A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics
I wrote my PhD on the philosophy of Norbert Wiener, namely, 'cybernetics'.I think what people haven't realised is that for Wiener - though not necessarily the successive generations of Cyberneticians per se - cybernetics names not only a transdisciplinary field of study, not only a primitive form of control engineering, but a philosophical system that contends directly with GW Leibniz's monadology.  Wiener considered it to be a kind of monster, a 'golem', since whereas the monadology posits universal beneficence throughout nature and humankind, Wiener's cybernetics is, when applied to human societies, structurally, infinitely, conflictual. Moreover it points towards awesome consolidations of power.Generations of readers of cybernetics have completely missed or disregarded this aspect of his thought, conveniently mistaking a system of regulation in nature for a system of regulation in artificial human societies. For Wiener there is no self-regulation in the body politic, societies are fundamentally anti-homeostatic, and the techniques that his generation had bequeathed to the world would only exacerbate its positive feedback loop.This is why, for me, Wiener is still so compelling,  despite the unfathomable equations, the desperate arrogance, the stuffy air of cigars. He was the first to see the world that Snowden brought to the public's attention. And it's all there, systematically in 1948 (and even, sort of, earlier).