[ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of capitalism

[Petter Törnberg]

I would second the point that the cybernetics movement was not necessarily
socialist. It did however have some interesting leftist tendencies, likely
due to its obvious potential on this account. For example, Stafford Beers
involvement in organizing Allende's Chile in project Cybersyn (do read Eden
Medina's excellent account of this fascinating history: *Cybernetic
Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, *2011), which
 illustrates how attempts were made to use cybernetics thinking to organize
the future socialist society.

But I would furthermore question the notion that linear programming is what
we should look upon as the contemporary heritage of cybernetics; instead, I
would see Complexity Theory as its natural heir. In my view, Complexity
Theory - while of course similarly forged in the greedy flame of capitalism
- holds the same potential for thinking about the organizing and transition
to an alternative society.
There is actually a current EU project/coordination action, called INSITE (
www.insiteproject.org), that works with such a development in mind. The
project departs from an explicitly complexity theory-based criticism of the
capitalist organization of innovation and technological development, and
envisions alternative ways to organize innovation and production through
new decentralized and democratic institutions. Interestingly, the project
is strongly interdisciplinary and includes many mathematicians
and physicists.

This, in my mind, illustrates that the last hope of a decent use of
cybernetics is yet to be extinguished.


Kind Regards
--
Petter Törnberg
PhD student in Complex Systems
at Chalmers University of Technology

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Bob Hughes <bob at dustormagic.net> wrote:

> Dear listmembers,
>
> Linear programming (and other mathematical/cybernetic planning techniques)
> were seen by many people in the 1940s and 1950s as heralding the end of
> markets, as they offered radically more efficient means of distribution.
>
> Instead, I get the impression these techniques ended up helping Big
> Capital to push markets to new limits, via Enterprise Resource Planning
> (ERP) apps like SAP.
>
> Certainly, I understand that people trained in cybernetics and OR during
> the 1960s increasingly found they could only get work in corporate
> situations, where it was impossible to work on 'whole systems' in the
> proper, cybernetic sense.
>
> And linear programming seems to be the basis of the 'combinatorial
> auction' systems that have been so very profitably developed for handling
> sell-offs of public assets (UK buses in 1995, followed by the auctions for
> 3G and now 4G bandwidth, and I guess auctions for airline routes ... and
> maybe finding further, similar markets in countries that come under IMF
> privatisation-orders).
>
> If this is the case then there's a ginormously bitter irony here: what
> should have led to an age of low-impact abundance ended up being a
> power-tool for the manufacture of high-impact scarcity.
>
> Has anyone researched this, or can anyone point me in the direction of
> someone who has? Do you think the above is broadly correct?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Bob Hughes
> --
> Home: +44 (0)1865 726804 * Mobile: +44 (0)7968 292499 * Mail:
> bob at dustormagic.net
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