Critical Cybernetics
Every observation loops back to alter the observer. How can we see our blindness to those feedback loops? If we don’t move consciously between terrains, we mistake our maps for nature itself and our observations as infallible, objective descriptions of reality.
Critical cybernetics studies the grammar of how systems organize themselves through observation and which realities get rendered or made to seem impossible. It traces the ideological work happening at the substrate level, where sociotechnical arrangements construct what counts as thinkable, viable, real.
Our ecology of engineered attention and affective capture, known as the attention economy, is just one entry point. Behind it lies a broader concern with artificial viability: the ways systems engineer their own conditions of persistence by shaping what people can perceive, desire, and imagine.
Neither pure critique nor machinic description is quite enough. Rather, critical cybernetics is an attempt to think with and against systems while remaining accountable to what they exclude or obfuscate.
This potential also carries with it inherent contradictions. There is no finality, it’s a process. My aim is to come up with human futures without succumbing to dogmatic doxa. I think that human flourishing can be found in the fertile soil of complexity.
