The Cybernetics Society

Since 1968, London

The UK's professional society for cybernetics, founded at King's College London in 1968. Today it is one of the most active venues for new cybernetic research, from the free energy principle to the Viable System Model.

The Cybernetics Society is the UK’s society for cybernetics and systems science. It is small and independent, and since 2020 has become one of the busiest venues for current cybernetic research, much of it online and freely recorded.

History

The society grew out of a club associated with Chelsea College and was formally founded at King’s College London in 1968 by five scientists: Haneef Fatmi, Kevin Clifton, David Hayes, Alan Hill and Christopher Harris. In 1976 it was registered under the Friendly Societies Act 1974, with the purpose of “the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of cybernetics pure and applied”.

It belongs to a distinctively British tradition: the Ratio Club of the 1950s, the work of W. Ross Ashby, W. Grey Walter, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, and the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London. The historian Andrew Pickering has described that tradition as practical and performative: more interested in building things that adapt than in theory for its own sake.

Activities

  • Cybernetics Live: regular online seminars, open to the public.
  • Presidents Series and Badlands: talk series, the latter on technology, harm and cybernetic responses.
  • The Cybernetics Conversation: an annual conference (the 2026 edition was held at Loughborough University).
  • Enacting Cybernetics: an open-access, peer-reviewed journal.
  • Professional membership grades (MCybS and FCybS).

Recent programmes have covered the free energy principle and active inference (Karl Friston), perceptual control theory (Warren Mansell), the Viable System Model in practice (Raúl Espejo, Patrick Hoverstadt, John Beckford), Chinese cybernetics, quantum information, and Niklas Luhmann’s social systems.

Compared with the American Society

The Cybernetics Society leans towards applied, organisational and scientific cybernetics, while the American Society for Cybernetics is the home of second-order cybernetics, design and epistemology. Membership and events overlap, and the two often promote each other’s programmes.

Further reading

  • cybsoc.org (talks archive and journal)
  • Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010)

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