2022/08/05 by Tom Scholte, Ben Sweeting · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Cybernetics and Technology in Society #Information Systems Theories and Implementation #University-Industry-Government Innovation Models
paper · doi:10.1002/sres.2891
openalex publication_date 2022/08/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Across the decades since its founding, the field of cybernetics has, at times, engaged in uncritical evangelising regarding the scope of both its explanatory power and its emancipatory promise. Yet, even at the height of the post-WWII scientific and technological optimism in which cybernetics was founded and to which it contributed, Norbert Wiener (1950) struck a cautionary tone, warning of the social upheaval that this field might unleash through its transformative potential, particularly within the realm of the automatization of human labour and decision making. Wiener's concerns speak to present challenges. The mutual embeddedness of so many of the world's citizens within electronic communication infrastructures is one of cybernetics' legacies for good and ill. While what is still sometimes called cyber-space has enabled countless new possibilities, it has also afforded various forms of oppression. Examining the information science behind issues such as income inequality and racial profiling, a number of books by eminent scholars of communications have exposed how human blind spots embedded within ‘algorithms of oppression’ (Noble, 2018) serve as ‘weapons of math destruction’ (O'Neil, 2016) that are ‘automating inequality’ (Eubanks, 2018). We live in a world that cybernetics has wrought. In what ways might cyberneticians respond? From the 1970s, the focus of cybernetics moved towards primarily social rather than technological contexts, leading to the development of various forms of reflexive thinking where cybernetics is used to interrogate itself. Contemporary cyberneticians have begun to bring these reflexive practices back to the context of technology, criticising the ‘algorithmic paradigm’ (Fantini van Ditmar, 2016) as obscuring human agency, falsely simulating objectivity and obstructing conversation. While these concerns have been circulating through the cybernetics community, and elsewhere, for some time, they were highlighted and brought together in a galvanising manner by Klaus Krippendorff's (2019) presentation ‘Agency, Algorithms, and New Forms of Oppression, and How Cybernetics Might Respond’, given at the 2019 Conference of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). Krippendorff characterised ‘agency’ as the ability to make distinctions and to act upon the differences they create. Conversely, ‘oppression’ is the experience of being entrapped and unable to exercise agency. Leaning on the work of some of the writers cited above, Krippendorff traced a history of the ongoing tendency to surrender human agency to algorithmically driven technologies in exchange for greater convenience, with humans entrapping themselves within the distinctions implied by those algorithms rather than being able to draw, and act upon, distinctions of their own. Krippendorff notes that each algorithm was created by humans with their own narratives who are giving instructions by way of the algorithms they create. While someone might colloquially remark that a computer told them something, computers do not tell anyone anything. They only report the conclusions resulting from a set of instructions in which the distinctions made by the algorithms' authors are embedded but hidden from view. It is those embedded distinctions within which people then act, rather than their own, creating a state of oppression. After Krippendorff concluded their presentation with a call to cyberneticians to take responsibility for the algorithmic world that their discipline has enabled, Scholte enthusiastically approached Krippendorff with the notion that what they were proposing was a ‘critical cybernetics’. Krippendorff enthusiastically agreed and has continued to develop their thinking along these lines under that banner in subsequent presentations (Krippendorff, 2021a, 2021b). Scholte's proffer of the critical cybernetics moniker was inspired by their reflections upon overlaps with, and significant differences between, the traditions of critical theory, most often associated with the Frankfurt School and its intellectual descendants, and the second-order cybernetic sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann (1995). The most substantial difference setting them apart is that the former is already grounded in, committed to, and operating within the distinctions drawn by Marxist theory, while the latter has its basis in the radical constructivism of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's biology of cognition. This allows Luhmann's type of second-order observation to escape critical theory's restriction to a critique of capitalist modernity and the particular sets of distinctions generating its normative patterns. Through its engagement with George Spencer Brown's (1969) Laws of Form, Luhmann's brand of systems theory provides a conceptual apparatus for digging deeper into the basal operation of drawing any and all observational distinctions and tracing the emergence and consequences of the patterns generated by any logical code. Such conceptual tools can also be found in Louis Kauffman's (2017) work on reflexive domains. Participatory arts methods have also been developed to facilitate greater second-order observation of our distinctions and their consequences on an individual level (Scholte, 2020b). To move from these and other modes of doing second-order cybernetics to an explicitly critical cybernetics entails the development of methodological tools for a more outward focussed interrogation of distinctions that, through their instantiation in legislation and various normative social practices, are consequentially binding upon large numbers of people. At the same time, such methodologies must preserve the principle of observer dependence at their core and resist proffering their own normative standards based upon some imaginary objectivity making it possible to uncover the right way of doing things. Werner Ulrich's (1983, 2005) critical systems heuristics could serve as a powerful example of such an approach, while there is also potential in reworking ideas from second-order cybernetics in support of this task (e.g., Perera, 2020, 2021; Sweeting, 2019, 2022). When we organised a discussion on the possibilities of critical cybernetics (in this case, particularly focussed upon technological concerns) within the 2021 conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, we turned to Krippendorff as a key member of the panel. We also extended invitations to Paul Pangaro, whose recent activities responding to ‘the pandemic of today's AI’ (Pangaro, 2020, 2021) seemed, to us, to be addressing concerns similar to Krippendorff's, and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar whose work on ‘smart’ technology and the internet of things posed many questions, since echoed by Krippendorff, well before the current ‘critical’ conversation began (Fantini van Ditmar, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). While Krippendorff and Pangaro were able to join us for a lively session, unfortunately, time zone differences made Fantini van Ditmar's participation too difficult to achieve. Within the discussion, Pangaro cautioned against unnecessary terminology, arguing that cybernetics (in its second-order dimension at least) already engages criticality, rendering the addition of the qualifier ‘critical’ redundant. For Krippendorff, however, cybernetics has historically been practised in an uncritical manner, such as in eliding differences between humans and machines or in its enthusiastic embraces of new technological possibilities. In a linguistically focussed argument typical of their work, Krippendorff maintained that the founders and followers of cybernetics have failed to sufficiently interrogate its underlying metaphors and that, like in any domain, the internal logics of those grounding metaphors will consistently produce the recurring patterns that define the domain. Reflecting on the panel and subsequent discussions, it is possible to identify at least two senses of criticality in play: (1) the interrogation of cybernetics' limitations, blind spots and legacies, so that it can be practised with critical awareness; and (2) the potential of cybernetic modes of thinking and acting as forms of critique. We see these as complementary, with the former being a foundation for the possibility of the latter. However, there is plenty of reason to tread carefully—after all, it is precisely those processes that are well-intentioned that can too easily escape critical attention. For instance, the reflexive interrogation of language, metaphors and distinctions can challenge received assumptions, but there are also social consequences that follow from focusing primarily on language at the expense of embodiment, and these need to be examined in turn. Moreover, while cybernetics' history offers numerous alternatives to the algorithmic paradigm, there is an important difference between using these as possibilities with which to critique the present and simply asserting that they would have been a better path to follow. We see the development of an explicitly critical cybernetics as part of a wider project of moving cybernetics beyond merely explanatory theory (whether scientific or philosophical) and towards more active and situated modes of engagement with the world. Indeed, this was the intention of the 2019 ASC conference mentioned above, which we organised with Pille Bunnell (Scholte, 2020a; Sweeting & Scholte, 2020). While the renewed engagement with technology in the discussions summarised above might be thought of as returning to earlier focuses of cybernetics, there are also resonances with the motivation behind the inflection away from technology that came with the development of second-order cybernetics. Speaking to the ASC in 1971, Heinz von Foerster (2003) argued that cyberneticians had a responsibility to address their ‘competencies’ towards the social challenges of the time. While cybernetics subsequently fragmented as a discipline, it also went on to develop new and/or deeper engagements with domains such as the creative arts, design, family therapy, feminisms and pedagogy. Given that today's technological crises are characterised by their entanglements in social, ecological, political, mental and bodily relationships, Foerster's argument can be inverted: It is the competencies from these domains that are needed in addressing the challenges of technology. Might cybernetics take its transdisciplinarity seriously enough to bring the insights gained in its engagements with creative, critical and therapeutic disciplines back to its earlier focuses in technology and beyond? And in what ways could such a return go beyond commentary, intervening to make new worlds possible? Whereas second-order cybernetics has often become bogged down in repetitive explanations of its key commitments, perhaps viewed this way it can finally have the mission, or at the very least the research agenda, that it has always lacked and seemed to be in search of. The critical conversation continues …