Cybernetics Workshop Plan

About

I am currently planning a workshop that deals with the "cybernetic view of society" - essentially the post-World War II tendency to view society as a cybernetic entity whose behaviour can be managed and predicted through the use of mathematical systems. In my research last year, I proposed that this "cybernetic view of society" was an ideology born out of the complexity of Cold War politics, an attempt to regain some sense of control over the myriad of possible events that could tip the world into nuclear war.

In Steve Rushton's lecture at the Masters of Reality launch, he spoke about how American was transitioning from a manufacturing-based economy to an information economy. With cybernetics provided the underlying logic to the management of this transition, cybernetics left the military domain and began to form an integral part of the workings of civil society itself. Cybernetic concepts were assimilated into management systems in corporations, municipal and governmental strategy, visual art/music/film/literature, environmental science, and the mass media's understanding of the world. The result was the formation of what Jack Burnham calls a "systems-oriented culture, where change emanates not from things, but from the way things are done." source

The game Micropolis (the open source version of Sim City) encapsulates these ideas in the form of an interactive game, in which the goal is to build a metropolitan utopia in an empty virtual landscape while trying to manage municipal finances, keep the population happy, and strike a balance between the division of labour in the city. The game presents the player with a simplified set of rules and some starting capital, and from then on he/she must decide how the city is to function without much further prompt from the game, other than basic feedback about crime rate or public opinion of tax rates, for example. The game presents the player with an exaggerated "cybernetic view of society: the rules of the game are mutually dependent, affecting each other through feedback loops, recursion, and cellular automata-like systems. The result is an impression of a city inhabited by people (referred to as Sims) with jobs, homes, and opinions on how the city is being run.

My aim with this workshop is to open a debate with the participants about the "cybernetic view of society" and systems-oriented culture in general. I am curious to hear how people feel we have gained from this transition, and how we might be adversely affected. I see the workshops as serving two purposes: firstly, they are an end in themselves - they are designed to encourage the participants to draw new conclusions about the type of society we live in today, and question the necessity of the underlying systems, and if they contribute to a better way of life. Secondly, I hope that the workshops can function as "field-research", and that I can use some of the feedback I receive from these workshops to inform my practice. I see great value in avoiding an insular and individualistic approach to my research this year: the formation of micro-communities for the duration of the workshops are integral to a practical understanding of my research.

Workshop Structure

Overview

The workshop structure will operate best with 6-10 participants, and over the course of a 6 hour session split into 3 section. The first part will take the form of a lecture of about one hour followed by a brief Q&A session. The second section lasts approximately 2 hours, beginning with a brief introduction to the game Micropolis. The participants then play the game as a committee, making decisions together and trying to build a utopian metropolis. The final section takes the form of an open discussion about the first two sections of the workshop. Specifically, how the participants feel the lecture and the game relate to each other, and how both relate to their own experiences of 21st century society.

The workshop would require the following facilities:

• Table space for 6-10 participants
• Internet connection (ethernet for 6-10 participants, or wireless internet)
• If available, some computers (preferably with linux-based OS) which I could pre-install Micropolis on to save time.
• Projector/wall space or panel.

Section 1

Section 1 is based on the format of the lecture I gave at LiWoLi last May. The lecture at LiWoLi traced the history of cybernetics during the Cold War, and how its theories were represented in a non-military context, specifically in popular cinema and television of the 1960s.