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

[Bob Logan]

Dear Petter - I agree with you that complexity theory with its feed forward feature is the natural heir to cybernetics where the focus was primarily on positive and negative feedback. Complexity theory and emergence entails self-organization or feedforward and has a teleological component to it. The goal of the emergent system is the system itself. Stafford Beer who I had the good fortune to work with when he lived in Toronto at the end of his life made use of feed forward in his management cybernetics approach. The recent work of Deacon (Incomplete Nature) and Ulanowicz (A Third Window) focuses on teleology and hence feedforward. Thanks for your post - with kind regards - Bob Logan

 
On 2013-01-24, at 8:59 AM, Petter Törnberg wrote:

> 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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______________________

Robert K. Logan
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto 
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan




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