CYBCOM is an open email discussion list for cybernetics. Practitioners, academics and newcomers have used it since the early 1990s to argue about the field’s ideas, share announcements and remember its founders.
History
The list was established in autumn 1993. From September 1997 it was hosted by George Washington University, where Stuart Umpleby, a long-standing figure in the American Society for Cybernetics, was one of the people responsible for it. In December 2017 it moved to Google Groups, where it remains active, carrying discussion threads and announcements such as the ASC speaker series.
Who writes
Contributors over the years have included many well-known names in second-order cybernetics and systems thinking, among them Stuart Umpleby, Ranulph Glanville, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro, Louis Kauffman and Loet Leydesdorff, alongside practitioners in management, therapy, design and engineering around the world.
What it discusses
Three problems recur across the archive: where a system ends and its environment begins (and who decides), whether an observer can include themselves in their own description, and how systems change while remaining themselves. Long threads have explored autopoiesis and whether it applies to social systems, George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative, the Viable System Model in practice, why cybernetics never found a lasting institutional home, and more recently whether large language models observe, converse or merely process.
Why it matters
The archive is the field’s living memory: first-hand recollections of von Foerster, Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask and Gregory Bateson, and decades of argument about what their ideas mean. It also shows the community’s difficulty in reaching outsiders, a theme participants themselves have debated on the list.
Joining
The list is open: search for “cybcom” on Google Groups and request to join.