Cybernetic Revolutionaries
*- Author
- Eden Medina
- (no term)
- about Project Cybersyn
Page 40
: technologies are the product not only of technical work but also of social negotiationsPage 41
: technologies are not value-neutral but rather are a product of the historical contexts in which they are madePage 46
: Technologies are historical texts. When we read them, we are able to read historyPage 57
: this connection between cybernetics and Chilean socialism came about, in part, because Beer and Popular Unity, as Allende’s governing coalition was called, were exploring similar concepts, albeit in the different domains of science and politicsPage 58
: political innovation can spur technological innovation. Page 59 : technology can shape the path of political history by making certain actions possiblePage 60
: historical readings of technology can make visible the complexities internal to a political projectPage 61
: Chile was not able to implement its political dream of democratic socialism or its technological dream of real-time economic managementPage 63
: The more I reflect on these facts, the more I perceive that the evolutionary approach to adaptation in social systems simply will not work any more. . . . It has therefore become clear to me over the years that I am advocating revolutionPage 67
: major theme in Beer’s writings was finding a balance between centralized and decentralized control, and in particular how to ensure the stability of the entire firm without sacrificing the autonomy of its component parts. Page 70 : how do you create a system that can maintain its organizational stability while facilitating dramatic change, and how do you safeguard the cohesion of the whole without sacrificing the autonomy of its partsPage 78
: brought together ideas from across the disciplines—mathematics, engineering, and neurophysiology, among others—and applied them toward understanding the behavior of mechanical, biological, and social systems.23Page 78
: for Beer, cybernetics became the “science of effective organization #+endquotePage 90
: Keller instead argues that the cybersciences also emerged as a way to embrace complexity and “in response to the increasing impracticality of conventional power regimesPage 92
: He embraced complexity, emphasized holism, and did not try to describe the complex systems he studied, biological or social, in their entiretyPage 92
: To put it another way, Beer was more interested in studying how systems behaved in the real world than in creating exact representations of how they functioned1 Elsewhere
1.1 In my garden
Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).
- 2021-05-06
- 2021-05-07
- 2021-05-09
- 2021-08-24
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- cybernetics
- Some books I've read
- Complexity and the left
- Complexity and the left
- Project Cybersyn
- Project Cybersyn
- Project Cybersyn
- Project Cybersyn
- Project Cybersyn
- Salvadore Allende
- Salvadore Allende
- Salvadore Allende
- Stafford Beer
- There are different strands of cybernetics
- US intervention
- Viable system model
- Viable system model