The Lost History of Cybernetics

June and Kyle from the General intellect Unit podcast join Mia to explain what cybernetics is, its history in the Chilean revolution, and how we can use it to build a better socialist world.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Cybernetics. All right, this is this is me Christopher Wong,
realizing that I have done like sixteen consecutive actual real
introductions and that if I keep doing them, everyone's going
to expect that I do a real introduction every time
instead of like randomly yelling something. So yeah, well, welcome
to it could happen here. I am trying to make
my job function as it should and not professionalize it.

(00:29):
Um and this is this is a podcast about things
that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about
things that are good and how, in fact there can
be a society beyond this one, and to talk about
some of the shades of what that could look like.
I have with me the co host of the General
Intellect Unit, Kyle and June, which is as a podcast

(00:51):
on the Emancipation Network. That is so this is the
tagline the podcast of the Cybernetic Marxists. I am. I
am very excited. Yeah, it's it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely,
thank you for coming on. Um yeah, I guess okay,
you should start at the the very very beginning, because

(01:12):
I don't think most people know any of this. What
is cybernetics? Right? Um? So cybernetics is I guess a
term that comes from what is it the kaibernetes right, steering, uh,
the idea of steering a boat um, so using your

(01:34):
ore to navigate the waters um. And so essentially it
is a science of control. And that sounds really scary,
but what it means is that it's that kind of
connection between the steers person, the or the boat, their

(02:01):
body and the water around them and getting all of
those things in sync in such a way that the
steers person is going where they want to go, the
ship or the boat doesn't capsize and they don't lose
the ore um. And so that's what control means. It's

(02:23):
a kind of balancing, a kind of connection between the
organism and the environment in such a way that it
can survive and thrive. And that's what cybernex is focused on. Yeah,
the thing I love about them, the steersman metaphor, is

(02:44):
that like it's all about it's controlling the sense of regulation.
But also like very importantly in cybernetics, it's almost always
self regulation m hmm, because like the one of the
kind of core principles. Again, like the because the term
usually calls to mind this like kind of terminator like UM,
like cyber Gothic kind of domination. It's actually not with

(03:07):
the field is about at all. It's UM because one
of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any
given system UM, the only thing that can really control
it is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems.
So that like UM, like the kind of like top
down external domination of an organism that we all fear
is kind of like actually, if you look at the

(03:28):
cyber sybanetics literature, that's not not actually really possible because
the the the the external controller would never have enough
complexity to match what the organism is capable of. UM.
And you know, organisms are self regulating systems. The steersman
with his boat is a self regulating system that like
regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its

(03:51):
course that's directed towards its goal. UM. So it's it's
that's why it's so important. I think that's why we
think it's so important for the left and like people
who are concerned with these like you know, visions of
a politics of autonomy and liberation, they really need to
look at this stuff because it turns out there kind
of is a science of like autonomous, self guiding organic systems.

(04:14):
You know, yeah, no terminator here, yes, and yeah, I
mean you know when you see uh, scary videos of
militarized robots and they're learning to you know, jump and
fire weapons and all that kind of stuff. There certainly

(04:36):
is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind of
domain application of cybernetics. Rather than defining what cybernetics is,
it's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is
what cybernetics is. Yeah, yeah, that that's that That's that's
probably worth emphasizing, right that, Like um, um, cybernetics in

(04:59):
some ways is a kind of like out of fashion
these days. Like it it kind of evolved into systems
thinking and like, um, I guess a lot of its
lessons got kind of absorbed in general. But we find
there's great value in going back to them, the kind
of originators and like focusing on that field. It's like
we on the show, we got into the cybernetics angle

(05:20):
by reading Andrew Pickering in his book with the Cybernetic Brain,
in which um, he kind of acknowledged that like there's
he kind of split it into two, like there's American
cybernetics like which had that kind of like um dour
kind of military domination sort of flavor to it. That
like it's kind of an earned reputation there. But Pickering
was more concerned with British cybernetics. Um, it's like a

(05:41):
lot of British thinkers that and it had a very
different flavor there where it was more open ended. It
was kind of had more of a focus on kind
of liberation than like politics and stuff. And in fact,
some of those like Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist,
wrote an anarchist um like journals and stuff like that, um.
And for him, like those two things went tant in

(06:02):
glove right like that, like um liberatory politics as like um,
the politics of like human flourishing, like as human human
beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and
of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing.
To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics.
There was no real distinction there. It was just like

(06:23):
these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you
lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff.
You know, it's like there's there's plenty. I don't know
who am I thinking of here? Like them that the Tally,
that guy with the like black Swan sort of stuff,
like he's biggest system and stuff, but like isn't so
much um isn't so much into the liberatory politics. I

(06:44):
guess you know, a lot of that angle is kind
of lost. Yeah, And I think this is awesome. This
is you know, this is sort of a product of
I guess the broader idelogical course that's going on while
sort of cyberige comes in and out of fashion. I
think I think we should go back a bit to
the beginning to sort of situate this because I know,
like when when I, like before I ever did any reading,

(07:07):
What's ever next? Like my immediate assumption was that it
was it was, you know, this, this is the thing
that was entirely just based off of computers, right that
this is like this is and that's not really true
from might understandtanding of us. Can we go back and
sort of like talk about where this came from a
bit and how it's sort of moves over this over

(07:29):
certain sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you can kind
of trace it back in it's sort of European origins
to UM. You could probably say Hagel Uh, you know

(07:49):
his his move towards like UM understanding being not just
as substance but as subject. I think is moved towards
a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole
system as a holistic entity as opposed to just an

(08:13):
individual interacting with an external environment. UM. And you can
also see this come up in say there was a
ecologist X skill in the German ecologist in the early
twentieth century, I believe, who was trying to understand, you know,

(08:36):
the organism in its environment. The sort of precursors to
ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics UM. And
then when you get to the kind of development of
cybernetics as a science or as a discipline UM in

(08:57):
the mid twentieth century, it's not exactly about computing, it's UM.
It's more about balancing a machine with its environment. So UM.
Sort of prototypical UM machine of this kind was the

(09:21):
servo mechanism, which was used to help guide a like
an anti aircraft gun in shooting down in any aircraft,
so making sure it tracks properly with the target and
doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in
operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object

(09:47):
that has trouble tracking what it's a very fast moving target.
I mean, you can even think back to like the
you know, in World War One, when they discovered, hey,
we could actually like sing chronize the timing of the
propeller and the timing of our gun on the front
of this plane so that our guns aren't destroying our

(10:07):
propellers and shooting and we're we're shooting our own planes
down with our guns when we're dog fighting, right, Like
it's uh, yeah, that's the system's understanding, right, So that's um,
that's that's Norbert Leaner, right and working on the automated
gun turret stuff. And that's he coins the term cybernetics

(10:27):
to like um given name to the thing he was
starting to discover. And it's like he was kind of
pulling together a bunch of rights there, and like one
of those kind of important insights is that like, um,
like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and
accuracy without like basically making the gun turret an agent
of its own that like and the like the turret

(10:48):
and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination
would achieve their goal. But like there was there was
there's something strange and spooky about that. And I think
that then this feedback mechanism in inside the terrist gives
it a sort of weird agency that UM combines with
the agency off the gunner to link going to the
whole system towards it goal. UM. Yes, And what it

(11:12):
ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space
where the distinction between human and machine UH starts to
become ambiguous because they both start to possess they're both
understood to have a kind of agency, they're both understood

(11:33):
to have kinds of like functions, And then you kind
of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea,
and you can start to bring in all of these
different ideas from like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from
ecology UH, and they all start to interact in this

(11:57):
domain of cyber addicts. And like the core, the core
idea of them that kind of ties everything together is
that of feedback UM. So like weener realizes that what
he needs to do achieve this goal is is a
feedback mechanism I am. That would is error correcting feedback, right,
like if the if the gun is slightly too far
to the left, it corrects itself right words and so on. Um.

(12:20):
But that as you said, that that connects across all
sorts of things, right, Like you start to realize that's
present everywhere in ecology, in neurology, in UM, like that
learning is based on feedback, you know. So it's really
funny to read to read Norburt Wiener like in the
fifties basically describing what would become machine learning, and he's
just like he just off the cuff, is like, yeah,

(12:43):
like if you could, if a machine could like UM,
or if if any system could just like UM analyze
its own performance and then feedback onto itself, it would
it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to.
And he's like, yeah, he turns out he was completely correct.
And that's that's where kind of like gets into like
you get a sure thinkers like Ross Ashby who was

(13:03):
UM and like other folks like were in in and
around psychiatry. We were like really interested in how the
brain worked. And that's that's the other thing that feeds
into like cybernetics is like, um, it's It's why Pickering
called his book the Cybernetic Brains, because like the brain
and nervous systems show up so much in that field,
right that, Like the brain being a kind of learning

(13:25):
and adapt an adapt adaptation machine attached to the body
or whatever, and like, um, yeah, I don't know, there's
there's something fascinating there, and like, um, the I mean
there's something kind of possibly troubling and kind of melting
down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever,
but like there's also something very compelling and just like
recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels,

(13:48):
right that, Like um, like you get similar behaviors and
similar kind of outcomes, and then you know, it turns
out like you can kind of do a science on
these things and and come up with an even better
planage my frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes,
and so it is in a sense about computers. But

(14:09):
the computers are really just understood to act like a
kind of brain, and that's connected to a nervous system
which is connected to you know, like actuators of some kinds,
some kinds of like machines that actually do things in
the world. So it's not about like say computer science specifically.

(14:36):
It's more about, like, well, computers are a useful way
to do cybernetic design because they can act as a
control system and they're flexible. It's not that this is
about computers really, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like the you
brought you brought up something very important there that like, um,

(14:57):
in all cases of like cybernetics like thing, the systems
that we're considering are not like isolated like braining a
box kind of things. They're all the things that are
directly engaged with a world, um like. So it's it's
it's not that kind of like monadic kind of rationalism
of like computation just happening in a box somewhere and
like per perfect intelligence, right, that kind of the kind

(15:18):
of stuff these are always, like the separantations, are always
working with systems that were engaged in real time emergent situations, UM.
And because of that, they rapidly kind of like acknowledge
that for so many of these important like systems, the
only way to figure out what it's going to do
is to let it do it UM because you can't

(15:39):
like pre compute all the possible outcomes. You know, of
these like very sticky and complex real world situations, the
best way to figure out what it's going to do
is to let it do it and watch yes. And
I think I think that's an interesting sort of like
if if you look at where a lot of the
sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort

(16:02):
of like manipulate so side the technology have gone, it's like, yeah,
you get like like blockchain smart contracts, and it's like
the blockchain smart contract is like, Okay, we are going
to think of literally everything that could possibly happen an
attempt to put it in like a very small amount
of code, and if anything like literally anything at all happens,

(16:23):
that uh, you know that we didn't expect where now
everyone is now screwed because we have just made this
thing im beautable and put it in such a way
that we can't change it. So I think that, yeah,
that's a I think this is a useful sort of
I mean corrective just just in the way that we've
we've we've now like like we've gone backwards, like we've
we've gotten into this place where you instead of like

(16:44):
we need to let these systems play out, we need
to let them control themselves. Have gotten to like we
think that we can actually just sort of like you know,
turn turn the entire system into code that we can
predict ahead of time and have the basis of some
sort of social system off of Yeah, I mean it's
I think it's something that like the serpetitions and like

(17:06):
maybe Pickering would describe as like a kind of perversity
of modern thought, like the modern mindset like that that
kind of like rational like um kind of mindset right
like um, and like to the serpenetitions that that whole
thing with like the blockchain stuff, will be just truly
laughable because it's immediate, it's immediately obvious to them that

(17:27):
the problem there is like okay, proposing we're going to
use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process
or whatever, smart contracts, whatever, and it's like that thing
has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes.
Because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety.
There's a there's a there's like a law that's at
the house of cybernatics called Ashby's law of requisite variety.

(17:49):
And in short, it basically states that given a system, um,
the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating
it is itself, because a regulator knee needs as much
variety as the thing it's regulating if it's gonna like
actually succeeded it um. And so that's that's the kind
of thing that nudges everyone towards, like like when you

(18:11):
get to someone like Stafford Beer is his whole model
of like organization pushes all a lot of the intelligence
downwards to the to the bottom layers, because there is
basically the people on the ground on the shop floor
are the people who are best informed to actually deal
with their own situation. And that's that sounds like a
banal observation, but like it for Beer that was actually
quite a step forward to like just admit that like

(18:33):
trying to trying to like in his context, it was
like often the organization of a firm, like at our company,
like trying to manage a company from the boardroom is
just fucking ludicrous, Like no nobody there has enough information
to act on They're all dumbasses anyway. So for Beer,
it was just like this is where it starts to
get interesting, and it connects to the politics, right that

(18:54):
like for one of these scientists just observing reality and
like you know, using you know, pretty pretty good stray
intuitions and like scientific frameworks, just looking at it and
going like, oh, it is obviously the case that the
best way for society to organize his bottom up self organization. Um,
And that like it's not just a moral point, it's
actually a technical point as well. Then like, um, these

(19:17):
these top down, bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not
only morally objectionable, they're also technically inferior to the kind
of like cyber communism we want to institute. Yeah, and
I have like one off one of my what if
one of my favorite stories about So I worked as
a maintenance worker for a while and one day my
boss was like, there was some problem with a sink.

(19:38):
And my boss was like, no, we don't need the plumbers.
I can do this. And so he goes in there
and it's it's what it's like, It's it's like a
sink in like a building, right, So it's it's just
one of those things where there's like a pipe that
connects to the top of the sink to like the wall,
and he goes, Okay, here, look at this. I'm gonna
I'm gonna turn this valve and this is gonna turn
the water off. And what he instead does is he
take he takes the pipe off of the wall, and

(20:00):
just like a torrent of water is just now shooting
out of this pipe because he has removed the thing. Yeah,
he's removed the pipe from the wall. This is you know,
this is this is why I think like, yeah, go
this this, this, this this, you know this this is
like a particularly funny example of how these sort of
top down management systems. And this guy like like used

(20:23):
to be a maintenance guy, right, but he just like
must a plumber, and so you know, and he accepts
into it and he's like, oh no, no, no no, no, no no,
hold on, I know, I know how this system works.
It's going to be fine. And it just there's a guys,
the guys are of water has so much force. It's
like it's like pushing our tool cart across the room.
It's like a fighter hydrants coming out this wall. I

(20:56):
wanted to I guess beers is an interesting way to
go to go into the sort of the politics of
what this actually looks like do you want to talk
about and I know I briefly talked about this in
an episode in The Liberalism a while back, but do
you want to go into sort of more detail into
what Beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt

(21:17):
because of military coup, to try to implement like a
cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure, um. Yeah,
So Stafford Beer was a UM management consultant UM he

(21:38):
and a cyberneticition. He got his start sort of doing
operations research UM, which is kind of a precursor to
cybernetics UM that is kind of like interested in logistics

(21:59):
and organizing systems UM in the British military UM in
World War Two. And then he came out of that
and became a corporate UH consultant for operations research and
management UM. And so in working in the corporate world UM,

(22:25):
he saw all of the things that were really screwed
up with the status quo UM way of doing business
and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic
power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the

(22:48):
way that managing organizations, according to ORG charts which are
there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all
kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt
to their environments because they get into these kinds of

(23:08):
strange neuroses. Um. And you know, just sort of going
through all of that and more often than not being
unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um
address these problems and just sort of like seeing how

(23:31):
these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of
the broader problems of our society as a whole and
of capitalism, right. Um. And so you know, he had
a basis from his time in India during the Second

(23:53):
World War in uh kind of like contra uh kind
of like you know, Eastern or specifically Indian um, spirituality, yoga,
all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had
a cult countercultural side to his personality. UM. And he
was always doing tinkering strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't

(24:18):
just the straight laced corporate guy. Uh. But it was
a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his
growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start
to develop ideas about how things could be different. And

(24:39):
this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were
happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early seventies. Um, So,
they reached out to him to come and help out
with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary

(25:00):
process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles
of imperialist dependency and create a society that was focused
on the flourishing of workers, uh, and of society as
a whole, as opposed to one that was based on
sort of you know, resource extraction where everything flows to

(25:23):
the top. Yeah, do you want to explain some more
about how that went well? So? Um, yeah, it it
went well and then it went badly, I guess. Um.
But from from from the reading we've done and from
our research, it seems like if basically, if the if
the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill them all, um,

(25:47):
this this would have worked like it was working, and
it was that the project was actually going pretty well.
Explained briefly, what like I think it becomes it's called
product Cyberson, But what exactly like what was it doing? So? Um? So,
like Beer's big kind of innovation is what we call
the viable system model, or VSM and it's a model

(26:07):
that's um it's a model for these like autonomous social
systems that is kind of taking it's I wouldn't say
it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body,
but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology
and neurology and neuroscience and and cybernetics and just kind
of meshing them all together. Um So, basically like it's
like if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous

(26:30):
organs that all take care of their own business, plus
a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into
a workable hole, then you can kind of see the
whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical
and horizontal aspects. Like on the one hand, it has
this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one units
are are well autonomous, more or less like the harror

(26:52):
takes harsh takes care of its own thing. The lungs
take care of their own thing. But then the nervous
system meshes them together in layers so that it can say, oh,
hold on too much oxygen, dial it down a bit,
and then the organs responds dynamically to those those signals, right,
So it's kind of like up down feedback loops, right,
where then the lower levels of the system are the

(27:14):
smart bits that are doing all the important work. But
there's this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system in the
brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all
on the rails. Um So, and importantly it's a kind
of recursive model. So like a human being is an
autonomous unit, and then that it's that unit is composed
of more autonomous units, like the organs and the muscles,

(27:36):
and then each of those is composed of cells which
are autonomous units, and then you know, so on. But
like that latter goes upwards as well, so that like
a team is an autonomous unit composed of human beings,
a firm, or like a department, is a autonomous unit
composed of teams. A firm is composed of departments, like
a secretor is composed of firms. And it's the same

(27:59):
kind of struct or at each layer. Um. So that
the kind of upside there is that like, um, you
don't like you kind of have a unit fairly unifying
like set of principles and like a science for doing
this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at every level,
at every every layer of society. So like in principle,

(28:21):
the sort of like the serbonetic principles that get applied
to cohering members of a team are the same story
principles that get applied to like sectors in an economy. Um,
with the same kind of you know, bottom up kind
of feedback going on as well. Um. So Stafford was
invited to Chile to by the all end A government

(28:43):
in so that was like nineteen seventy, right, Um, that
that that election happens. So he arrived in late nineteen
seventy I think, Um, I mean certain on the timeline,
but we're looking at those those first few years of
the seventies as as the time when this is happening. Yeah, yeah,
I d like it in setting negativity. Yeah. So it's

(29:04):
towards the end of that year that he's he's invited
and he's basically kind of given the task of like, hey,
do all this stuff but with this entire economy, and
he's like, yeah, I'm sure cool. Um so puts together
Project cybersen Um and there's kind of long story there
of like and them building out this kind of infrastructure
and like it's it's all highly experimental UM and highly tensive.

(29:25):
Like they one of the big problems they run into
is that like they don't have very much in the
way of like hardware, especially because they're under embargo. So
they had like UM a pretty what what at the
time was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they ran
the around the software on UM. But like step step
one was like UM installing this like huge communications network

(29:46):
amongst all the factories and UM like setting like the
workers committees and stuff would feed information into it and
it would kind of again this like feedback thing where
you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them,
and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, route
some of your product over to this this factory and
it will be better used there. And then you know,

(30:07):
you guys over there turn up this dial. You've turned
down this dial. So and then if that plan doesn't
quite work out, then you've got another layer of feedback
tomorrow to say, Okay, that plan didn't quite work here's
an adjusted plan. So it's it's just like both bottom
up and top down sort of loop of feedback. That's
like I think the phrase pickering is is reciprocal adaptation,

(30:30):
where at the economy and its firms and its workers
are all kind of adapting to each other in real
time in a kind of in a in a full system. Um. Uh, yes, anything, no,
that I mean, that's that's essentially what Cyber said was
it was a system designed too largely I think at

(30:56):
first supplement the mare kit, although Beer later realizes that like, actually,
if you have a good system of this kind, you
probably don't need a market. Um. But essentially it was like, Okay,

(31:16):
our economy has been one that has been built around
dependence two uh, you know, especially the United States, and
it's been organized in that way, and we need to
reorganize the economy both to promote the well being of
the workers, the autonomy of the workers, realized the ideals

(31:38):
of socialism in that way, and also to create a
system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism.
And so having this reciprocal adaptation um, having systems in
place to connect things that were previously disconnected would allow

(31:59):
you to move in that way of increasing autonomy and
increasing freedom. Um. And that was generally the idea of
Cyber sin Um. Yes, yeah, and there was something very interesting,
Like when we were reading the reissue of his book
Brain of the Firm, where he has a section the
end that that documents this whole experience in Chile. Um,

(32:22):
there's a really interesting parts where towards the end of
it he's like and this is like getting up towards
the coupe where he's like, um, he and the other
cyber sin operatives like on the people are putting this together,
realize that like the workers and like people in towns
are are like just on their own just like using
this stuff and these kind of principles to just like

(32:43):
abolish the value form basically like but notably without the
involvement from above, like as in Beer and Company stumble
upon this just happening where they're like, oh my god,
they're just they're just dismantling the market, and it's like
it's all just kind of happening. And that's that there
was something really wonderful to that. Then, Like it it

(33:04):
indicated like there was there really wants something to it
that like you could like as in people working, people
could use these tools and this like new way of
organizing themselves. Two just like liquidate market relations and and
wage relations like spun spontaneously. But it's it's a spontaneity

(33:24):
that's that's not really it does. It's it feels very
different from the kind of spontaneity you often get in
like the way Left to sort of like anarchists talk
about it often like the kind of spontaneity is like
a magical sort of thing that is like where freedom
just arrives from out of nowhere. But this this was
like installing infrastructure to enable freedom and then it actually
kind of happening until the fascists showed up. You know. Yeah,

(33:46):
what I think is really interesting about it is that
so you know, you have you have like you have
this sort of central control center from which a lot
of stuff is being run. But you know, yeah, it's
it's it's it's a weird system because it's try to
link together like a lot of different kinds of firms.
Like you have something saying in private firms, but you
have a lot of you have a lot of state

(34:07):
run firms. You also have firms that throughout this whole process,
people like workers just taking over factories. They're setting up
these sort of like call them industrial cordons. I think
I'm remembering my Spanish rights, like yeah, they they you know,
they start sitting up their own institutions and it's it's
this becomes this way is sort of like networking these
groups together. And the thing that's the other thing is

(34:28):
it's interesting is you know, so you have you have
them on the one hand, like just getting rid of
markets and going like okay, well we can just coordinate
production through this and like not have markets. And then
the second thing they do is it's the freedom immediately
becomes political in the sense that like, yeah, like one
of one of the things they do they there that
that's what's going on in this period is that and
there's Chile has a very very right wing like it's

(34:52):
basically like the even today it's like it's like really
like one of the only like union like huge unions
left in Chile is the truckers unions, and those guys
are extremely right wing. There in this period of being
backed by the CIA, they're being trained by f l
c i O as I say like every episode, but
like yeah, and and they're you know, they're intentionally doing strikes,
trying to oversaw the government by blocking production, and you know,

(35:15):
like the workers are like, okay, hold on, we can
just use this symenetic system to figure out where these
blocks are, figure out where materials need to move through,
and we can just you know, we can just stop
the kind of revolution. We can just sort of like
we can we can just we can just fight our
way through it. And and it's interesting, is like this happens,

(35:35):
and so then that that like the original plan of
using sort of of using these truckers is like the
sort of right wing like the first attempt fails, and
once that fails, it's like they have to go to
the military and the coup eventually works. It's it's hard.
It's hard to resist a coup outbrans, isn't Yeah. Yeah,

(35:55):
the thing with the trucker strike is not like yeah,
it's you can very well imagine like the CIA and
stuff into a thinking that this is what will do.
That's right, this will sell it up, but not realizing
that the workers actually had in their hands a like
vastly more sophisticated system for out maneuvering them. Yeah, and
that system works like a charm, like like clockwork, just
like and even like you read the accounts from this thing,

(36:18):
like both in eating Medina's cybernetic revelation areas and in
Beer's on account, and there's like the sense that was
actually kind of spooky and weird. But I'm like even
the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out
that way, and that like they were surprised at how
effective it is, but that it gets back to the
core of cyberneticsent like feedback is weirdly effective at getting
things done. You know, these like highly tuned feedback systems,

(36:40):
they give you a lot of power to out maneuver
this comebacks, you know. Yeah, And I think in some sense,
like this is like people talk a lot about Chile
is sort of like the sort of foreclosed future of
like antellectual and archetic socialism, But like, I don't think
that was the potential of the moment. The potential of
the moment was this. And it's interesting thing to me
that well, because Beers kind of traces out a political

(37:04):
history that never quite happened, which is so okay. One
of the one of the sort of big political trends
over the course of the twentie century is you have
all these people who were sort of like they they
basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during June World War two,
because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine,
and then you know, some of them go into some

(37:25):
of them, you know, essentially stay on in the government
during planning stuff. Beers like goes into corporate world, and
the corporations are also you know, they start doing they
also start doing this planning stuff. And you know, but
Beers is interesting because he he pivots, like he pivots
in a direction that the world doesn't, which is he
pivots towards. Okay, the solution to sort of you know,

(37:46):
the kind of like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems,
whether whether they be like the corporate versions of it
or the sort of like state administered like total economic
planning from the top up down versions is oh well, okay,
we need to have planning from the bottom up and
distributed planning. Yeah. Yeah. And he, like everyone involved with

(38:09):
Iverson gets murdered. The only reason Beer survives because he
wasn't in the country. And it's it's just really interesting,
like like it's just kind of not a story. Everybody
got murdered, but some of them did, and some of
them were in exile Uh, some of them were imprisoned. Yeah,
it was, it was, it was, you know, it was

(38:30):
not a good time. Beer got out early and he
knew things that we're getting we're getting bad, and everybody
around him knew things were getting bad. Um. Yeah, like
he was on him. He was on like a kind
of I guess, like it's almost diplomatic mission to like
try and get some of the blockade stuff. Like he
was trying to. I think he was trying to flog
like a container ship full of iron or something. You know,
it was shopping shopping it around to try and trying

(38:52):
to help out the likely in mine to the world.
That's what it was. Yeah. But um, yeah, it's m
hold on, I had a thought there. Um. And then
like after afterwards, um, like Beer spent a fair bit
of time like trying to catch his his comrades out
of out of Chile and get them out of prison
and got the Gottam resettled in um in the UK

(39:15):
and so on and yeah America as well. M hum.
But yeah, I think that Um, this is like that's
a very interesting point about the the you know, the
sort of the real value of this moment being that

(39:36):
movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society, not towards
UH neoliberal engineering of markets and UH sort of reinforcement
of private dictatorships, um, but towards a kind of like

(39:57):
holistic control system that is still informed by you know,
the principles of autonomy and UH and and and science. UM.
It's it's definitely like an answer to the crisis of
the seventies which was not taken up. And in that
sense it is a foreclosed future, but of course one

(40:20):
that we can take lessons from now. Yeah, I think
there's something else. It's very interesting me about this because
you know, if if you look at how like if
if you look at how the socialist block sort of
responds to the crisis and seventies, and you know, they're
sort of decaying the eighties, like they have this option

(40:40):
available to them, right, they have they have they have
made a lot of ways, They have a lot they
have a lot better technology than with the lands are
using that have more resources, and every single one of
them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions,
you know, instead of I think it has to do
with there there there's a line. This this is this

(41:01):
is like Slightly before this, there's a line in um
a debate Maw and Joe and Li are having in
I think it's seven. This is like the peak of
the sort of workers led part of the culture revolution,
like the works have taken Shanghai, and Maw and Joe
and I are talking and they're they're trying to figure out,
like what are they gonna do? You know, they they've

(41:24):
set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable. And there's
there's this line where they're talking about, Okay, well, if
if we give if they give them, if we give
them a commune, they have to have free elections, and
Joe and l is like, well, that would be anarchism.
And then they're just like, oh god, we can't do that,
and they never do in the end, you know, the
end result of this whole sort of that whole sort

(41:46):
of processes that trying to like instead of doing, instead
of sort of like devolving any level of control down
to like any of the workers who are doing things,
they're like, Okay, well we'll just try to we'll just
you know, we'll we'll we'll do capitalism instead, Well, will
you will? You know, we'll create markets, will sort of
like maintain our firm structure, but you know, the party

(42:12):
countries into it. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's this, it's
it's a very interesting thing to me too, because like
there have been other like you know, like they're like
lots of socialist parties have sort of various like degrees
of radicalness have come to power like since nineteen seventy three,
and to my knowledge, not a single one of them

(42:33):
has ever picked any of this stuff back up, like
even even you know, like like the most radical sort
of like like you know, like like like early Chavas
never like touches this, like even like I don't like
I I don't I don't think like I don't think
the easy Lends ever done it, Like I mean, they
have fatological issues there, but like it's it's it's it's

(42:55):
interesting to me that like basically no one who's ever
taken power sense has ever attempted it again m h.
Which again is changed because this is you know, one
of one of the sort of like this you would think,
this is like this is at least a potential solution
to sort of this this this this problem of the

(43:19):
stagnation and sort of collapse of the old sort of adults.
There's a plenty of economies, but no one takes it up.
And I'm just to think what you too think about that?
Like why this doesn't happen? Yeah, there's a I think
there's an interesting dimension of Beer's work in Chile that
kind of I think um might provide some answers to that,

(43:41):
which is that you know, he he was in charge
of setting up Cyberson, and Cyberson was kind of a
system for optimizing the economy, but he had other concerns
and other briefs that he was working on at the

(44:03):
same time. And what he came to realize was that
there was a layer of management and experts in the
organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort
of work on a Cyberson that was designed to improve

(44:29):
production numbers, but they had real resistance to the idea
of worker autonomy because of the because of of of
wanting to maintain their their job privileges, and because of
the prejudices of their their habitats. I guess you could

(44:51):
say that what they learned when they were educated as
engineers or managers or whatever, and you know, where the
people who know things the workers don't know things, they
shouldn't be in charge that kind of thing. And so
he starts to he starts to realize that in order
to really make cybersen effective as an engine for autonomy,

(45:13):
what needs to happen is that um, sort of what
you are describing with the Shanghai commune Uh, the the
workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves and implement
them through autonomous action. UM. And so he starts to

(45:36):
try to kind of like right up, like right pamphlets
that can be distributed to the workers so that the
information that he has as theory is not being filtered
through a bureaucracy but is instead, like you know, involved
in an educational process of self mode mobilization in among

(46:00):
the workers. UM. And so you know this really uh
doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does
mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of
management and expert knowledge, because in Beer's conception of management,

(46:24):
management is something that is done by anyone who has
the power to affect an organization or change an organization.
So if the workers are able to change their organizations,
they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.
For beer, management is a function. It's not a person.

(46:46):
In Beer's ideal world, like management would just be these
like decision nodes that emerge among among workers. I can
like the management. A manager would never be a person.
A manager would be like a kind of structural information
processing like, um, think that happens among people. Um. Yeah,

(47:07):
and so like when you see in for example, the
USS are the option of creating a planning network, a
computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. Um, it's
basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be

(47:30):
very very expensive for them to develop. It would be
on the order of of doing you know, their nuclear
weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. Uh. And two
it is simply at odds with the system of like planning,

(47:54):
the command economy that had that had grown up in
the wake of the revolution. Right, it's simply at odds
with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners,
all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes
it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power.
And so I think that when you look at the

(48:17):
socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I
think it's because they it would require the people in
power to really rethink their entire role and identity as
members of society. Um. Yeah, and then there's a kind
of there's a dreadful irony really and that like it's

(48:40):
it's Stafford me or somebody who comes out of like
bourgeois like management stuff and is deep in the pocket
for that he's the one who actually sincerely pursues the
most radical projects in like the socialist history that we've
ever seen, vastly more radical in its intent, and it's
like kind of it's the beginnings, it's impact than anything

(49:01):
any Leninist has ever done, and it's basically because he
actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people,
and your average Leninist just doesn't, you know, like again
like to go back to the example from earlier, right
that like when when under pressure, they will they'll do
capitalism before they'll do anything that even resembles um autonomy

(49:22):
for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the
right thing. You know. That does speak to the character
of the thing, and it's it's it's it's it's it's
that class interest basically off those kind of functionaries, right, like,
and the thing that makes Beery different is that he
sincerely actually wanted to do it, you know, and the
worker's autonomy thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him,
you know. Yeah, and when when he starts to come

(49:44):
up with these ideas of like thinking like, okay, like
an economic planning system is not adequate, we need to
go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the
social body, he he quickly finds that he's being marginal
iised within those circles of planners in the Chilean government

(50:05):
because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about.
They're actually quite concerned about this idea. Even if I
end would be, you know, all for it, right, because
he was he was very sincere about his interest in
an autonomy. UM, there were still many people around beer

(50:26):
who did not particularly like the idea. UM. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think if we look at it, you know,
in terms of why hasn't it happened since then, in
in all of these intervening decades, I think you also
have to look at, um the international system and the

(50:50):
way that countries figure into it, because we have all
of these UM neoliberal structures of management and organization that
were created in the eighties and nineties and early odds uh,
that a socialist government has to contend with if they

(51:11):
are to embark on a program like this, which isn't
to say it's impossible, but what it does mean is
that there are all these sort of um, highly complex
regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our
societies right now, and it is the path of least

(51:36):
resistance to not attempt to engage in a in in
uh an effort to kind of you know, let the
market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization, um,
because all of these structures are there and you have
to kind of like root them out and replace them

(51:58):
with something new, as opposed to having all these ready
mades of what's already there, the market centered solutions, the
the the kind of autocratic solutions, um, you know, all
of the management systems that have been developed with an
auto cracy in mind instead of something that is truly

(52:20):
democratic and uh kind of self just dating mm hmm.
And I think as well, and there's there's a kind
of other thing that like, um, like the left has
been kind of in a very weak position for quite
a while now, like since then, since the seventies, right,
and like, um, yes, like we're we're just we're just

(52:43):
starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing.
But also like I think there was this kind of
long depressive phase at the end of them, at the
crossing in the centuries right, where a lot of the
like left is kind of and this this this actually
gets into like why some of the reasons why we
started general into lat unit that like we felt like
we needed to bring this kind of like systems thinking

(53:06):
and like technical seriousness back to the table after the
kind of weird depressive phases where like you know, like
say the alter globalization stuff for the occupy stuff, where
people kind of take an almost explicitly anti strategic kind
of turn and like a kind of anti technical turn.
You know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like
oh my god, like capital and it's it's it's technology,

(53:28):
is is hegemonic? Like how the fund are we ever
going to get out of this? Like it would have
been heard to make an argument for a scientific and
like technical kind of fusion with um with the humanist
kind of impulses of socialism, But that's I think we're
getting to a point where we can start actually having
that conversation again, like we're we're seeing a bit more

(53:49):
of a turn towards that, and it kind of turn
towards like this kind of serious kind of like more
and more serious kind of discussion of like hey, like okay,
like okay, like we we we we fucking the current
order of things. We want to we want to see
it gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with?
Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think
those kind of conversations are coming back on the table

(54:09):
in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties,
like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They
were impossible a couple of years ago. You know, Yeah,
the the market as the fundament of society basically seemed
to be invincible at that time. Um, and there was

(54:30):
a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what
was and wasn't true about it and about society as
a whole. And you know, we've had a lot of
chaos in the years since then. That was um that

(54:51):
affected not just the countries that we were you know,
being restructured by the I m F, but actually really
came in affected the core of the world. Economy as well. Uh,
And I think that that that's sort of like, you know,
in the same way that World War One kind of
disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority.

(55:16):
Like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to
roost in the core of the world system has has
undermined that invincibility, That that that idea that oh, the
market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that
could possibly be better. At the same time that we
have all of this technological development that's happening, um, you

(55:39):
know in our economy that could be used for something
different as opposed to you know, I don't know, making
n f T s or something. Yeah. Absolutely, that that's
all super important. I think that that kind of refines,
like my previous point is refining in my head now
like that like right now, Um that that kind of
market chaos and especially even the chaos of like the

(56:02):
system's response to COVID and stuff really puts um like
in general, and for the left in particularly, puts like
the question of governance back on the table in a
way that it had kind of been off the table
for a while. Like I think there was a there
was a period on the left where like left activity
was kind of like railing against governance. Like it was
like we we want freedom from governance and that sort

(56:23):
of thing. Right, And I'm not going to say those
are necessarily bad impulses, right, but I think they're also
kind of a bit wrong headed as well. Right, But
like the kind of reality is that, like, for for
human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish,
we need governance. And like because like governance actually like
as a word has the same route as cybernetics does.
So kaibernetes, the Greek word becomes kubernetti, has becomes cybernetics, right,

(56:46):
but that's also the root of governor, so kuberner, kubernator,
those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics
are one and the same kind of concept. Um And
this question of like if we intend to create a
world of self governance, um that is effective, it's viable
in Beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're

(57:07):
proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that
we have to put up with right now. And that's
back on the table in a big way that like,
because I think especially with with COVID, people look at
like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of
our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely

(57:29):
screwed up systems and in parhats because their goal is
the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back
to the goal directed behavior cybernetics, right, Like the steersman
steers the boat towards a goal, right, and it's it's
always about or like a you know, a cybernetic device
like a thermostat has a goal temperature that is trying
to regulate the temperature of the water towards um You know,

(57:52):
we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're
just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life,
for flower shy, They're only suitable for the regulation of
this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going, like
that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now
in a position, we're on the left, Like more and

(58:12):
more of us are saying, like what we're proposing is
not like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're
proposing really, you know, we should have sane governance. And
it turns out that same governance is bottom up self
organized governance. Um. And that's that's both the moral position
and a technical position, and I think they're both of those.
The moral and technical valences feed off each other. Like

(58:35):
we're we're we're able to be the serious people in
the room. This this is a very big change of
pace right for us, because like for a while we
were railing against like the very serious people of like
the Centrists and like the fucking Blair rights and the
Clintonite sort of people. We're the serious people now saying
what what this what this system actually does is absurd

(58:55):
and ludicrous, and it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt
a totally different like feedback snarcus, a different kind of
goal orientation, um. And it needs to be oriented towards
human flourishing. And that's it turns out there's a science
of doing that, and it's called cybernetics, you know. Well,
and we also have a runaway ecological crisis where we

(59:18):
learn about we see that you know, like the capitalist
market system is absolutely leading us all to death and
the earth to death, and so it is human flourishing.
But we also are concerned with the flourishing of life

(59:40):
in general. Right, Um, So I think that that that
is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in
the seventies. You know, I certainly think you know, people
were thinking about it. But breaking down this barrier between
economics uh and uh ecology, I think is a very

(01:00:03):
cybernetic impulse and I think one that you know, we
need to keep working at because, like you know, whenever
you think about these things as separate domains, were already uh,
we're already engendering more destruction of the environment. Yeah, yeah,
I think cybernetics and also help us in that kind

(01:00:24):
of like um on a kind of for left projects,
like on an aggressive footing of like if we recognize
that like the capital and its kind of government system,
is it is cybernetic, like it has its own feedback
circuits and like saying that the explosive feedback circuit that
we're on with with ecology, right, Like, how do you
intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits

(01:00:46):
so as to so as to disintegrate the system? Is?
Um is something like you can you can learn a
lot from cyberennics to to get lessons on how to
intervene there. The last thing I want to talk about

(01:01:07):
is just what is the society that is non capitalist
and based off of sort of cybernetic government's principles. What
does that look like for just a person? Because I
think you know this, this has been one of the
big sort of like political challenges of the last you know,
fifty years. It's just the complete foreclosure of the ability

(01:01:29):
to even just sort of imagine assistant that's not this
mm hmm, yeah, I think it. It means UM In
the first instance, it means a different orientation to your
workplace and your community, right, because when you grow up

(01:01:56):
in a society where um power is exercise autocratically, it
has an infantilizing effect on on you as an individual. UM.
And uh, you know, maybe your relationship to work, is
your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or

(01:02:20):
of tantrum throwing, right, because these are these are reactions,
These are natural reactions to being in an abusive environment. UM.
But if you are in a system where the work
of management is not only open to you but expected

(01:02:44):
of you, you have a different orientation to that workplace,
to the community you're in because it's your responsibility. If
you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose
your autonomy. And also you're going to have real problems
that you have to grapple with as an individual. So

(01:03:05):
there is a responsibility that comes there. But also like
that means an opening up of horizons in terms of well,
things don't always have to be the same, Things don't
always have to be handed down to you for management
on high. They can actually change, Like you can see
the possibilities in front of you, You can plan for

(01:03:27):
the future in your context, and you can have that
meaningful freedom in your life and be you know, a
a full human being in that sense, right, um, And
so I think that that's a very core every day
change that you could see, um in terms of you know,

(01:03:50):
sort of your horizons of where you might work or
what you might do. You know, you could expect that
there would be more pause abilities for each person to
be like quote unquote entrepreneurial, right to to have initiative
in their life and be able to envision and create

(01:04:12):
things around them that uh, you know they can't do
right now because they either are stuck in a job
that doesn't give them that freedom or they are actually
not even able to have a job right now where
they can have a reasonable expectation of survival because their

(01:04:34):
workplace is oriented around just making sure the work gets
done and you know, the consequences be damned. UM. So
I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. UM.
And that sort of freedom of management um extends all

(01:04:57):
the way up to uh, you know, working in different
kinds of capacities or jobs. Like some people in kind
of a middle middle ranking area in a corporation these
days might get shuffled around from department to department to
try to kind of get a well rounded understanding of
what the corporation is uh and how it functions. But

(01:05:23):
you know, we can kind of expect that these roles
would be more open to everybody because again, you know,
a system in the v s M is not a person.
A system is a function, and that function should be
fulfilled in a way that is as flexible as possible. UM.

(01:05:45):
So there's a lot less kind of well, I'm stuck
in accounting and that's my life now, and that's all
there that will ever be. Of course, there are limits
to education, their limits to specialization, all of that kind
of stuff. Like, you know, it takes time to learn
these things, but you could expect some more flexibility there
without having that terror of oh yeah, you know, in

(01:06:06):
the neroliberal era, everybody is expected to have like fifteen
jobs in the course of their quote unquote career. But
also each of those jobs is going to be interspersed
with a period of absolute terror as they live with
unemployed in a society without a safety net. Right, Um,
I think that that's that's you know, those are real

(01:06:27):
consequences for everybody's life. I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And
I think like at a very very high level, the
way Beer puts that is that we are trapped in
this kind of crazy system that like its control variable
as profits, like that's the little variable that it's it's
like doing feedback onto to maintain um. Whereas what we're

(01:06:52):
proposing is like that the sort of cybernetic future will
be a society that's optimizing flourishing Like what what beer Beer?
The word he used as a u demony, which is
borrowing from Aristotle, just like flourishing um. And yeah, a
lot a lot of stuff flows out from that, Like
to imagine a world where because we we all feel it,

(01:07:14):
right that like everything around us is kind of like
micro tuned as like a little feedback loop to keep
money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating. Just
imagine a world where that's just not true anymore, and
the the sort of social infrastructure that you grow up
in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing

(01:07:35):
of life. Yeah. Um, and I I think you know,
when we we we look at sort of the broader
patterns of society today, we see all of these hair
brained schemes that you know, very rich men are embarking
on and they're they're setting the agenda for society. You know,

(01:07:55):
we're that you know, Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that
the metaver this is the future, and you just have
to get on board with this, even though anyone can
see that this idea is patently ridiculous. Um. And in
a society where that kind of management, that kind of
money power doesn't exist anymore, Like you don't have to

(01:08:21):
live under that kind of future horizon anymore, where it's
like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up,
you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them,
just like they were following the orders of pharaoh back
in the day. I think, do not be ruled by
pharaohs is as kinda places and eat to leave off

(01:08:42):
unless you tell if anything else do you want to
get to? Okay, There's there's one little line from Beer's
book at what it's actually a set of presentation. It's
called designing Freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me
up every time I read it, So I'm just gonna
read that for the listeners. It gives you a sense
of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off the
fucking chats with this stuff. Um. At some point he says,
I'm quoting here, every time we hear that a proposal

(01:09:05):
will destroy society, has we know us, we should have
the courage to say, thank god at last. Yeah, a
real maniac. Yeah. And and and he had this this
dictum of if it works, it's out of date. So
you know, it's it's like like, yeah, don't be complacent,

(01:09:28):
you know, don't be a traditionalist. I think also that
there's been there's been really horrific consequences of sort of
the right being the ones to like take the urge
for creative destruction. Just like you know, what was that
line there's some I forget some some venture capitalist things
like move fast and break things, and it's like, yeah,

(01:09:50):
so when they move fast the things they breaks us.
But yes, you know, we can move faster and break
things that are bad. Yeah, definite's to a creative and
playful kind of motive, being right that like you you
might be able to work, wake up in the morning
and think, God, you know, it would be really cool
if we could have like a like a child care

(01:10:11):
nurse ory just like like out in the out in
the common area between these buildings and stuff, and like
go to your go to your local like your your
workers council or whatever, and have a really plausible like
the way of actually getting that and like collaborating with
people to make that happen, and then being like, Okay,
well we'll try it as an experiment for twelve months.
We'll keep we'll see how it goes. And then there's

(01:10:32):
a feedback cycle where it's like, Okay, some aspect of
this design didn't really work out. We'll we'll go talk
about it some more, and then it aerate on that
and that's that's like as it's it's an entrepreneurialism that
doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now.
It just means that human beings, living real things, real workers,
will be able to actually control their environments in this

(01:10:54):
the substance of their lives and in a meaningful way. Yeah,
and like this, I think you know, back in the
nineties early odds, sort of before the two thousand eight crisis,
in the hoary days of your um it's there was
a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation.

(01:11:20):
But what that always meant was we make decisions about
what's going to change, and you have to adapt, right
it was it was it was, you know, always this
arbitrary power for him outside that would just be changing
the social fabric, and you had to be flexible enough
to cope with what you were being subjected to. It's

(01:11:44):
very different if you know, the planning is being done
by you for you, and you're moving towards adaptation and
flexibility out of a sense of that, oh yeah, this
would be better and I'm going to adapt to be

(01:12:05):
in a better state to to work with my environment, uh,
in a more healthy and a more flourishing way, as
opposed to just like, oh yeah, you've got to work
three jobs now, so figure it out right. That's a
very different kind of flexibility, very different kind of adaptation.
And you know, those things have sort of become dirty

(01:12:26):
words in some ways, but they are really core to
the way that we all exist as organisms in the
world and they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse.
Mm hmm exactly. Yeah, I think okay, we can take
this as a place to leave off. Yeah, do you
two have stuff you want to log and I know
you you want to plug, but plug the things that

(01:12:46):
you want people to listen to because they are Um. Yeah,
we're General Intellecting us um e cou to General Intellecting
a totness and it's got all the episodes on there
around Twitter, ask gunice pod um. Yeah, you can find
us on all the podcast things. Um. We're also part
of a podcast network called Emancipation and so that's emancipation

(01:13:07):
dot Network on the web. UM. And yeah, some really
excellent shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats
and um, Mortal Science, from Alpha to Omega, Jumpsy in Utopia.
They're they're really wonderful shows that are all Um. It's
it's a variety of different sort of takes on things,

(01:13:27):
but like, um, there's a sort of common there's a
sort of a spiritual common grounds they all have. Um yeah,
we we all were all interested in thinking systematically. We're
all interested in emancipation, as the network name says, and
we're all interested in sort of building something going forward,

(01:13:53):
trying to construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting
caught up in day to day politics or getting caught
up in uh dum mentality. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's systematic,
it's critical, but it's also constructive and I think that's
what we're all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, Well,

(01:14:16):
thank you too both for coming on. Thank you it's
been wondering, Thanks for having us. Yeah, this has been
Make it happen here you can find us that happened
here pod in places. There's also stuff at quals on
Media that you can also find in those same places
and possibly also different ones. We have a we have
a website. Everyone asked me for my sources every single

(01:14:38):
week and they get posted there once a month. So yeah,
go go to coals on media dot com and you
will find all of the sources so you don't have
to DM me every week. All Right, Happened Here is

(01:15:00):
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