Cybernetics

From Wikipedia

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” In the 21st century, the term is often used in a rather loose way to imply “control of any system using technology.”

Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed incorporates a closed signaling loop—originally referred to as a “circular causal” relationship—that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in the system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change. Cybernetics is relevant to, for example, mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems.

I first encountered this term while reading Nick Land. Land has some incredibly complex ideas, but another philosopher talks about Cybernetics (although he doesn’t use the term) – Marshall McLuhan.

So basically, the context is that technologies, be them literal robot machines, or structures of economics, in particular capitalism in the form of neoliberalism, becomes so complex that we as humans, begin to merge and be altered by these structures, a kind of dissolution into the means of production.

McLuhan talks about how ‘we create shape our tools and our tools shape us in return’, what he calls ‘media’, or ‘mediums’ are the technologies of communication (in his time it was TV and radio and satellites being launched into space) bring us into a reality where the Earth is a closed system, a form of enclosure by the medium. He perceives the TV and radio as being an extension of the central nervous system and so we can apply the current internet hyperspace super highway of information as an evolved form of this extension. It’s a kind of subjective divorce, we are fundamentally narcissistic and send ourselves out into the world through various amputations to relieve stress and pain. For example, we can only carry so many stones until our feet hurt, so we invented the wheel, which then evolved into the car and massive transport systems we see today that have changed our world so drastically and profoundly.