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

[MEICECC]

Dear Colleagues,

I just wanted to share this conference link with you!

The Sixth AASRC 2013 INTERNATIONAL Conference On “Innovative Trends in
Information Studies, Technologies, Computing and Engineering to tackle A
Competitive Global Environment” (ITITCE – 2013) 30 – 31 May 2013 ISTANBUL,
TURKEY
Sponsored by: International Certification Council
Organized by: American Academic & Scholarly Research Center

http://aasrc.org/conference/?p=660

Kindest regards,

Samer


On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 4:31 PM, José María Díaz Nafría <diaz-naf at hm.edu>wrote:

> ... As I pointed out in a previous post, I think that's to see the
> cybernetic movement in a very restricted manner. I know very bad cases of
> cybernetician working in a very simplistic, old-fashion manner -even very
> close to me-, people who even think the whole knowledge had to be adapted
> to their short-seeing -discounting most of the mathematical findings of the
> xx century, as mere noise... But as I saw in the Heinz von Foerster 100 -
> Self-organisation and Emergence - Conference 2011, the cybernetic movement
> -in a broad sense- is of course working on Self-organisation and Emergence
> which is completely coherent to what has been named 2nd order cybernetics
> since the 1970s... If both are updated, complex theory, cybernetics, as
> well as systems science altogether could be working in a joint manner. As
> far as I have seen often there's just terminological differences...
>
> Kind regards,
> José María
>
> 2013/1/25 Bob Logan <logan at physics.utoronto.ca>
>
>> 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
>>> Personal site: http://www.dustormagic.net | No One Is Illegal:
>>> http://www.noii.org.uk
>>> ______________________________**_________________
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>>>
>>
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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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>>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Jose Maria Diaz Nafria
>
> Visiting Professor at the *Hochschule München* (HM, Germany,
> http://www.fh-muenchen.de/)
>     Postal Adress: Fakultät 13-Studium Generale, Dachauerstr. 100A, 80663
> München, GERMANY
> *Universidad de León *(ULE, Spain, http://www.unileon.es/)
>     Postal address: Esc.de Ingenierías Industrial e Informática, Campus de
> Vegazana s/n, 24071 Leon, SPAIN
>
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> Coordination of *Glossarium BITri* (http://glossarium.bitrum.unileon.es/)
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> http://stylusbitae.bitrum.unileon.es/)
> *myUniversity* research team (http://www.e-myuniversity.eu/ule/)
> Board of Director, Institut für Design Science (IfDS, Munich, Germany,
> http://www.designscience.de/)
> Board of Directors, *Science of Information Institute* (SoII, Washington,
> USA, http://www.soii.info/)
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>
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>
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