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!
Where's a good place to learn more about Cybersyn?
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
Awesome, thank you!