Has the left finally rediscovered Cybernetics? Has my time finally come?
Is anyone actually making a new cybersyn? It would be interesting to have one that’s designed to better organize mutual aid rather than to run an entire economy.
Not that I know of (which isn't much to be fair). Though there are some good arguments out there that amazon/walmart are essentially modern day cybersyns in their internal functioning. While I disagree to some extend, that's what the "liberate ..."-part in my title was hinting at.
There are some open-source business management software projects. Maybe that would be a good place to start? I wonder if anyone here would be interested in turning any of those into a new cybersyn.
Repurposing business software towards organizing mutual aid sounds like a cool project, actually. I'm not sure it has much to do with Cybersyn at that point, but that's actually irrelevant. I'm not much of a programmer so I'm not sure how much I could really contribute though
The grocery chain I work for is basically run by Cybersyn, I made the realization a few months ago while I was pumping inventory numbers into the system, just stood there in aisle slacked jawed going "bro wtf this is literally just Allendes Chile 2.0"
Cybernetic Marxism is a fascinating subject. I'm not even all that tech-savvy but I've enjoyed learning more about it. For comrades who want to learn more, I strongly recommend Towards a New Socialism by Cockshott and Cottrell. You can read it for free here.
There's also the podcast "The General Intellect Unit" run by two Cybernetic Marxists that covers this topic, and I'm pretty sure they have at least one episode about Cybersyn. Though note they are fairly critical of how the Soviet Union implemented central planning, which can be a bit of a shock at first. They're also open about the challenges we'll face in implementing socialism but frankly I think these are questions we shouldn't avoid.
I think Cosmonaut (which also has a podcast) is fairly into cybernetics as well.
I literally thought “cybernetics” was L Ron Hubbard shit (lol oops) and was super confused at first, but I am definitely interested in learning more . Thanks for the links
How in-depth do you want to go? As an intro, I'd recommend reading/listening to Designing Freedom. Beer wrote it as a lecture series soon after the coup in Chile, and while he does try to 'hide is power level' a bit, you can tell he's been radicalized by witnessing that shit go down. If you want a more detailed analysis there's a pretty good book called The Cybernetic Brain, sketches of another future. It's all about early Cybernetics and goes a fair bit into Cybersyn specifically.
Also there's General Intellect Unit, someone already mentioned. Good podcast for all things Cybernetics.
The Cybernetic Brain has some wild stuff in there, but overall it feels kinda fluffy in the depths it dives to. I think it's great to get the intellectual history with folks like Walter and Ashby, but overall you could cut out a lot of their psychotherapy-oriented work from the writing.
With the other psychologists discussed, you could keep their stuff. I think it ends up getting to useful places at times, and it's profoundly moving stuff.
It's really the philosophical explanations of non-modern ontologies and cybernetic thinking, the Beer chapter an to a lesser extent the chapter on Pask that should interest us as leftists. That said, for leftists looking to organize and economy or run an org, Beer's where it's at.
Thanks! Going to be adding this to my upcoming reading list, I think this might end up being incorporated into a project I'm working on. Might hit you up once I'm done!
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile Eden Medina
Yes (mostly). He does a really good job at identifying why organizations of any origin (governmental, private) can become oppressive, inflexible, and morph from existing to meet specific goals to existing to perpetuate their own existence. More broadly, he has great theories on how to look at, analyze, and help change organizations to be more egalitarian and effective at existing in an environment that is too complex for them to understand wholly and therefore require high-variety responses grounded in more horizontal organization between constituent parts, bottom-up information gathering style and effective iterative decisionmaking
Not gonna lie, I thought this was that one Naboo governor dude from Phantom Menace who is always calling the queen's ship
