Articles
Ideas worth
sitting with.
Writing from our community on systems thinking, complexity, ecology, design, and futures.
What Is Cybernetics?
A plain-language introduction to the science of steering: feedback, goals, and the systems that pursue them.
Cybernetics as a Discipline
Is cybernetics a science, a method, or a way of looking? Why the field never fitted inside a single university department.
A Brief History of Cybernetics
From wartime gun predictors to the Macy Conferences, Soviet planning, Chilean socialism, and the internet: eighty years in five phases.
The Philosophy Behind Cybernetics
Purpose without mysticism, mind as pattern, and the observer who cannot step outside: how cybernetic philosophy developed through the first, second, and third orders.
The Recommendation Machine: A Cybernetic Reading
Algorithmic recommendation systems are among the most consequential feedback machines ever built. What does cybernetics tell us about why they behave the way they do?
The Four Diagram Modes
A reference article demonstrating all four static diagram modes: network, feedback, architecture, and adversarial.
Welcome to Neo-Cybernetics
An introduction to who we are, what we're exploring, and why we think these ideas matter now more than ever.