over on fedi, someone who read our previous post (well, the fedi thread version of it) asked what cyberneticism is. they quite reasonably worried they were missing nuance because they hadn't heard the term before. we realized it's past time we do a proper intro to the topic, and we feel like we're ready to, so here goes!
so. the field of cybernetics, under that name, dates back to the mid 20th century. it first came to our attention when we were describing our tech labor organizing to an academic political scientist and they summarized something we'd said by calling it "cybernetics". that came as a shock to us, so we looked into it...
then an anarchist friend, for entirely unrelated reasons, mentioned cybernetics to us as a framework that offers useful ways to analyze oppressive power structures
that was when we realized it was something we really needed to engage with
the definition we like best is that cybernetics conceptualizes all phenomena on the same ontological plane
it takes a little thought to see how that applies to anything useful :)
when we compare human DNA to computer code, or when we imagine that someday machines may talk to us as equals, we are engaging in cybernetics, though we usually don't think of it that way
that's important because if you're trying to convince tech workers that they can be independent cats with their own independent opinions, but still be organized into a union, you need to know how to speak the language of tech or you won't be taken seriously
people have largely forgotten that these ideas even exist, and yet we see arguments on our timeline every single day that stem from them.
oh, also, it didn't fit well into the explanation above but our favorite illustration of how cybernetics relates to daily life...
when our many queer friends engage in cybersex, they are treating textual descriptions of sex acts as being the same thing as sex acts.
this has a better claim to the "same ontological plane" thing than most things that US DoD tacks the "cyber-" prefix onto... which, we must say, makes us happy :D