learning-gardens / cybernetics-club

:arrows_clockwise: Cybernetics Reading Club

Cybernetics Club is a learning group organized around the legacy of cybernetics and all the fields it has touched.

"Cybernetics" is difficult to define: an ambitious interdisciplinary science that sought to connect fields as disparate as astrophysics, biology, sociology, computer science, and more by considering systems, and the control and communication that run within them, as the objects of study. As a practice, cybernetics is a victim of its own success -- it is renown has faded, but its ideas have dissolved into the disciplines it aimed to unite, or seeded entirely new ones: information science, systems biology, and more.

In a world that feels intractable in scale and complexity, tensions of communication and control abound. Maybe by returning to the ideas of cybernetics can we find some help in making sense of the present.

The ethos of Cybernetics Club is: "I'm interested in this topic, let's learn and explore it together". Anyone can lead a session; there's no need to be an expert. The only requirement is some connection to cybernetics, or approaching the topic in a cybernetic way. Fortunately, cybernetics is such a broad discipline that its framing is applicable to many, many different subjects.

We meet roughly every other month in New York. Remote participants are more than welcome.

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Cybernetics Club on the web:

• GitHub - Past session notes and readings
• Slack - Find us in #cybernetics in Learning Garden's Slack
• Learning Gardens - Our parent meta-organization of learning groups
• Google Group - List for official announcements (new sessions)
• Are.na - Where readings for future sessions are organized

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Past sessions:

1. What is Cybernetics? I
2. What is Cybernetics? II
3. Complex & Wicked Problems
4. Networks & Scale
5. Games (Theory) & Behavioral Economics (w/ Karla Hoff)
6. Design & Cybernetics (w/ Michael Yap)
7. Cybernetics & Me (w/ Dan Taeyoung & Max Fowler)
8. The Alt-Right (w/ Édouard Urcades)
9. Organizational Cybernetics
10. Affect Theory & Shame (w/ Rachel Rosenfelt)
11. Cybernetics & Architecture (Intro) (w/ Dan Taeyoung, David Hecht, and Austin Smith)
12. Cyber-Systemic Theories of Change (w/ Howard Silverman)

Have an idea for a future session? Add it here!

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Thanks to Éd for the logo!

cybernetics-club's Issues

[S3 Discussion] Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning

Rittel & Webber, defines "wicked" problems

http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf

[S3 Discussion] Anekāntavāda

the "observer effect" of wicked problems is a very old concept

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada

[S3 Discussion] Social Traps

John Platt, applies cybernetic concepts (e.g. feedback) to wicked problems

http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Negotiation_and_Conflict_Management/Platt_1973_Social_traps.pdf

[Group Branching] Instantiate a Pittsburgh CC?

In the wake of @irealva leaving NYC, I think it'd be great to figure out how we might all be able to sync learnings across time and space!

@frnsys mentioned a while back that we could simply create a branch and instantiate a new naming scheme to accomodate for group branches, or other reconfigurations like a Cybernetics Club made entirely in spanish or chinese.

If anyone has any cool ideas re: this, all help is welcome! Whatever we decide to use here may be of use for other Learning Gardens groups, as we've recently come up against the idea of group continuity, and whether or not it should be guided or let free.

Cybernetics and the Alt-Right??? Ideas

[S3 Discussion] The Cybersyn Revolution

an ostensibly more democratic/participative approach to complex problems

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/

time/location?

Hi all! @frnsys invited me to this reading group - this looks really interesting.
Question - I do see dates, but what's the time/location for the upcoming meeting?

6A: Cybernetics And Me

When I mentioned "doing cybernetics on myself"

I was thinking of times where I change my environment to try to influence my behavior - instead of viewing my self as a static entity, considering my self and my environment interacting as a system

some examples:

• I am pretty into "Getting Things Done" methodology (http://gettingthingsdone.com/), I don't follow it exactly but I use notes in certain ways where I view "me, my notes, and my system for taking and retrieving notes" as a system
• I've done a variety of experiments with blocking access to my phone in different ways
  --- tried having a friend child-block my phone and only they knew the pin
  --- I use a "redirector" chrome extension, which redirects me from facebook newsfeed to the events page, I've also used killnewsfeed in the past
  --- when I sit down to work, I hide my phone out of sight, often underneath a pillow

Maybe we could talk about how people use systems in their lives? Hmm what readings could be relevant

Also definitely some gray area on what is a system (could I analyze all my relations with my environment as a system?)... but my initial feeling is that some types of logic I employ is more at a systems level (finding a gym buddy so that I go to the gym more) and some is more one-off (deciding to read a book because the cover looks interesting)

not sure if there are also other directions to take "Cybernetics And Me" but this is the angle I was thinking about

Suggestions for Session 3

Hey everyone, wanted to start listing some suggestions for readings. Please add yours below and we can filter it down. Or if anyone has a theme they'd like to lead with, feel free!

At one point we we're talking (@frnsys?) about the transition from continuous (classical physics) to discrete (quantum) and it reminded me of another good collection, particularly the essay "the genesis of the quantum theory in the period 1913-1927 " that talks about a paradigm shift (quantum leap :) ) in thinking that was necessary to go from continous to discrete models. It's more "new media" focused but some of the foundational stuff in the beginning is really good and relevant.

The book + the TOC:
Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation

Table of Contents:

• As we may think / Vannevar Bush
• The Age of the world picture / Martin Heidegger
• Constituents of a theory of the media / Hans Magnus Enzensberger
• Visualization lost and regained: the genesis of the quantum theory in the period 1913-1927 / Arthur I. Miller
• Machines of the visible / Jean-Louis Comolli --

Representation: Photography and after.

• The Work of culture in the age of cybernetic systems / Bill Nichols
• From the photograph to postphotographic practice: toward a postoptical ecology of the eye / David Tomas
• The Virtual unconscious in postphotography Kevin Robins
• Photography at the interface / Roy Ascott
• The Double helix / Raymond Bellour
• Video, networks, and architecture: some physical realities of electronic space / Kathy Rae Huffman
• Electronic media: the rebirth of perspective and the fragmentation of illusion / Kim H. Veltman
• The Automation of sight: from photography to computer vision / Lev Manovich

Theory.

• Digital apparition / Vilém Flusser --
• Between nodes and data packets / Florian Rötzer --
• Virtual bodies and flickering signifiers / N. Katherine Hayles --
• Thinking the border and the boundary / Siegfried Zielinksi --
• From virtual reality to the virtualization of reality / Slavoj Žižek --
• From kaleidoscomaniac to cybernerd: notes toward an archeology of media / Erkki Huhtamo --
• Metavirtue and subreality / David Blair --
• Cyberwar, God and television: interview with Paul Virilio / Louise K. Wilson
• There is no software / Friedrich Kittler
• The World as interface: toward the construction of context-controlled event-worlds.

Media/Identity/Culture.

• Constructions and reconstructions of the self in virtual reality / Sherry Turkle
• The Art of cyberspace / Pierre Levy --
• The Information war / Hakim Bey --
• Common law for the electronic frontier / Anne W. Branscomb
• Contemporary nihilism: on innocence organized / Adilkno/Geert Lovink --
• The Coming of age of the flesh machine / Critical Art Ensemble.

[S3 Discussion] Navigating Neoliberalism

Nick Srnicek, lays out the "crisis of representation" problem

https://medium.com/after-us/navigating-neoliberalism-f9fae2405488#.kd4aliz0r

[S5 Planning] Games

dump all your cybernetics-y games here!

[S3 Discussion] Seeing Like a State, chapter 1

James C. Scott, analysis of the authoritarian approach to complex problems

https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf

[S3 Discussion] Fuller's "World Game"

putting complex systems modeling into the hands of more people

https://bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/world-game

Future session ideas

Dumping some possibilities for future sessions...if we get enough maybe we can be deliberate about ordering them?

• Chaos theory/complexity science
• Organizational cybernetics/design
• Economics + cybernetics (e.g. steady state economics, Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science)

Films/videos

Making an issue to keep track of films/videos we've brought up in conversations. Feel free to reply with more!

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis (recommended by @frnsys)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3