Cybernetic State

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* Book: The Cybernetic State. By Javier Livas.

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Description

By Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski:

“The essential telos of a cybernetic state is precisely not a productive dissensus, let alone a form of democratic-agonistic pluralism, but the other’s integration into to the same, that is, the expansion of the whole via adaptation. Hermann Schmidt, the founder of cybernetics in Germany, affirmatively frames this logic as an imperative: ‘to control everything that is controllable, and to render controllable that which cannot yet be controlled’. The timely political conclusion to be drawn from this is nicely summed up by the authorial collective Tiqqun, who defines the task of cybernetic governance in the era of networks as follows: ‘governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the free – i.e., transparent and controllable – circulation of information that is generated in this manner.’”

(https://networkcultures.org/longform/2018/10/18/res-publica-ex-machina-on-neocybernetic-governance-and-the-end-of-politics/)


Excerpt

From the preface:

"The emergence of a cybernetic State is now a real possibility, and most likely inevitable in the near future. This book sketches this information age organization and the cybernetic management principles on which it is based. As we shall see, many of its features are already present in embrionary form in the modern democratic State.

The description of the cybernetic State relies on the Viable System Model (VSM) developed by professor Stafford Beer and explained in several of his books. This model originates from control theory and the cybernetics of the human nervous system, and has been adopted and validated by management science. In this book the VSM is used to show the nature of the State.

The enormous explanatory power of this cybernetic map will show that Economics, Law, and Political Science, which have mostly been studied separately, actually refer to three different aspects of the same phenomena, namely the State. In this sense, the book attempts a synthesis of ideas that were born disconnected and remained so for a long time. Helpful insights about the evolution of economic, legal and political theory are a byproduct."

(http://managing.blue/2012/02/10/the-cybernetic-state/)