Cybernetics is wrong

The Cybernetic Limit Having established how a restrictive cybernetic vision of control might operate, we are now in a position to mount a critique to point towards what such a picture of contemporary power ignores. In cleaving to an understanding of power as basically restrictive, cybernetic control is largely focused on the ways in which decentralised systems contain and limit behaviour. From this perspective, at least, the control society operates as a system of complexly articulated homeostats, modulating and constraining behaviours towards accepted goals. The relatively primitive forms of feedback offered by disciplinary panopticons have become vastly more sophisticated, dynamic, mobile, omnipresent, and operative on a personal or even sub-personal level. Yet these remain primarily negative in nature (even if targeting goals which are themselves dynamic, as when the goal is a set rate of change). What this leaves out is the dimension of decentralised power which is not merely restrictive, (or goal-oriented) but which is also constructive. On the one hand, this constructive aspect refers to the ways in which control systems positively construct as well as negatively constrict action – they make things possible that would otherwise be impossible. On the other hand, it is also to point towards the fact that cybernetic visions of control have a tendency to ignore the ground of such decentralised power, the very means by which it might be constituted, and hence also modified. For example, we might ask why it is that certain kinds of control systems predominate over others. To put this another way: there may well be a more interesting relationship between constraint and enablement, and hence between necessity and contingency, than control is often taken to indicate. As we argue below, the immense power of control rests not just in its ability to modulate behaviour via homeostatic dynamics, to target goals which are known in advance, but also in its ability to relatively constrain an open-ended range of contingent behaviours, which cannot be identified in advance. These contingent behaviours, enabled and constrained by the control systems within which they operate, work also to reinforce the power of the control systems themselves, in a conspiracy between closedness and openness, constriction and construction. It is this relationship, and its increasing operationalisation by business and governmental organisations, that constitutes the real power of control, a power we will describe under the name of the platform. More than an issue of mere theoretical dispute, there are important practical implications for how we are to consider possible resistance to the operations of cotemporary power. For if we misunderstand the nature of control’s power, then we will also be likely to misapprehend the correct measures necessary to oppose, transform or supplant it. This also goes some way to explaining why it is that the strategic responses often offered in response to the control society have been relatively paltry (and largely focused on hacking, spreading viruses, or otherwise disrupting or evading existing control systems).29