We have a we have
Speaker 1: a website. Everyone asked me for my sources every single
Speaker 1: week and they get posted there once a month. So yeah,
Speaker 1: go go to coals on media dot com and you
Speaker 1: will find all of the sources so you don't have
Speaker 1: to DM me every week. All Right, Happened Here is
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