Many texts have been written on cybernetics. For our purposes I only wish to state that in its original conception, cybernetics was conceived as a practice of understanding feedback for the sake of control. More formally, cybernetics conceives «biological, physical, and social behaviours as something integrally programmed and re-programmable. It conceives of each individual behaviour as something "piloted," by the need for the survival of a "system" that makes it possible, and which it must contribute to. It is a way of thinking about balance, born in a crisis context».[1] The goal is then to reach a state of metastasis, where probability is obsolete. Developed by Wiener for military purposes, the applications became truly endless. The rationale of the method has spread so successfully we no longer have a need for the discipline itself as its will is carried out by the underlings. Quantitative finance, optimal control theory, and biocybernetics are the first examples that come to mind.
The following essay is not an attempt at tracking the history of this practice, rather to discuss what the miming cybernetician's vision of the future looks like. For them — of us and for us.
For the model to be built, we must have data. Representations of ourselves, of that which has built and been built by us. Exhaustive analytics are all but facultative. In this series we previously introduced Dataism(Organs of a Digitized Society, Osborne). Those who extract and manipulate abstractions of the Truth are to blame. Well — blame… maybe they are to correct? Its pervasiveness makes this sound innocuous. One may retort: "The data is there, why not take advantage of it"? To them I say: maybe we ought to question why the machinery for such data extraction exists in the first place! Our favourite overlords may try to convince us that this just so happens to be a convenient coincidence — a happy accident — a byproduct. I would be more inclined to believe them if I did not see the dollar signs in their eyes or the fangs in their smiles.
The difference between the general notions of improvement and Optimization is essential. Let us avoid overindulging in the linguistic gymnastics at play. Here, the notion of improvement is one which we may loosely define as benefiting the interest of the people as they really are. Optimization serves only the neutered version — the Yōu[1] — and the people who envision us as such. The predictable consumer; the perfect Amazon client. For instance, when people discuss improving the medical system by developing theoretically perfect machines, virtually incapable of botching a surgery, the patient's body is not reduced to an imaginary understanding of what it needs. This can never be analogous to the optimization of, say, an actuarial algorithm assessing financial risk that understands you as a time series.
Let us take the cybernetician's vision to the end of its own logic — the aforementioned metastasis. People act as agents of perfect rationality, the beautifully termed homo economicus. Of course, our rationality's bible will only have further been sculpted by the opaque hand of the accumulators. A sculpture so precise that Yōu become. Being is binary and choice is no longer even an illusion. Oh the angst! Their perfect you is entirely reducible to their tools for measuring you. That is the dream — the best citizens in the smartest city. True Nirvana may be reached when we are no longer able to distinguish beings for the qualities used to assess contributions to the metastasis' order.
In the late 1990s, Warwick's CCRU — freshly galvanized by the efforts of the two superstars of French philosophy some decades earlier[D&G] — created the fertile ground for the ideas of Fisher, Land, and Plant, who actually seems to have grown from said soil. Many of you may know Land as one amongst other intellectual titans such as my favourite peptidian, Curtis Yarvin. I won't even honour their self-professed ideology by its chosen name. For our sake, I'd rather refer to their ideology as right accelerationism.
Loosely, I would describe the CCRU and those affiliated as focusing their efforts on studying — and showcasing — the way revolutionary and youth culture, after the period of unrest in the 1960s and '70s, was "melted"[Land, 1994] into the economy. From Land's 1994 text Meltdown:
"The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws out competitive dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with technoscientific soft engineering positive nonlinearity rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans."
— Nick Land, Meltdown, 1994
I chose this passage because I like it, but also because texts like these were signs of eventual discord within the CCRU. Incorporate a bit of religious nihilism and you have a recipe for the thinker you may know today.
The CCRU deemed cybernetics the principle mechanism through which to understand and incite change — likely in the aftermath of '68. By drawing on the notion of runaway processes attributable to D&G and developing an appreciation for the occult and figures such as H.P. Lovecraft, they sought to create cultural modes of recursion destined to implode when implanted in a faulty system. D&G's lines of flight were a more open-ended, esoteric formulation of this.
The fourth part of Tiqqun's text draws upon Wittgenstein and Keynes to argue that it is precisely the trust we place in institutions, through the language we have adopted, that has allowed for the disproportionate growth rate of intangible labour to fit the current capitalist cybernetic project. The perceived value of accumulated information is worth immeasurably more than your browser history. Hence, by necessity, we have entered a paradigm of insecurity contrary to its predecessors, which functioned through scarcity.[Tiqqun]
"The control and communications sectors develop because commodity valorization needs to have a looping circulation of information parallel to the actual circulation of commodities, the production of a collective belief that objectivizes itself in values."
— Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis
By circularly validating our need for more methods of control which require machinery, data, and energy — implementation introduces more variability. Seek to control it and in doing so we enter a new iteration. Each time more demanding.
Mathematics and formal logic have played a part in this story. Bertrand Russell was among the first sceptics[Russell, 1902] and later Kurt Gödel mathematically proved the incompleteness of any formal system.[Gödel, 1931] We know that a closed system cannot express the truth about itself — it cannot be logically total. This had the most profound epistemological implications. Consider the mission of disciplines such as psychology or physics. Conversely, God's power is the ineffable. But the church failed when the first brick was laid, and the best Marxist is the one who does not leave their house. This is not to dismiss the value of narratives in our lives as "containers of negativity" — an essential metabolic function. In fact, acceptance of grand narratives is the ultimate resignation to logical boundedness.
Capitalism is obviously not a complete system. It cannot prove the fundamental axioms upon which it relies, such as preference or commensurability. Notably, as Tiqqun expresses in the Cybernetic Hypothesis, Keynes was able to show that after the 1929 crisis, capitalism could be stuck in disequilibrium.[Tiqqun] When Hayekian technocrats present market dynamics as neutral vehicles for the expression of pre-existing truth, they wilfully ignore the fact that these truths are produced by the very mechanics they claim to be scientifically describing.
As previously discussed, cybernetics as the study of loops and deviation posits an inherent implementation of failure. Drawing on Byung-chul Han's "achievement society" from The Burnout Society — characterised by its ever-compromising ability to "Can," a submission to bureaucratic will, or in other words the refusal to negate — although it may seem contradictory to the cybernetician's study, we will attempt to convince you otherwise. Formally, we can view this new neoliberal imperative as one which establishes the structures through which negativity is captured. Productive, or functional failure, ascribed to market logic is cyclically implemented while the potentially disruptive is discarded. But the most proficient cybernetician is a hoarder.
Cultural depreciation is a cyclical consequence of a system that can only ever reproduce itself through its existing categories. The cyberneticians are all too aware of this. It is of no coincidence that most of the efforts in the arts and culture industry today work towards the extension of these categories, refining capture mechanics. Yet, incessant expansion of the state of balance renders it more porous. Implementing a wider variety of stabilizing artefacts necessarily provokes higher degrees of contradiction. The optics become terrible!
The ubiquity of critique afforded to all by identity apparatus from the eighties onwards flattened the value of good criticism. Furthermore, the quality of criticism is too often confused for the qualities associated with those publicizing their opinion. To omit discussion of the object in question relative to its culturally dominant context results in vacuous talk.
To conclude, I'd like to say that I find there is solace to be had in the early nihilism of Land's work. The kind which evokes a dehumanization of the historical process. Whatever we are becoming is fundamentally arbitrary. The reader may feel a sense of dread after our discussion on the engineering of our social moments. I wish to end this piece simply by stating that there is no Singularity. There will never be. We may see a deceleration in our abilities to relate to the thing you and I cherish, but never can it be eradicated. Zero is inhuman. The Cybernetic project is still a human project. And thus will fail.