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

[José María Díaz Nafría]

Dear Petter,

thank you for drawing on INSITE project. I'll like it to know more about
and to get in contact with the community. I didn´t know it, but I was
saying some days ago that something of this kind could be proposed to the
UE and surely financed despite of the general European focus to
neo/ultra-liberalismus... So it was not only possible, it's actual... Great.

Medina's work is really interesting -I worked on this idea in an article I
published on tripleC in 2011. But the viewpoint is the so called
cybernetics of the first order. After the works of Maturana, Varela, von
Foster, cybernetics evolved, and I think that by properly developing the
correct viewpoints there's no essential difference to the complex
viewpoint. In November 2011, during the 100th Anniversary of von Foester, a
great conference was organised in Vienna. Seeing the broadness of the areas
covered, the depth in the perspectives presented...(including some novel
price and most renoun theoretical physicists) it is hard to talk about the
death of the movement, and even claiming the kingdom of complex thinking. I
believe we should rather see what we have in common and try to work
together, because there's a lot of things to improve regarding a very
unfair and non-sustainable state of affairs, and a few ones who want to let
it be in benefit of an distressing future for the most...

Best regards,
J.
J.M.

2013/1/24 Petter Törnberg <pettert at chalmers.se>

> 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
>> Personal site: http://www.dustormagic.net | No One Is Illegal:
>> http://www.noii.org.uk
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>
>
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-- 
Dr. Jose Maria Diaz Nafria

Visiting Professor at the *Hochschule München* (HM, Germany,
http://www.fh-muenchen.de/)
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