Living Cybernetically: Newly Unlocked Paid Post

When I first published my first pay-walled post in May, 2024, I had 39 subscribers. Today I’m proud to be only two subscribers shy of 500!

To help push me over the edge, let’s revisit the origins of the LessMad project with a solid reintroduction: As of today, that first post is free for all subscribers to read, in full.

Jump right in below, or continue reading this post to get a gentler introduction to the subject, which will be helpful to new readers.

In Metamorphosis: The Countours of your Embedding (now free, above!), I strove to give the reader a really down to earth, relatable understanding of basic cybernetic principles as applied to individual human development. Cybernetics was a new field of science slowly developed in laboratory of war in the 1940s and made popular in the 1950s and 60s. It is the science of control, derived from the Greek term for governor.

The best resource to take a deep dive into cybernetic theory was also one of the very first sites on the World Wide Web in 1993, the homepage of the Principia Cybernetica. (At the time of writing, October 1st, 2025, the website appears to have been offline for just over a month! I am investigating, but have linked to the Internet Archive’s mirror for now).

While the term itself has fallen out of usage, cybernetics is still everywhere today applied whenever control or prediction of complex systems is analyzed or applied. Just because marketers can’t glaze a new serious gadget, software application, or method by calling it “Cyber-”something doesn’t mean that applied cybernetics isn’t penetrating your life every waking and sleeping moment.

Cybernetics tries to be universal. Anything and everything is a system; most things are complex systems. Anything which is modeled and then updated according to feedback is applied cybernetics.

That’s it. Anywhere you see the word “feedback”, think cybernetics. This means customer feedback, employee feedback, and fan feedback, ratings for television or movies or podcasts, “trending topics” on social media and, among the oldest feedback loops of all, profitability of a business model or advertising promotion.

Your FitBit or other health monitoring app? Even just your bathroom scale? Cybernetic. You get data on your health, you change your exercise regime or diet or sleep patterns. New changes are fed back into the sensors and adjust your health data. Rinse and repeat. It’s a loop. Of feed back.

You taste your soup while it simmers on the stove. The flavours aren’t quite coming out. You add some salt. You stir, dip the spoon in again, blow, take another sip. Boom. Feedback loop. Repeat until flavour equilibrium is reached. I could continue for anything and everything: study habits feeding into grade changes, asking old dates how you gave them the ick—anything you measure and revise over time.

We’ve done it long before cybernetics formalized it. Half a million hears ago, some predator approaching its prey on an oblique angle, changing speed to intercept, was in a compensation loop according to feedback from its eyes. Natural systems, biology especially, are ripe for the application. Everything is.

This goal of total-generality and universal applicability has actually hurt the field. It’s why nobody even talks about it anymore.

Some recent fashionable approaches have their roots in ideas that were proposed by cyberneticians many decades ago: e.g. artificial intelligence, neural networks, complex systems, human-machine interfaces, self-organization theories, systems therapy, etc…

What distinguishes cyberneticians from researchers in the previously mentioned areas is that the former stubbornly stick to their objective of building general, domain independent theories, whereas the latter focus on very specific applications: expert systems, psychotherapy, thermodynamics, pattern recognition, etc. General integration remains too abstract, and is not sufficiently successful to be really appreciated.

It’s ubiquity has been its downfall. People have been applying cybernetic principles since long before cybernetics formalized them, and will continue to reinvent and apply them today without needing to ever acknowledge it. I actually think that’s part of its mystique: it has become forgotten and, so rather occult. The word or prefix “cyber” is, in its most common usage today, punk. It’s an aesthetic—the technopagan alternative to inverted pentagrams, funny beards, and candles. Its actual application in our lives is ignored by most, while glittering depictions of robot machine-augmented limbs, half-shaved (like a pet animal returned from the vet) and dyed (like the spray-paint marking utility lines beneath the sidewalk) hair, and neural interfaces get thrown perpetually into fantasy. Oooh! Invisible forces are being wielded!

The origins of this new science began, as I said, in World War II with the creation of systems to better control and aim anti-aircraft artillery. As cybernetics often involve the “splicing” of humans into a “feedback loop” of machinery and sensory data, in this case it was gunners who aimed their guns where their displays told them to fire, rather than where they themselves were looking up in the sky. Since electronics could better anticipate where planes would be by the time the munitions reached their altitude, gunners became a mere “servo-mechanism” (or, in our digital age, a part of an “algorithm”) inside a larger system.

You are already, through and through, a cyborg. That is something that academic feminism, to its great credit, has been robustly exploring and explaining since the 1980s. Instead of treating it like an aesthetic, they are the only ones consistently attempting to grapple with cybernetics as it actual exists, and is wielded. It may be on their own contentious terms, but at least they’ve been doing the work!

Notions of embodiment and the strange shape of identity in worlds where we are projected into cyberspace and puppeted by the control of unseen powers is an entirely legitimate subject for study. And since there are no cybernetics departments in universities today, it’s the groups most personally worried about issues of power-relations—those in feminist, colonial, queer and other critical studies—have taken the lead. What do the colonized worry about? Control of the colonizer. Women? Control by men. Queers? Their own strange embodiment as subjects whose bodies have been spliced into and ruptured by strange “semiotic” (information) “flows” (loops) first explained psycho-analytically by French theorists Deleuze and Gautari.

I’m trying to find a voice in the focal point of two groups who hate each other and absolutely do not want to intersect. More conservative people will complain that critical theories are full of nonsense or Marxist subversion. Feminists, trans people, many academics in the humanties, and basically anyone else who knows more critical theory than I do will find my descriptions problematic. Worse, though, they may interpret my promotion of “cybernetics” as a vehicle for stealing their authority: for taking the discussion of embodiment and oppression away from the marginal groups who need them and putting it back into the hands of the straight male colonizer.

Or maybe I’d be so lucky to even be get such notice by anybody at all!

Ultimately, I’m against what McLuhan called “monopolies of knowledge”, an idea he got from Harold Innis. People should understand the forces controlling them, and they control everybody. And, yes, buried amidst scores and scores of terrible papers, there is lots of good research into power, control, psychology, and the effects of cybernetics within and between-the-lines of feminist and critical works. The post-humanities are adept at collecting and tagging the effects of ubiqutious cybernetics applied to all of us, even if they (detrimentally, I believe) use masculine and colonial terms to name the source of that power.

It’s foolish to write-off the influence of works like Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, or various transmedia salons like those “discovered” during the #GamerGate digs of 2014-2015 about players merging with the virtual for emotional/cultural reprogramming as “post modern nonsense” or “word salad.” That’d be just as bad as those who claim that modern and abstract art during the 20th century was merely an intelligence-agency psy-op. As I tried to write about about in this long piece that I thought would be funny to structure around Alex Jones, assertions that trans people are the truest cyberpunks are not unfounded. There are very good reasons, and very solid footing to make such claims.

The problem (if it is a problem) is that the arguments are just completely unfamiliar and impenetrable to those outside the academic fields of feminism and critical theory.

So think of my whole project here on LessMad as one to find, try on, and lay out new grounding within which to have these conversations. Identity and maturation in a world suffused with cyberspace, where the material ground is nearly out-of-contact by most people.

Instead of Deleuze and Gauttari, I look to McLuhan and developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan. I consider embodiment as a relation to its ground, the outer environment, as in John Vervaeke’s agent-arena relationship, a concept also developed by Bateson. To understand the machines which model and control us, I start from first principles by taking computer history; describing the actual development of computers from massive machines, to personal computers, to smart phones. And Free Software as liberation from commercial exploitation.

And I do this all while trying to exhibit the sort of thinking and perception which has kept me from, as the title says, going mad (again, lol) from obsessing over this stuff!

I have printed off this entire blog, and began reading it from the start a few days ago.

The pay-walled piece I unlocked today, titled Metamorphosis: The Contours of Your Embedding, is like a great old piece to hype for new readers. It will elaborate on what you’ve just read in different terms, opening up to larger ideas. It also broaches the strange subject of my friend Bob, which you will read more about in up-coming posts.

I have gone through it and fixed the various typos. I’ve also added many more links to help new readers understand my allusions, references, and terms.

When I started writing this blog, I was immodestly proud of my erudition. I enjoyed writing the sort of texts I read, and the texts I love reading most are the once that force me to keep my dictionary open nearby, or begin web-searches to understand! That is, I love books that make me make my own “hyperlinks”, creating rabbit-holes.

Until only a few decades ago, readers of old books could not simply turn on a dime toward a citation. They couldn’t just grab a referenced paper on Sci-Hub, or find a mentioned author’s oeuvre on Archive.org. A snippet of poetry couldn’t be immediately be placed in the context of the total poem. The intrepid reader, rather, was lucky to have a large-enough library near by, perhaps to browse through shelves and shelves hopping to find anything relevant to contextualize.

When I write, I know you are able to just copy/paste and search whatever you want, like I do when I read. But you are also free to just stop reading too. We are on the world wide web; hyperlinks actually exist here, so I should make them explicit when I can. (While we’re on the subject, The Principia Cybernetica Web, linked above, was one of the first hyperlinked documents publicly available!)

As you read, please reach out with any questions, requests, or comments on what you do or do not understand! I value all feedback.

Thanks for reading!