Dear Petter,<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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...</div>
<div><br></div><div>Best regards,</div><div>J.</div><div>J.M.</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">2013/1/24 Petter Törnberg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pettert@chalmers.se" target="_blank">pettert@chalmers.se</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>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: <i>Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, </i>2011), which illustrates how attempts were made to use cybernetics thinking to organize the future socialist society. </div>
<div><br><div><div>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. </div>
<div>There is actually a current EU project/coordination action, called INSITE (<a href="http://www.insiteproject.org" target="_blank">www.insiteproject.org</a>), 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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>This, in my mind, illustrates that the last hope of a decent use of cybernetics is yet to be extinguished. </div><div><br></div><div><br>Kind Regards</div><div>--</div><div>Petter Törnberg</div><div>PhD student in Complex Systems </div>
<div>at Chalmers University of Technology</div></div></div><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><div><div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Bob Hughes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bob@dustormagic.net" target="_blank">bob@dustormagic.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Dear listmembers,<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Has anyone researched this, or can anyone point me in the direction of someone who has? Do you think the above is broadly correct?<br>
<br>
Best regards,<br>
<br>
Bob Hughes<span><font color="#888888"><br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><font face="'trebuchet ms', sans-serif">Dr. Jose Maria Diaz Nafria<br><br><font size="1"><span style="font-family:arial"><font face="'trebuchet ms', sans-serif">Visiting Professor at the <b>Hochschule München</b> (HM, Germany, <a href="http://www.fh-muenchen.de/" target="_blank">http://www.fh-muenchen.de/</a>)</font><div>
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