Response to What is Cybernetics - The Craft Reader

I guess by now, anyone concerned with technological singularity should be familiar with Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings. Written after What is Cybernetics, which was the original publication in which Wiener introduced his theory of cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings was actually a response, a form of feedback -how convenient- to the backlash his first piece received in the first place.

As briefly discussed in The Craft Reader, when first published, What is Cybernetics was thought to be a master theory for Cold War America. I personally think of this reductive view of Wiener's work as to how people usually perceive the concepts of control and feedback. Maybe not for feedback, but for the word control, one rarely thinks anything resembling to have a positive nature.

But if one actually reads and genuinely tries to understand what Wiener is trying to say is beyond its reducibility. First of all, he tries to define control as nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient. For me, this sounds like nothing but a feedback loop, which all of us pay more attention to, if we wish to create genuine change, which comes from genuine motives.

But I guess we can only discuss it this way because of the fluctuant times we are in right now. I guess post World War II was not the best setting to sit down and talk freely about control mechanisms.

Back to the article: I was very intrigued by how feedback was introduced as the basis of an actual performance of a machine rather than its expected performance.

As clear to many companies and organizations right now, this is no news to human resources or consultation departments as they have been taking inspiration from the way machines work to alter organizational systems under the umbrella term of Agile. Agile way of working was firstly developed amongst software developers to create a product in an incrementally-defined process, for the overall elimination of bullshit type of work (excuse my language). By BS work I merely mean the type of work done for the sake of being done, no motivation, no clear purpose, whatsoever.

So we can only imagine the rejoice amongst companies when they realized that their top-down hierarchies were useless and actually derogatory of the human capital they have been exploiting.

Now they're all celebrating new squad and value-defined team formations in banks and big companies, HOW MAGNIFICENT!

This is actually a very good place to mention the author, who at the beginning of the article talks about how constructive research and invention carries a potential risk of aggrandizing what they accomplish. He says and I quote: Stating new potentials of fact might justify or even urge their exploitation.

I believe, this is exactly what big capital is trying to do. Stealing methodologies from computer science intended merely for optimization or automation to only use them to exploit the human potential in just a polished way. Exploitation wrapped as employee engagement, or core motivational acts, or whatever we might call them.

This might be a distant interpretation of the article, but it is what I think.

Moreover, I believe the article is a good thought experiment for what we think of which makes up a robot. We have such derogatory viewings of machines, sometimes when not "utilized" at maximum capacity, we forget that basically we are machines with jobs that we don't want to do, with the time we waste on insignificant and petty matters that under any circumstance or in any other realm means something.

Wiener understood this, too. 60-years ago, this mathematician cracked the code of the misery of our modern world: "When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood."

Moving on again. Here is my favorite quote from Wiener. Honestly when I first read the book I was more interested in this entropy concept.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness described in the 2nd law of thermodynamics. What Maxwell, Bolzmann and Gibbs meant by this heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethic of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe.

In this, our moral obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order  and system. These enclaves will not remain their indefinitely by any momentum of their own after we have once established them… We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been…

This is no defeatism, it is rather a sense of tragedy in a world in which necessity is represented by an inevitable disappearance of differentiation. The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build an enclave of organization in the face of nature’s overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too.

arbitrary enclaves of order and system... After reading this saying, who would have thought that this book was dictating control and automation? It sounds nothing but like yet another takeaway of ecofeminism. (The connection may seem arbitrary but it would take me too long to articulate it) All I'm saying is, world would be a better place if every mega tech company owner spared some time to read Donna Haraway or any other prominent cyberfeminist.