It Could Happen Here - The Lost History of Cybernetics

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

June and Kyle from the General intellect Unit podcast join Mia to explain what cybernetics is, its history in the Chilean revolution, and how we can use it to build a better socialist world.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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that I do a real introduction every time instead of like randomly yelling something. So yeah, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am trying to make my job function as it should and not professionalize it. And this is a podcast about things that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are good and how, in fact, there can be a society beyond this one.

And to talk about some of the shades of what that could look like, I have with me the co-host of the General Intellect Unit, Kyle and June, which is a podcast on the Emancipation Network that is, this is the tagline, the podcast of the cybernetic Marxists. I am very excited. Yeah, it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, I guess, okay, we should start at the very, very beginning, because I don't think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics?

Right. know any of this uh what is cybernetics right um so cybernetics uh is i guess a term that comes from uh what is it the kybernetis right uh steering uh the idea of steering a boat um So using your oar to navigate the waters. And so essentially it is a science of control. And that sounds really scary. between the steersperson, the oar, the boat, their body, and the water around them. And getting all of those things in sync in such a way that the steersperson is going where they want to go, the boat doesn't capsize, and they don't lose the oar um and so that's what control means it's a kind of balancing a kind of uh connection between the organism and the environment in such a way that it can survive and thrive yeah and that's what cybernetics is focused on

yeah the thing i love about the um the steersman uh metaphor is that like it's all about um it's controlling the sense of regulation but also like very importantly in cybernetics it's almost always self-regulation um because like the one of the kind principles... Again, because the term usually calls to mind this Terminator, cyber-gothic kind of domination, that's actually not what the field is about at all. Because one of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given system, the only thing that can really control it is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems. So that like, the kind of like top-down external domination of an organism that we all fear is kind of like, actually, if you look at the cybernetics literature, that's not actually

really possible because the external controller would never have enough complexity to match what the organism is capable of. And, you know, organisms are self-regulating systems. The steersman with his boat is a self-regulating system that, like, regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its course that's directed towards its goal. So that's why it's so important. That's why we think it's so important for the left's why we think it's so important for the left and like people who are concerned with these like you know visions of

politics of autonomy and liberation they really need to look at this stuff because it turns out there kind of is a science of like autonomous self-guiding organic systems you know so yeah no Terminator here yes yeah I mean you know when you see

uh scary videos of militarized robots and they are learning to you know jump and fire weapons and all that kind of stuff there certainly is cybernetics involved there but that is that kind of stuff. There certainly is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind of domain application of cybernetics rather than defining what cybernetics is. It's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is what cybernetics is. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably worth emphasizing, right?

That like cybernetics in some ways is kind of, like, out of fashion these days. Like, it kind of evolved into systems thinking and, like, I guess a lot of its lessons got kind of absorbed in general. But we find there's great value in going back to the kind of originators and, like, focusing on that field. kind of originators and like focusing on that field um it's like we on the show we got into the cybernetics angle by reading uh andrew pickering and his book the cybernetic brain in which um he kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split it into two like there's american cybernetics like which had that kind of like um dour kind of military domination sort of flavor to it that like it's kind of an earned reputation there but Pickering was more concerned with like British cybernetics um it's like a lot of British thinkers that and it had a very different flavor there where it was more open-ended it was kind of

had more of a focus on kind of liberation and like um politics and stuff in fact some of those like Gray Walter was um like explicitly an anarchist like wrote in anarchist um like journals and stuff like that um and for him like those two things went hand in glove right like that like um liberatory politics as like um a politics of like human flourishing like as human human beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts and of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing to him that was just hand in glove with cybernetics there was no real distinction there it was just like yeah these these two things fit each other perfectly um which you lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff you know um it's like there's plenty i don't know

who am i thinking of here like um uh like the talib that guy with the like black swans sort of stuff. Like he's big into systems stuff, but like isn't so much into the liberatory politics, I guess. You know, a lot of that angle is kind of lost. Yeah, and I think this is sort of a product of, I guess, the broader ideological course that's going on while Cybernetics comes in and out of fashion. I think we should

go back a bit to the beginning to sort of situate this because i know like when i like before i like ever did any reading on cybernetics like my immediate assumption was that it was it was you know this this is a thing that was entirely just based off of computers right that this is like this is and that's not really true from my understanding of it so can we go back and sort of like talk about where this came from a bit and how it sort of moves over this is over sort of the 60s 70s and yeah go from there yeah yeah i i think you can kind of trace it back in its sort of European origins to, you could probably say Hegel, you know, his move towards like understanding being not just a substance, but a subject, I think is a move towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole system as a holistic entity as opposed to just an individual interacting with an external environment.

individual interacting with an external environment. And you can also see this come up in, say, there was a ecologist, Uexküll, a German ecologist in the early 20th century, I believe, who was trying to understand the organism in its environment. The sort of precursors to ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics. And then when you get to the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or as a discipline in in the mid 20th century it's not exactly about computing it's um it's more about uh balancing a machine with its environment so um the sort of prototypical machine of this kind was the servo mechanism, which was used to help guide an anti-aircraft gun in shooting down enemy aircraft. So making sure it tracks properly with the target and doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking what

a very fast moving target i mean you can even think back to like the you know in world war one when they discovered hey we could actually like synchronize the timing of the propeller and the timing of our gun on the front of this plane so that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and we're shooting our own planes down with our guns when we're dogfighting. Right. Like it's yeah, that's a systems understanding right so that's um that's that's norbert wiener right and working on the um automated gun turret stuff and that's he coins the term cybernetics to like um give a name to the thing he was starting to discover and it's like he was kind of pulling together a bunch of threads there and like one of those kind of important insights is that like um like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and accuracy without like basically making the

gun turret an agent of its own but like and the like the turret and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would um achieve their goal but like there was there was there's something strange and spooky about that i think that um this sort of feedback mechanism inside the turret gives it a sort of weird agency that combines with the agency of the gunner to like guide the whole system towards a goal um yes and what it ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space where the distinction between human and machine starts to become ambiguous because they both start to possess they're both understood to have a kind of agency they're both understood to have kinds of like functions and then you kind of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea and you can start to bring in all of these different ideas from like anthropology

from physiology from uh math from ecology uh and they all start to interact in this domain of cybernetics. And the core idea that kind of ties everything together is that of feedback. So Wiener realizes that what he needs to achieve this goal is a feedback mechanism that is error-correcting feedback. Like if the gun is slightly too far to the left, it corrects itself rightwards and so on. But as you said, that connects across all sorts of things, right?

Like you start to realize that's present everywhere, in ecology, in neurology, in... Like learning is based on feedback, you know? So it's really funny to read Norbert Wiener in the 50s, basically describing what would become machine learning. And he's just like, he just off the cuff is like, yeah, if a machine could like, or if any system could just like analyze its own performance and then feed back onto itself, it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to. And he's like, yeah, it turns out he was completely correct and that's that's where it kind of like gets into like you get later thinkers like ross ashby who was um and like other folks like in and around psychiatry we were like really interested in how the brain worked

and that's that's the other thing that feeds into like cybernetics is like um it's it's why pickering called his book the cybernetic Brain, because, like, the brain and, like, nervous systems show up so much in that field, right, that, like, the brain being a kind of learning and adaptation machine attached to the body or whatever, and, like, yeah, I don't know, there's something fascinating there, and, like, the, I mean, there's something kind of possibly troubling in kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever, but there's also something very compelling in just recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels, right?

That you get similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes. And then it turns out you can kind of do a science on these things and come up with even better explanatory frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes. And so it is, in a sense, about computers. But the computers are really just understood to act like a kind of brain. understood to act like a kind of brain and that's connected to a nervous system which is connected to uh you know like actuators of some kind some kinds of like machines that actually do things in the world so it's not about like say computer science specifically it's more about like well computers are a useful way to do cybernetic design because they can act as a control system and they're flexible it's not that

this is about computers really yeah yeah absolutely and like that you brought you brought up something very important there that like um in all cases cases of cybernetics, the systems that we're considering are not isolated, like brain-in-a-box kind of things. They're all the things that are directly engaged with a world. So it's not that kind of monadic kind of rationalism of computation just happening in a box somewhere and perfect intelligence, that kind of stuff. These are always, the cyberneticians are always working with systems that were engaged in real-time emergent situations. And because of that, they rapidly kind of acknowledge that for so many of these important systems,

the only way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it. Because you can't pre-compute all the possible outcomes of these very sticky and complex real-world situations. The best way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it and watch.

I think that's an interesting sort of like, if you look at where a lot of the sort of techno-fetishist social attempts to sort of like if you look at where a lot of the sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort of like manipulate society's technology have gone it's like yeah you get like like blockchain smart contracts it's like the blockchain smart contract is like okay we are going to think of literally everything that could possibly happen and attempt to put it in like a very small amount of code and if anything like literally anything at all happens that i you know that we

didn't expect i we're now everyone is now screwed because we have just made this thing immutable and put it in such a way that we can't change it yeah i think that yeah that's a i think this is a useful sort of i mean corrective just it just in in the way that we've now, like, we've gone backwards. Like, we've gotten into this place where you, instead of, like, we need to let these systems play out, we need to let them control themselves, we've gotten to, like, we think that we can actually just sort of, like, you know, turn the entire system into code that we can predict ahead of time and have, you know, the basis of some sort of social system off of. Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that, like, the cyberneticians

and, like, maybe Pickering would describe as, like, a kind of perversity of modern thought, like, a modern mindset, like, that kind of, like, rational, like, kind of mindset, right? Like, and, like, to the cyberneticians that that whole thing with like the blockchain stuff would be just truly laughable because yeah it's immediate it's immediately obvious to them that the the problem there is like okay proposing oh

we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process or whatever smart contracts whatever and it's like that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety there's um there's a there's like a law that's at the heart of cybernetics called ashby's law of requisite variety and in short it basically states that given a system um the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating it is itself because a regulator needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating if it's going to like actually succeed at it yeah um and so that's that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards like like when you get to someone like stafford beer his his whole model of like organization pushes all a lot of the

intelligence downwards to the, to the bottom layers, because there is basically the people on the ground on the shop floor are the people who are best informed to actually deal with their own situation. And that's, that sounds like a banal observation, but like it for beer, that was actually quite a step forward to like,

just admit that like trying to, like trying to like in his context, it was like often the organization of a firm, like, trying to, like, in his context, it was, like, often the organization of a firm, like, or a company. Like, trying to manage a company from the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous. Yeah. Nobody there has enough information to act on. They're all dumbasses anyway. So, for Beer, it was just, like, this is where it starts to get interesting, and it connects to the politics right that like for one of these scientists just observing reality and like you know using you know pretty pretty good intuitions and like scientific frameworks

just looking at it and going like oh it is obviously the case that the best way for society to organize is bottom-up self-organization um and that like it's not just a moral point it's actually a technical point as well that like um these these top-down bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable they're also technically inferior to the kind of like cyber communism we want to institute yeah and i have like what if one of my one of my favorite stories about so i worked as a maintenance worker for a while and one day my boss was like there was some problem with the sink and my boss was like no we don't need the plumbers i can do this and so he goes in there and it's one it's like it's like a sink in like a building right so it has just one of those things

there's like a pipe that connects the top of the sink to like the wall and he goes okay here look at this i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this valve and this is gonna turn the water off and what he instead does is he take he he takes the pipe off of the wall and just like a torrent of water is just now shooting out of this pipe because he has removed the thing yeah he's removed the pipe from the wall it's like this is that you know this is this is why i think like yeah this this this this you know this this is like a particularly funny example of how these sort of top-down management systems and this guy like like used to be a maintenance guy right but he just like wasn't a plumber and so you know and he accepts into it and he's like oh

no no no no hold on i know i know how this system works it's going to be fine and it just there is a geyser the geyser of water has so much force. It's like pushing our tool cart across the room. It's just gushing. It's like a fire hydrant. It's coming out of this wall. Incredible. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

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wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Now, I wanted to... I guess beers is an interesting way to go into the politics of what this actually looks like. Do you want to talk about... I know I briefly talked about this in an episode on neoliberalism

a while back, but do you want to go into more detail into what beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt because of military coup to try to implement like a cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So Stafford beer uh was a um management consultant um he and a cybernetician

uh he got his start sort of doing um operations research um uh which is kind of a precursor to cybernetics that is kind of like interested in logistics and organizing systems in the British military in World War II. in World War II. And then he came out of that and became a corporate consultant for operations research and management. And so in working in the corporate world, he saw all of the things that were really screwed up with the status quo way of doing business

and of organizing things. The way that autocratic power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems. The way that managing organizations according to org charts, which are there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt to their environments because they get into these kinds of strange neuroses and, you know, just sort of going through all of that and more often than not being unable to intervene in an effective way to address these problems and just sort of like seeing how these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of the broader problems of our society as a whole and of capitalism, right? And so, you know, he had a basis from his time in India during the Second World War in kind of like Tantra, kind of like, you know, Eastern or specifically Indian spirituality, yoga, all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had a cult countercultural side to his personality. And he was always doing tinkering, strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't

just the straight laced corporate guy. But it was a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start to develop ideas about how things could be different. And this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were happening in Chile during the Chilean revolution in the early 70s. the Chilean revolution in the early 70s. So they reached out to him to come and help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that was uh focused on the flourishing of workers uh and of society as a whole as opposed to one that was based on sort of you know uh resource extraction where everything flows to the top yeah do you want to explain some more about how that went?

Well, so, yeah, it went well and then it went badly, I guess. But from the reading we've done and from our research, it seems like if basically if the if the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill them all, this would have worked. Like it was working and it was the project was actually going pretty well yeah can we explain briefly what like i think it becomes it's called project cyber symbol what what exactly is like what was it doing um so um so like beer's big kind of innovation is uh what we call the viable system model um or vsm and it's a model that's um it's a model for these like uh autonomous social systems that is kind of taking it's a model that's, it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that is kind of taking, it's not, I wouldn't say it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body, but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology and neurology and neuroscience and,

and cybernetics and just kind of meshing them all together. So basically like, it's like, if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous organs that all take care of their own business, plus a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into a workable whole, then you can kind of see the whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical and horizontal aspects. aspect where the autonomous like system one units are are well autonomous more or less like the heart takes heart takes care of its own thing the lungs take care of their own thing but then the nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it can say oh hold on too much oxygen dial it down a bit and then the organs respond dynamically to those those signals right so it's kind of like up-down feedback loops, right? Where the lower levels of the system are the smart bits that are doing all the important work, but there's this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system and the

brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all on the rails. And importantly, it's a kind of recursive model. So like a human being is an autonomous unit. And then that it's that unit is composed of more autonomous units, like the organs and the muscles. And then each of those is composed of cells, which are autonomous units, and then, you know, so on. But like, that ladder goes upwards as well. So that like a team is an autonomous unit composed of human beings, a firm or like a department is a autonomous unit composed of human beings. A firm or a department is an autonomous unit composed of teams. A firm is composed of departments. A sector is composed of firms. And it's the same kind of structure at each layer. So the kind of upside there is that you kind of have a fairly unifying set of principles and a science for doing this kind of coordination that get applied to like sectors in an economy um with the same kind of you know bottom-up kind of feedback going on as well um so stafford was in

invited to chile um to by the nda government in so that was like 1970 right um that that that election happened so he arrived in late 1970 i think um i mean i'm not 100 certain on the timeline but we're looking at those those first few years of the 70s as as the time when this is happening yeah yeah i and i selected in 1970 yeah so it's towards the end of that year that he's he's invited and um he's basically kind of given the task of like hey do all this stuff but with this entire economy and he's like yeah sure cool um so it puts together uh project cyberson um and there's kind of a long story there of like and then building out this kind of infrastructure

and like it's it's all highly experimental um and highly tentative like they one of the big problems they run into is that like they don't have very much in the way of hardware, especially because they're under embargo. So they had a pretty, what at the time was a pretty crufty old mainframe that they ran the software on. But step one was installing this huge communications network amongst all the factories and setting up the workers' committees and stuff would feed information into it and it would kind of again this like feedback thing where you kind of take signals from the economy uh integrate them and then go uh-oh you're producing too much steel route some of your product over to this this factory

and it'll be better use there and then you know you guys over there turn up this dial you turn down this dial so and then if that plan doesn't quite work out then you know you guys over there turn up this dial you turn down this dial so and then if that plan doesn't quite work out then you've got another layer of feedback tomorrow to say okay that plan didn't quite work here's an adjusted plan so it's it it's this like both bottom up and top down sort of loop of feedback that's like i think the the phrase pickering uses is reciprocal adaptation where the economy and its firms and its workers are all kind of adapting to each other in real time in a full system. Am I missing anything? No, I mean, that's essentially what Cybersyn was.

That's essentially what Cybersyn was. It was a system designed to largely, I think, at first supplement the market. Although Beer later realizes that, like, actually, if you have a good system of this kind, you probably don't need a market. actually if you have a good system of this kind you probably don't need a market um but essentially it was like okay our economy has been one that has been built around dependence to uh you know especially the united states and it's been organized in that way. And we need to reorganize the economy, both to promote the well-being of the workers, the autonomy of the workers, realize the ideals of socialism in that way, and also to create a system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism. And so having this reciprocal adaptation um having systems in place to connect things that were previously disconnected uh would allow you to move in that

way of increasing autonomy and increasing freedom um and that was generally the idea of cybersyn um yes yeah and there was something very interesting like when we were reading um the reissue of uh his book brain of the firm where he has a section at the end um that documents this whole experience in chile um there's a really interesting part where towards the end of it he's like and this is like getting up towards the coup where he's like um he and the other cyber sent operatives like and the people are putting this together realize that like the workers and like people in towns are like just on their own just like using this stuff and these kind of principles

to just like abolish the value form basically like yeah but notably without the involvement from above like as in beer and companies stumble upon this just happening where they're like oh my god they're just they're just dismantling the market and it's like it's all just kind of happening and that's there was something really wonderful to that that like it it indicated like there was there really was something to it that like you could like, as in people, working people could use these tools and this like new way of organizing themselves to just like liquidate market relations and wage relations, like spontaneously.

It's a spontaneity that's not really, it feels very different from the kind of spontaneity you often get in like the way leftists or like anarchists talk about it often like the kind of spontaneity is like a magical sort of thing which is like where freedom just arrives from out of nowhere but this this was like installing infrastructure to enable freedom and then it actually kind of happening until the fascists showed up you know yeah what i think is really interesting about it is that so you know you have you have like you have this sort of central control center from which a lot of stuff is being run but you

know yeah it's it's it's it's a weird system because it's trying to link together like a lot of different kinds of firms like you have some say you have private firms but you have a lot of you have a lot of state-run firms you also have firms that throughout this whole process people like workers just taking over factories they're setting up these sort of like call them industrial cordons i think if i'm remembering my spanish rights like yeah they they you know they start setting up their own institutions and it's it's this becomes this way of sort of like networking these groups together and the thing that's the other thing i think is interesting is you know so you have you have them on the one hand like just getting rid of markets and going like okay we can just coordinate production through this and like not have markets and then the second thing they do is it's

the freedom immediately becomes political in in the sense that like yeah like one of the things they do they they're that that's what's going on this period is that and there's chile has a very very right wing like it's basically like the it's even today it's like it's like really like one of the only like union like huge unions left in chile is truckers unions and those guys are extremely right wing they're in this period of being backed by the cia they're being trained by afl-cio as i say like every episode but like yeah and and they're you know they're intentionally doing strikes try to overthrow the government by blocking production and you know like the workers are like oh okay

hold on we can just use this cybernetic system to figure out where these blocks are figure out where materials need to move through and we can just you know we can just stop the kind of revolution we can just sort of like we can we can just we can just fight our way through it and and it's interesting it's like this happens and so then that that like the original plan of using sort of of using these truckers is like this sort of right wing like the first attempt fails and once that fails it's like they have to go to the military yes and the coup eventually works it's it's hard to it's hard to resist a coup outright isn't it um yeah yeah the thing with this the trucker strike is that like

yeah it's you can very well imagine like the cia and stuff going into it thinking oh this is what will do it right this will sew it up but not realizing that the workers actually had in their hands a like vastly more sophisticated system for outmaneuvering them. Yeah. And that system worked like a charm, like clockwork. You read the accounts from this thing, both in Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revelationaries and in Beer's own account, and there's this sense that it was actually kind of spooky and weird, that even the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out that way, and

that they were surprised at how effective it is but that it gets back to the core of cybernetics that like feedback is weirdly effective at getting things done you know these like highly tuned feedback systems they give you a lot of power to outmaneuver the scumbags you know yeah and i think in some sense like this is like people talk a lot about chile as sort of like the sort of foreclosed future of like an electoral democratic socialism. But like, I don't think that was the potential of the moment. The potential of the moment was this. And it's interesting to me that, well, because Beers kind of traces out a political history that never quite happened, which is so, okay. that never quite happened which is so okay one of the one of the sort of big political trends over the course of 20th century is you have all these people who were sort of like they they

basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during during world war ii because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine and then you know some of them go into some of them you know essentially stay on in the government doing planning stuff beers like goes into corporate world and the corporations are also you know they start doing they also start doing this planning stuff and you know but beers is interesting because he he pivots like he pivots in a direction that the world doesn't which is he pivots towards okay the solution to sort of you know the the the kind of like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems whether whether they be like the corporate versions of it or the sort of like state administered

uh like total economic planning from the top down versions is oh well okay we need to have planning from the bottom up and distributed planning yeah yeah and he like everyone involved with cybersyn gets murdered the only reason Beer survives because he wasn't in the country it's this really interesting like like it's this kind of story not everybody got murdered but some of them

did and some of them were in exile some of them were in prison yeah it was it was you know it was not a good time beer got out early and he knew things that were getting were getting bad and everybody around him knew things were getting bad um yeah like he was on a he was on like a kind of i guess like a almost diplomatic diplomatic mission to like try and get some of the blockade stuff like he was trying to

i think he was trying to flog like a container ship full of um iron or something you know he was he was shopping shopping it around to try and try and help out but like trying to flog a container ship full of iron or something. He was shopping it around to try and help out. Trying to sell Chilean wine to the world. That's what it was, yeah. But yeah, it's... Hold on, I had a thought there. Oh, and then afterwards, Beer spent a fair bit of his time trying to get his comrades out of Chile and get them out of prison um and got got them resettled in um in the uk and so on and yeah

america as well um but yeah i i think that um this is like that's a very interesting point about the the, you know, the sort of the real value of this moment being that movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society, not towards neoliberal engineering of markets and sort of reinforcement of private dictatorships, but towards a kind of like holistic control system that is still informed by, you know, the principles of autonomy and science. It's definitely like an answer to the crisis of the 70s which was not taken up and in that sense it is a foreclosed future but of course one that we can take lessons from now yeah i think there's something else that's very interesting to me about this because you know if if you look at how like if you look at how the socialist block sort of responds to to the crisis in the 70s and you know they're sort of decaying the 80s like they they have this option available to them right they have they have they have in a lot of ways they have a lot

they have a lot better technology than what the chileans are using they have more resources and every single one of them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions you know instead of i i i think it has to do with there there's a line this this is like slightly before this there's a line in um a debate mao and joe and lai are having in i think it's like 1967 this is like the peak of uh the sort of worker-led part of the Cultural Revolution. Like the workers have taken Shanghai and Mao and Zhou Enlai are talking and they're trying to figure out like, what are they going to do? You know, they've set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable.

it's now become uncontrollable and there's there's this line where they're talking about okay well if we give if we give them if we give them a commune uh they have to have free elections and joe and lai is like well that would be anarchism and then they're just like oh god we can't do that and they they never do in the end you know the end result of this whole sort of that whole sort of process is that china like instead of doing instead of sort of like devolving any level of control down to like any of the workers who are doing things, they're like, okay, well,

we'll just, we'll just, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll do capitalism instead. Well, we'll,

we'll, we'll, you know, we'll create markets. We'll sort of like maintain our firm structure, but, you know, subjugate the party cadres into it. Yeah and it's it's this it's it's a very interesting thing to me too because like there's been other like you know like

like lots of socialist parties of sort of various like degrees of radicalness have come to power like since 1973 and to my knowledge not a single one of them has ever picked any of this stuff back up like even even you know like like the most radical sort of like like you know like early like early chavez never like touches this like even like i don't like i i don't i don't think like i don't think the eZLN has ever done it like I mean they have psychological issues there but like it's interesting to me that like basically

no one who's ever taken power since has ever attempted it again which again is strange because this is you know one of the sort of you would think this is at know one of one of the sort of like this you would think this is like this is at least a potential solution to sort of this this this this problem of the stagnation

and sort of collapse of the old sort of old systems of planning economies but no one takes it up and i'm interested to think what you two think about that, like why this doesn't happen. Yeah, there's a I think there's an interesting dimension of beer's work in Chile that kind of, I think, might provide some answers to that, which is that, you know, he he was in charge of setting up Cybersyn and Cybersyn was kind of a system for optimizing the economy. But he had other concerns and other briefs that he was a layer of management and experts in the organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort of work on a Cybersyn that was designed to improve production numbers, but they had real resistance to the idea of worker autonomy because of wanting to maintain their job privileges and because of the prejudices of their habitus, I guess you could say that what they learned when they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever. And, you know, where the people who know things, the workers don't know things. They shouldn't be in charge, that kind of thing. to realize that in order to really make Cybersyn effective as an engine for autonomy, what

needs to happen is that sort of what you were describing with the Shanghai commune, the workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves and implement them through autonomous action. And so he starts to try to kind of like write up like write pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so that the information that he has as theory is not being filtered through a bureaucracy, but is instead like, you know, involved in an educational process of self-mobilization among the workers. And so, you know, this really doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of management and expert knowledge. Because in Beer's conception of management, management is something that is done by anyone who has the power to affect an organization or change

an organization. So if the workers are able to change their organizations, they are also managers. Um, and that's not something exclusive to experts. Um, for, for,

for beer management as a function, it's not a person, right? Yes. In, in, in beer's ideal world, like management would just be these like decision nodes that

emerge among among workers right and like in the management a manager would never be a person a manager would be like a kind of structural information processing like um thing that happens among people um yeah and yeah and so like when you see in, for example, the USSR, the option of creating a planning network, a computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be very, very expensive for them to develop. It would be on the order of doing, you know, their nuclear weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. is simply at odds with the system of like planning the, the command economy that had,

that had grown up in the wake of the revolution, right? It's simply at odds with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners, all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power. And so I think that when you look at the socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I think it's because they, it would require the people in power rethink their entire role and identity as members of society um yeah and then there's there's a

kind of there's a dreadful irony really in that like it's it's stafford beer somebody who comes out of like bourgeois like management stuff um and is is deep in the pocket for that he's the one who actually sincerely pursues the most radical project in socialist history that we've ever seen. Vastly more radical in its intent and it's like, kind of, it's the beginnings of its impact than anything any Leninist has ever done. And it's basically because he actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people. And your average Leninist just doesn't, you know? Like, again, like to go back to the example from earlier, right?

That like when under pressure, they'll do capitalism before they'll do anything that even resembles autonomy for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the right thing. You know, that does speak to the character of the thing. And it's that class interest, basically, of those kind of functionaries right like and the thing that makes beer different is that he sincerely actually wanted to do it you know and the the workers autonomy thing wasn't just a smokescreen for him you know yeah and when when he starts to

come up with these ideas of like thinking like oh okay like an economic planning system is not adequate we need to go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the social body. He quickly finds that he's being marginalized within those circles of planners in the Chilean government. Because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about. They're actually quite concerned about this idea. Even if Allende would be all for it, because he was very sincere about his interest in autonomy, there were still many people around Beer who did not particularly like the idea. Yeah. absolutely. And I think if we look at it, you know, in terms of a why hasn't it happened since then in all of these intervening decades, I think you also have to look at the international system and the way that countries figure into it, because we have all of these neoliberal structures of management and organization that were created in the 80s and 90s and early aughts that a socialist government has to contend with if they are to embark on a program like this, which isn't to say it's impossible.

But what it does mean is that there are all these sort of highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our societies right now. And it is the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage in an effort to kind of, you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization. market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization. Because all of these structures are there and you have to kind of like root them out and replace them with something new, as opposed to having all these ready-mades of what's already there. The market-centered solutions, the kind of autocratic solutions, you know, all of the management systems that have been developed with an autocracy in mind, instead of something that

is truly democratic and kind of self gestating. And I think as well, there's, there's a kind of other thing that like, like the, the left has been kind of in a very weak position for quite a while now, like, since the 70s, right? And, like, we're just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing. being on possibly an upswing but also like i think there was this kind of long depressive phase at the end of the or at the crossing of the centuries right where a lot of like leftist kind of and this this this actually gets into like why some of the reasons why we started a general intellect unit that like we felt like we needed to bring this kind of like systems thinking and like technical seriousness back to the table after the kind of weird depressive phases where like you know like say the ultra globalization stuff or the occupy stuff where people kind of

take an almost explicitly anti-strategic kind of turn and like a kind of anti-technical turn you know there's that kind of depressive hangover of like oh my god like capital and it's it's it's technology is hegemonic like how the fuck are we ever going to get out of this? Like, it would have been hard to make an argument for a scientific and, like, technical kind of fusion with the humanist kind of impulses of socialism, but that's, I think we're getting to a point where we can start actually having that conversation again. Like, we're seeing a bit more of a turn towards that and they can turn towards like this kind of serious kind of like more more serious kind of discussion of like hey like okay like okay like we we we fucking hate the the current order of things we want to we want to see it gotten rid of what would we actually

replace it with like functionally how would things actually work like i think those kind of conversations are coming back on the table in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties, like after the Berlin wall came down or whatever. They were impossible a couple of years ago, you know? Yeah. The, the,

the market as the fundament of society basically seemed to be invincible at that time. Um, and there was a lot of just sort of wrong-headed assumptions about what was and wasn't true about it and about society as a whole and you know we've had a lot of chaos in the year since then that was, that affected not just the countries that were, you know, being restructured by the IMF, but actually came and affected the core of the world economy as well. And I think that that that's sort of like, you know, in the same way that World War One kind of disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority. Like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to roost in the core of the world system has has undermined that invincibility, that that that idea that, oh, the market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that could possibly be better.

At the same time that we have all of this technological development that's happening, you know, in our economy that could be used for something different as opposed to, you know, I don't know, making NFTs or something. Yeah, absolutely. That's all super important. I think that kind of refines, like my previous thought is refining in my head now like that like right now um that kind of market chaos and especially even like the the chaos of like the the system's response to covet and stuff really puts um like in general and for the left

in particular it puts like the question of governance back on the table in a way that it had kind of been off the table for a while like i think there was a there was a period for the left in particular, it puts the question of governance back on the table in a way that it had kind of been off the table for a while. I think there was a period on the left where left activity was kind of railing against governance. It was like, we want freedom from governance, that sort of thing, right? And I'm not going to say those are necessarily bad impulses, right? But I think they're also kind of a bit wrongheaded as well. But the reality is that for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish, we need governance. Governance actually, as a word, has the same root as cybernetics does. So kybernetis, the Greek word, becomes kubernetes, becomes cybernetics. But that's also the root of governor. So kuberner, kubernator, those are the roots

of governance. So governance and cybernetics are one in the same kind of concept. And this question of like, if we intend to create a world of self-governance that is effective, it's viable in Beer's terminology, like viable self-governance, that what we're proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that we have to put up with right now and that's back on the table in a big way that like because i think especially with with covid people look at like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of our governments and realizing like oh those are decrepit, completely screwed up systems. And in part because their goal is the maintenance of capital accumulation.

So this gets us back to the goal-directed behavior of cybernetics, right? Like the steersman steers the boat towards a goal, right? And it's always about, or like a cybernetic device, like a thermostat has a goal temperature that it's trying to like regulate the temperature of the water towards. You know, we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life for flourishing. They're only suitable for

the regulation of this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going. Like that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in a position where on the left, more and more of us are saying, what we're proposing is not a sort of magical escape from governance. We're proposing really, we should have sane governance. And it turns out that sane governance is bottom-up self-organized governance. And that's both a moral position and a technical position. And I think both of those the moral and technical valences feed off each other

we're able to be the serious people in the room this is a very big change of pace for us because for a while we were railing against the very serious people of the centrists and the fucking Blairites and the Clintonites we're the serious people now saying what what this what this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous and it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a totally different like feedback circuit a different kind of goal orientation um and it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing and like that's turns there's a science of doing that, and it's called cybernetics. And we also have a runaway ecological crisis.

The more we learn about it, the more we see that the capitalist market system is absolutely leading us all to death and the earth to death. And so it is human flourishing, but we also are concerned with the flourishing of life in general. Right. So I think that that is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in the 70s. wasn't as much on the horizon in the 70s you know certainly think you know people were thinking about it but breaking down this barrier between economics uh and uh and ecology i think is a very cybernetic impulse and i think one that you know we need to keep working at because like you know whenever we think about these things as separate domains we're already uh we're already uh engendering more destruction of the environment yeah yeah i think cybernetics can also help us in that kind of like um on a kind of for left

projects like on an aggressive footing of like if we recognize that like the capital and its kind of governance system is it is cybernetic and like it has its own feedback circuits and like say the the the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with with ecology right like how do you intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits so as to the so as to disintegrate the system is um's something you can learn a lot from cybernetics to get lessons on how to intervene there. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom and refuge between the chapters. Thank you. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time. on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. the last thing i want to talk about is just what is the society that is non-capitalist and based off of sort of cybernetic governance principles what does that look like for just a person because i think you know this has been one of the big sort of like political challenges of the last 50 years.

It's just the complete foreclosure of the ability to even just sort of imagine a system that's not this. Yeah, I think it means – in the first instance, it means a different orientation to your workplace and your community. Because when you grow up in a society where power is exercised autocratically, it has an infantilizing effect on you as an individual. Yeah. And, you know, maybe your relationship to work,

your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing, right? Because these are reactions reactions these are natural reactions to being in an abusive environment but if you are in a system where the work of management is not only open to you, but expected of you. You have a different orientation to that workplace, to the community you're in, because it's your responsibility. If you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose your autonomy. And also you're going to have real problems that you have to grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility that comes there, but also like that means an opening up of horizons in terms of, well, things don't always have to be the same. Things don't always

have to be handed down to you for management on high. They can actually change. Like you can see the possibilities in front of you. You can plan for the future in your context and you can have that meaningful freedom in your life and be, you know, a full human being in that sense. Right. And so I think that that's a very core everyday change that you could see in terms of, you know, sort of your horizons of where you might work or what you might do. would be more possibilities for each person to be like, quote unquote, entrepreneurial, right? To have initiative in their life and be able to envision and create things around them that, you know, they can't do right now because they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give them that freedom or they are actually not even able to have a job right now where they can have a reasonable expectation of survival because their workplace is 100% oriented around just making sure the work gets done and the consequences be damned. making sure the work gets done and, you know, the consequences be damned. So I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. And that sort of freedom of management extends all the way up to, you know,

working in different kinds of capacities or jobs. Like some people in kind of a middle ranking area in a corporation these days might get shuffled around from department to department to try to kind of get a well-rounded understanding of what the corporation is and how it functions. But we can kind of expect that these roles would be more open to everybody because, again, you know, a system in the VSM is not a person. A system is a function and that function should be fulfilled in a way that is as flexible as possible.

So there's a lot less kind of, well, I'm stuck in accounting and that's my life now. And that's all that I'll ever be. Of course, there are limits to education. There are limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, it takes time to learn these things. But you could expect some more flexibility there without having that terror of, oh, yeah, you know, in the neoliberal era, everybody's expected to have like 15 jobs in the course of their quote unquote career. But also each of those jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society without a safety net right um i i think that that's that's you know those are real consequences for everybody's uh life i think uh yeah yeah absolutely

and i think like at a very very high level the way beer puts it is that we are trapped in this kind of crazy system that like its control variable is profit like that's the little variable that it's it's like doing feedback on to to maintain um whereas what we're proposing is like the the sort of cybernetic future would be a society that's optimizing flourishing like what beer beer the word he uses eudaimony, which he's borrowing from Aristotle, which is just, like, flourishing. And, yeah, a lot of stuff flows out from

that. Like, imagine a world where we all feel it, right? That, like, everything around us is kind of, like, microtuned as, like, a little feedback loop to keep money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating. Just imagine a world where that's just not true anymore. And the sort of social infrastructure

that you grow up in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we look at sort at the broader patterns of society today, we see all of these harebrained schemes that very rich men are embarking on, and they're setting the agenda for society. Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that the metaverse is the future and you just have to get on board with this even though anyone can see that this idea is patently ridiculous yeah um and in a society where that kind of management that kind of money power doesn't exist anymore like you don't have to live under that kind of future horizon anymore where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up you know ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them just like they were following the orders of pharaoh back in the day yeah

i think do not be ruled by pharaohs is as good a place as any to leave off unless you have anything else you want to get to. There's, there's one little line from a beers book. Well, it's actually a set of presentations called designing freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me up every time I read it.

So I'm just gonna read it out for the listeners. It gives you a sense of his absolute, like ridiculous radicalism, like these off the fucking charts with this stuff. At some point he says, and I'm quoting here. Every time we hear that a proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say,

thank God at last. Yeah. A real maniac. Yeah. Yeah. And he had this, this dictum of if it works, it's out of date.

Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's out of date. Yeah. So, you know, it's like, yeah, don't be complacent, you know? Don't be a traditionalist. I think also there's been really horrific consequences of sort of the right being the ones to, like, take the urge for creative destruction. Just like, you know know what was that line there's some what i forget some some venture capitalist thing is like move fast and break things and it's like yeah so when they move fast the things they break is us but yes you know we can move faster and break things that are bad yeah and it's to a creative and playful kind of um mode of being right that like

you you might be able to work wake up in the morning and and think god you know it'd be really cool if we could have like um like a child care nursery just like like out in the out in the common area between these buildings and stuff and like go to your go to your like local like your your workers council or whatever and have a really plausible way of actually getting that and collaborating with people to make that happen. And then being like, okay, we'll trial it as an experiment for 12 months. We'll see how it goes. And then there's a feedback cycle where it's like, okay, some aspect of this design didn't really work out. We'll go talk about it some more and then iterate on that. And that's

an entrepreneurialism that doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now it just means that human beings living real things real workers will be able to actually control their environments in this the substance of their lives and in a meaningful way yeah and like this i think know, back in the 90s, the early aughts, sort of before the 2008 crisis and the hoary days of yore, it's, there was a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation. and adaptation. But what that always meant was we make decisions about what's going to change and you have to adapt, right? It was always this arbitrary power from outside that would just be changing the social fabric and you had to be flexible enough to cope with what in a better state to work with my environment in a more healthy and a more flourishing way, as opposed to just like, oh, yeah, you've got to work three jobs now. So figure it out. Right. That's a very different

kind of flexibility, a very different kind of adaptation. And, you know, those things have sort of become dirty words in some ways, but they are really core to the way that we all exist as organisms in the world. And they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse. Exactly. Yeah, I think, okay, we can take this as a place to leave off. Yeah, do you two have stuff you want to log? I know you have stuff you want to plug, but plug the things that you want people to listen to, because they are good. Yeah, we're General Intellect Unit. You go to generalintellectunit.net, and it's got all the episodes on there. We're on Twitter as GIunitPod. Yeah, you can find us on all the podcast things.

We're also part of a, uh, podcast network called emancipation. Uh, so that's emancipation.network on the web. Um, and yeah, some really excellent shows on there.

We were, uh, collaborating with, uh, Swampside chats and, um, mortal science, uh,

from alpha to Omega, Jim, see utopia there. They're really wonderful shows that are all... It's a variety of different sort of takes on things, but there's a sort of common... There's a sort of spiritual common ground

that we all have. Yeah, we're all interested in thinking systematically. We're all interested in emancipation, as the network name says, and we're all interested in sort of building something going forward, trying to construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting caught up in day to day politics or getting caught up in day-to-day politics or getting caught up in a doomer mentality. So yeah, it's systematic, it's critical,

but it's also constructive. And I think that's what we're all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, well, thank you two both for coming on. Thank you. It's been wonderful. Thanks for having us. Yeah, and this has been It Could Happen Here. you can find us at happen here pod in the places there's also stuff at

cool zone media that you can also find in those same places and possibly also different ones we have a we have a website uh everyone asks me for my sources every single week and they get posted there once a month so yeah go go to uh coolzone media.com and you will find all of the sources so you don't have to dm me every week all right goodbye it could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Raya.

Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of Raya. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive

and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.