A framework for categorising c/cyb in practice

Common Cybernetics (C/cyb) is a transdisciplinary field of knowledge and practice directed towards the creation of new forms of self-organisation, while reinterpreting the history of cybernetics from the perspective of commonality. There is a huge range of resources conducive to commoning cybernetics, but the categorisation of c/cyb is slippery and difficult to pinpoint. It emerges in myriad forms, which might be entirely conceptual, physical, or interpersonal, or, more often than not, a messy blend of the above. The question of how c/cyb can be categorised is elusive, and I will here suggest a framework for categorising the varied manifestations it can take.

First, a few notes on the rough typology suggested here:

• Examples of c/cyb may not be exclusively used in the service of c/cyb. A strength of cybernetics (and many of the models that emerge from it) is its malleability to adapt to different interpretive frameworks. Cybernetics is ethically ungrounded, and so can emerge in forms that favour different worldviews, or no worldview in particular. A model might be designed with managerial hierarchies in mind, yet remain vulnerable to reappropriation by a common politics.

• Second, c/cyb can take an affirmative or oppositional form. This is to say, it can reinforce synergism or resist machinism. We can only birth a new world from the ashes of the old, and there is a dimension of c/cyb concerned with turning machinism to ash. Dismantling machines of oppression, whether rhetorically or physically, is as necessary to build a more habitable world as erecting new forms of habitation themselves. Oppositional c/cyb can be exemplified by practices of counter-logistics, collectives like Tiqqun, the critical art of Suzanne Treister or researchers like Stephen Harwood, and is fundamental to our common struggle. Nevertheless, this article will focus on affirmative c/cyb, since critique is in greater supply than ideas worthy of acclaim.

• Finally, although there will be a fair few links here as always, some of the examples mentioned here were discussed and linked in a post on c/cyb resources, along with reading lists and other opportunities for further exploration.

  

Outlining a typology

There are at least three categories of c/cyb: [1] models of understanding, [2] models of activity, and [3] machines. Many cybernetic artefacts overlap between these categories and their sub-categories, and this rough typology can be imagined as a Venn diagram with each artefact taking a position upon it, based on its composition relative to the typology.

Of the three categories of c/cyb, each can be further sub-categorised. Models of understanding come in two forms: [1] models of design and [2] models of provocation. Models of activity take both the form of [1] tools of collaboration and [2] groups of collaboration. Machines take three forms: [1] manifested machines, which exist and can operate in the world, [2] pre-emptive machines, which describe manifest machines which are yet to become manifest, and [3] hypothetical machines, which are machines (either manifest or pre-emptive) that demonstrate a hypothesis about how a particular complex system works.

[1] Models of understanding

Models of understanding are made up of conceptual structures which bring into being a particular way of understanding and interpreting the world, and ways of distributing and commoning those ideas. Models of understanding are concerned with information.

Models of design

Models of design are what is most frequently understood by cybernetics. They are ideas, concepts, models, and structures which elucidate systems and enable their design, diagnosis or development. C/cyb concerns the use of these cybernetic designs towards common ends, applying models of design to communal, radical and leftist forms of organisation to improve or reimagine their organisational capabilities. Examples of models of design include the viable systems model (VSM), stigmergy, dis/agreement, redundancy of potential command (RoPC), and various other models for understanding complex systems and how to better conceive of them.

Models of provocation

Models of provocation are forms of media used to popularise common uses of cybernetics. They operate in the discursive context and include publications, media outlets, art projects, university courses, propaganda, podcasts, and the rest. Examples are varied and widespread. Publications such as the widely discussed Whole Earth Catalogue were a path breaker in this area, though lesser-known publications like the Whole University Catalogue are equally informative (the latter used to be available to view online, but since appears to have been taken down). Podcasts like Acid Horizon and the General Intellect Podcast, and art projects like those by Suzanne Triester, articulated the darker history of cybernetics in a uniquely clear and visually powerful way. Writers like Tiqqun popularised anti-machinist politics in powerful prose, while experimental art projects of the Soviet Union produced propaganda for a world that never came. Even my little blog here can be considered a model of provocation.

[2] Models of activity

Models of activity refer to groups that develop and practice manifestations of c/cyb, as well as the tools and techniques used by those groups to organise themselves. Models of activity are concerned with the social realm, and have to do with c/cyb communities and their means of self-organising.

Tools of collaboration

Tools of collaboration refer to whatever can be used to aid in the organisation of people towards common cybernetic ends. There is some crossover with models of design and manifest machines here, as tools can be physical or conceptual. Organisational models such as sociocracy are popular cybernetic organisational models, and decision-making processes like Team Syntegrity (though often impractical), provide frameworks for structuring organisations and their processes upon cybernetic principles. There are various contemporary apps, platforms and other software-based technologies directed towards assisting in decision-making and organisation. There are even tools directed towards less explicitly organisational ends, such as Eno’s Oblique Strategies, which are a set of tools directed towards the injection of novelty into the production of works of art.

Groups of collaboration

Groups of collaboration refer to communities and organisations that further the interests of c/cyb, which is to say, the self-organisational capacity of the common. These groups can include things like media projects, like the GIU podcast, VSRU, and so on. They might be communities of practice, like the School for Designing a Society, the Complex Anarchism conference, Tiqqun or the CCRU, the latter of which hold an ambivalent and unclear position regarding its compatibility with c/cyb. Such organisations are essential for the continued vitality of c/cyb, for its growth and development as a school of thought and action.

[3] Machines

C/cyb machines refer to the technologies and devices directed towards the furthering of c/cyb, whether actual, proposed or demonstrative of cybernetic hypotheses. Machines are the broadest category of c/cyb, and can range from the blueprints of proposed machines as well as their actual production. Machines are concerned with the technological and machinic realm, and have to do with technologies and machines which contribute to the emergence of new forms of self-organisation, either through means of addition or subtraction.

Manifest machines

Manifest machines are existent machines, actual pieces of technology, which contribute in one sense or another to the c/cyb project. They come in two basic types: tech for the common, and subversion through technology. The first is constructive, the second destructive. Both are equally essential to the c/cyb project. Tech for the commons include pieces of technology which can be engineered and directed towards common ends. There is potential in, for example, AI, blockchain and DAO technologies, and so on, to facilitate the creation of new worlds, particularly new post-capitalist economic arrangements such as gift economies. However, these positive potentials are by no means the norm, and if they are to arrive, they must first swim against the tide of profiteering, corruption and hype which characterise these technologies more broadly. Subversion through technology takes this tide of machinic technology as its target. It is centred on the disruption, undermining, subversion and destruction of technological systems which sustain and accelerate the inhospitability of our hyper-capitalist world, by technological means. This might include the sabotage of infrastructure, hacking and attacking hostile technologies of the state and capital, or the infiltration and doxxing of fascist groups, as examples.

Pre-emptive machines

Pre-emptive machines are imagined, hypothetical technologies which have either not yet been put into practice or were actively undermined during their attempted implementation. These proposed technologies might be entirely practical technologies which serve a specific purpose, or they might play more of a utopian, provocative role, hypothesising a future to inspire or direct. Proposals such as Glushkov’s cybernetic-communist economy, parecon, and Apolito’s anarchist proposal for self-organised economics at scale, each propose ways of reimagining economics, whether they are steps on a path to a better world or sketching that world itself. Less practical, but more beautiful and equally inspirational, are Paolo Soleri’s mindbending utopian sketches. Perhaps the greatest example of a pre-emptive machine was Beer’s Cybersyn project in Chile. Had the project not been thwarted by a fascist coup so early in its development, we might have quite different conceptions of the economic and political options available to us today. A similarly different historical pathway can be seen in the history of cybernetics in communist Russia, with Bogdanov proposing a quite different path to communism, as well as Glushkov proposing a system comparable to what Beer would later attempt in Chile.

Hypothetical machines

Finally, there are hypothetical machines, perhaps the most modest and unassuming of the typology of machines discussed here. Hypothetical machines are designed to demonstrate a particular cybernetic hypothesis (and are therefore closely related to models of understanding). Their function is merely to demonstrate an understanding of the world through the production of a model of that hypothesis. Hypothetical machines are as old as cybernetics itself, and include formative cybernetic artefacts like Ashby’s homeostat, Grey’s touroises, or Beer’s pond brain. Contemporary examples include any number of simulations which model worlds or the multiplicity of systems within them. They exemplify a particular cybernetic hypothesis not through its logical argumentation, but through its production and demonstration in practice. Hypothetical machines are closely associated with what Pickering calls performative ontology.

Breaking typology

Having read this brief typology, it should be clear that many, if not most, of the examples mentioned could fit into more than one subcategory of this framework. This is indicative of both c/cyb’s complexity and diversity. The discursive, multi-faceted character of cybernetics makes its categorisation, on the one hand, challenging, and on the other, a challenge. Proposing a typology of c/cyb should not serve as a cage in which to constrain common practice, but a provocation which encourages its overcoming by exceeding its boundaries. These categories of cybernetic practice should be understood not as a framework to hold c/cyb within, but a threshold to be surpassed, or a platform from which to jump into unforeseen territory.

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(My apologies for such a long break between uploads. Sometimes things get in the way. I have a few other posts lined up, so there will be at least two more uploads coming in the next few weeks.)