Liberty machines: mapping the future through institutional cybernetics

The entropic Control Societies and the invention of democratic algorithmic machines of negentropy

After 51 years from Beer’s implementation of Cybersyn in Chile’s economy, our world is confronted with a multiple social and ecological crises, driving our Gaia far from the equilibrium. In the late Anthropocene, new human-machines assemblages emerge, which are steered by the administrators of power nodes in the global networks. The state and entrepreneurial organizations compete for the accumulation of Big Data, which are produced from humans in their everyday network interactions in the “societies of control” (Deleuze), or of “surveillance-algorithmic capitalism” (Zuboff, Parisi). The new architecture of power relations, described as “Cyberopticon” (Sarafidis) is emerged from algorithmic structures (ASs), generated from the hierarchical assemblage of the meaningful humans’ actions, in their structural coupling with their “Umwelt” (Uexküll, Varela-Maturana, Lühmann, Bateson Gregory, Sebeok, SØren). The ASs reproduce in our everyday life many of the discrimination and inequalities of the hierarchical societies: racism, sexism, classism, and others. Algorithms are communicational abstracts machines (Guattari) with a fully specified goal (Beer) and sign systems (Sebeok, Danesi), having important effects in the formation of feelings, actions, habits or patterns of action (Peirce, Liszka) In the edge of chaos for Gaia we have to institutionalize research communities, aiming to the invention of democratic algorithms, as pharmacological abstract machines (Stiegler), which generate “Warm or Thick Data” (Bateson Nora, Wang, Geertz). Their institutionalization will be emerged as knowledge playgrounds, from the synergies between specialists and non- specialist citizens, and their organizations. The “Warm Data” instead of the numbers of “math destruction” (O’Neil) will focus on viable, creative, heterarchical and democratic relationships (von Foerster, Espejo, Bookchin, Castoriadis). Following these theoretical trails I will try to construct a map for the diagrammatization of democratic algorithms, binding together VSM and Cybersyn with Cybersemiotics (Peirce, Søren), Schizoanalysis (Guattari), the theories of “Warm or Thick Data”, Ethnography and Participatory Action Research.

Organization and eudemony. Liberating unconscious in the Algorithmic-Surveillance Capitalism.

Living in the Age of Anthropocene, confronting multiple crises in all levels of our everyday experience, is more than ever important to map lines of flight beyond the capitalistic hyper-proletarianization of every aspect of Living, which steers the devastation of our Gaia. Human and non-human beings are connected to the Semiotic Capitalistic Machine, in the form of Big Data, under continuous Surveillance. (Cyberopticon, Sarafidis). Using the schizoanalysis of Felix Guattari, I will try to investigate the role of the Organization in the liberation of Unconscious, through the creation of neganthropological and pharmacological machinic assemblages (Stiegler Bernard), connecting the Viable System Method (VSM) of Stafford Beer with the tenets of direct democracy both in the thinking of Castoriadis and Bookchin. Stafford Beer was a Cybernetician, invited in 1971 by the Popular Unity in Chile, to plan, construct and implement Cybersyn or “Liberty Machine” on the Chilean economy, an early “Internet” aiming to the direct communication between the government and the industrial management. Both Schizoanalytics and VSM have not as their objective to describe and forecast the future of the living subjectifications, but to experiment with their multiple possibilities of liberating their active relations from oppression and exploitation. Initiating from the concept of desire we could outline ethical-aesthetics paths to Eudemony, meaning a world of Freedom, Love, Compassion, Solidarity and Sympoiesis.