I digressed into the more “political” offshoot of cybernetics, clearly springing out inspiration from “Project Cybersyn” and it seems intellectually thin so far. It seems to boil it all down to: “of course any modern socialism* would have to include technology”

And tbh that is both extremely shallow and broadly uninteresting.

The rest seems to be a lot of “capitalism is bad” ranting which… yeah sure, but that’s not a thought, that’s more of a feeling.

*they mean communism, I think

So let’s think about Project Cybersyn for a minute, based on the extremely thin material I have read so far. It is technically super interesting, but ethically… it might need some discussion. To recap: they made an “Internet” based on telex machines, used that to gather metrics and fed that to a “powerful” machine to analyze, visualize, maybe run simple simulations and alert on values going out of range.

But what were they monitoring? It seems to have been a rollout around factories, but (for reasons that could easily be technical) the aggregation and visualization wasn’t local, it was central. So as opposed to the Toyota Way idea of visualization directly to the people doing the work, this was (intentionally or not) surveillance.

Later it was apparently used to run strikebreaking trucks.

Now for context, the strike was apparently a psyops by the CIA, but I’m sure the truck drivers didn’t know that.

My point is that the implementation wasn’t unproblematic and because it was interrupted before more experience could be gathered, it feels naive to think it wouldn’t end up being used for oppression.

And this isn’t to say Contras weren’t bad, they were trying to bring back a ruthless dictatorship. So… the US backing them was very on-brand.

My point is… stuff is complicated.

Which is probably the point of this whole thread tbh.

So apparently the statement “The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID)” is one of the most famous in Cybernetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
And since I keep on returning to financial/political systems, that’s quite damning. The purpose of capitalism is to make the few immensely rich at the expense of the many? The purpose of communism is to create corrupt dictatorships (which to be fair ends up being the same purpose as capitalism)? Ouch.

I guess this is related to “No true Scotsman”… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

It’s weird I oscillate between reading this as tech content and as political content. And that bothers me to a certain degree. In my experience, when most programmers get a tiny bit of power over others we tend to wield it with the worst kind of entitled fervor.

So if a way of thinking fits for computers, I will instinctively think it would lead to oppression in the real world. Our job is to create fine grained systems of control. That is not what should be unleashed on a population.

- Hey, Charlie’s Readiness probe is not looking good, maybe we should kill*cough* I mean.. ehhh call him? Dispatch an on call team to his house? Fire him?

😳

I’ve been trying to grok money and banking to try to figure out if MMT is right and so I’ve been trying to follow this Columbia university lecture series on it and yesterday something clicked for me.

The professor seems to be describing not only a complex adaptive (and distributed) system, but also the regulation/manipulation/stabilization of that system.

So he seems to describe it as cybernetics. I’ll find a relevant clip in a minute.