Articles
Ideas worth
sitting with.
Articles on cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, ecology, design and futures.
The Steersman and the Noise: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, and the Macy Conferences
Norbert Wiener taught machines to steer themselves, gathered the best minds in postwar America to build a science of it, and then spent the rest of his life asking the question the science could not answer: who holds the tiller.
Cybernetics in the Eastern Bloc
East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania: how cybernetics took different shapes across Central and Eastern Europe.
Cybernetics in Chile: Project Cybersyn
In 1971 a British cybernetician and a socialist government tried to run a national economy through a telex network and an operations room. What they built and why it still matters.
Cybernetics in the USSR
From 'reactionary pseudoscience' to the science of communism in under a decade, and the national computer network that never got built.
Why Does AI Make Things Up?
AI chatbots make things up because they are built to produce likely text, and training often rewards a confident guess over an honest "I don't know".
Cybernetics in the United States
Born in American wartime labs, funded by the military, eclipsed by AI, and kept alive by the counterculture. The American story of cybernetics.
Third-Order Cybernetics
A contested and still-forming idea. Four proposals for what comes after the observer, and what they have in common.
Second-Order Cybernetics
The cybernetics of observing systems. What changes when the observer is included in the description?
First-Order Cybernetics
The cybernetics of observed systems: feedback, homeostasis, variety, and the engineering of control.
How Does ChatGPT Decide What to Say?
ChatGPT writes one small piece of a word at a time, picking each from a list of likely next pieces. Here is how it decides, and how training shapes its choices.
What Is an AI Agent?
An AI agent is an AI system that works towards a goal by taking actions, checking the results and deciding what to do next. Here is how agents work and why they go wrong.
Paul Pangaro: Cybernetics as Conversation
A Pask student who found AI unsatisfying and cybernetics human. How Paul Pangaro presents the field today: purpose, conversation, and design.
Why We Need Cybernetics in the Age of AI
AI systems are feedback systems embedded in larger feedback systems. Five cybernetic questions that today's AI debate keeps circling without naming.
The Protagonists of Second-Order Cybernetics
Von Foerster, Maturana, Varela, Pask, von Glasersfeld, Bateson, Luhmann, and Glanville: where their thinking came from and what they were trying to do.
Norbert Wiener
Child prodigy, MIT mathematician, wartime engineer, and the first scientist to refuse military work on moral grounds after 1945. The life of the man who named cybernetics.
In 1936, an Anthropologist Described the AI Sycophancy Spiral
When a chatbot agrees with us a little more each time, the loop that forms was already studied in 1936. Gregory Bateson called it schismogenesis, and his work explains how AI sycophancy builds and what holds it in check.
The Founders: Lives and Studies
A mathematician, a physiologist, a psychiatrist, a homeless prodigy, two anthropologists, and a British psychiatrist with a box of magnets. Short portraits of the people who built cybernetics.
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 Very 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 of AI
The AI behind your feed is among the most consequential feedback machines ever built. What does cybernetics tell us about why it behaves the way it does?
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.