A plain guide
to cybernetics.

• Articles. Short pieces in plain English, grouped into series that can be read in order, from Foundations to Why It Matters Now. No background in mathematics or engineering is needed.
• The wiki. Entries on the people, concepts and communities of cybernetics, with dates, influences and links to primary sources.
• The Diagnostic Toolkit. Five questions, drawn from cybernetics, for working out why a system resists change.
• Ex Machinis. Our column on artificial intelligence, which reads the latest AI news and ideas through feedback, control and the systems around them.
• Medium. Selected articles are republished on our Medium publication, which also accepts contributions.

In the 1940s and 50s a small group of mathematicians, engineers, biologists and anthropologists started asking how systems, living or built, steer themselves through feedback. They called the field cybernetics. By the 1980s it had mostly lost its name and its institutions, although its ideas had spread into engineering, computing, biology, therapy and management under other names.

We think cybernetics is needed again today. Decisions about technology and policy spread through society, mental health and the environment, and those effects are usually studied one field at a time. Cybernetics looks at the whole system at once: how the parts affect one another, where the feedback loops are, and what happens when one part changes faster than the rest.

We also think there should be professionals trained to do this work. That takes critical thinking, to question how a problem has been framed; systems thinking, to see how its parts connect; and modelling and simulation skills, to test what a change might do before it is made.

Neo-Cybernetics is researched, written and edited by Daniele Nanni. Daniele first came across cybernetics in courses for a communication degree and grew interested in it from there, as a way of taking apart how modern society works, with many complex systems influencing one another.

In 2016 Daniele wrote an essay called Faster Than Meaning: Media, feedback and the dematerialisation of the social system. Drawing on cybernetics and on Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, it argued that the media a society communicates through set the tempo of its feedback, and that digital networks now carry communication faster than society can build the structures that keep it stable. Daniele's work has drawn on cybernetics ever since, and that essay is what inspired them to start Neo-Cybernetics.

Daniele's mission is to restore cybernetics as a field that people know about and can use: to explain its ideas in plain English, to tell its history accurately, to apply it to current problems such as AI, and to point readers to the people still doing the work.

Contributors

Several writers contribute regularly to the Neo-Cybernetics Medium publication:

• Dr Wolfgang Stegemann, an independent philosopher with a doctorate from the University of Bremen, writes on the philosophy of mind, theories of consciousness, logic and the limits of artificial intelligence (Academia, ORCID).
• Dirk Boucsein and Axel Stöcker, of philosophies.de and Die großen Fragen, run the Zoomposium podcast: interviews with scientists and philosophers on questions where natural science and philosophy meet, such as consciousness and the brain.
• katoshi, a software engineer and system architect with a doctorate in engineering, writes on the origin of life, artificial intelligence and society, seen through the lens of system architecture.

Articles are based on the primary texts of the field, by Wiener, Ashby, Bateson, Beer, von Foerster, Maturana and Varela among others, on histories of cybernetics, and on talks from the communities still working in it today. Quotations are given with their source, and dates, names and claims should be checkable. If you spot a mistake, please tell us and we will correct it.

We'd like this to grow into a shared space where people and ideas from different fields can meet. You can pitch or submit a piece through the Medium publication, send corrections or suggestions, or simply get in touch at admin@neo-cybernetics.org.