Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems.
link:Wikipedia ...more

Cybernetics Books

Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences)

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition

Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 42)

More cybernetics books...

Lists

Engineering Communism by Steven T. Usdin

New Atlantis Revisited by Paul R. Josephson

How Not to Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch

Soviet Computing

44 books — 3 voters

The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener

The Information Age: Cybernetics, Systems, Media

138 books — 10 voters

Power, Interest and Psychology by David Smail

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Books Referenced in "K-Punk" by Mark Fisher

68 books — 4 voters

An Introduction to Cybernetics by William Ross Ashby

Best Cybernetics Books

46 books — 29 voters

Featured News & Interviews

Get Ready! Readers' Most Anticipated Books of 2026

Read »

Quotes Tagged “Cybernetics”

“ It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. ”
― Albert Einstein

1806 likes

“ Yet this new form of virulence is ambiguous, and AIDS is an example of it. AIDS provides an argument for a new sexual prohibition, but it is no longer a moral prohibition: it is a functional prohibition on the circulation of sex. This breaks all the commandments of modernity . Sex, like money , like information , must circulate freely. Everything must be fluid, and acceleration is inevitable. To revoke sexuality on the grounds of a viral danger is as absurd as stopping international trade on the Yet this new form of virulence is ambiguous, and AIDS is an example of it. AIDS provides an argument for a new sexual prohibition, but it is no longer a moral prohibition: it is a functional prohibition on the circulation of sex. This breaks all the commandments of modernity . Sex, like money , like information , must circulate freely. Everything must be fluid, and acceleration is inevitable. To revoke sexuality on the grounds of a viral danger is as absurd as stopping international trade on the grounds that it is fuelling the cancerous rise of th e dollar. No one seriously envisages such a thing. Now , at a stroke with AIDS: a stopping of sex. A contradiction in the system? Perhaps this suspension has some enigmatic purpose, linked contradictorily to the equally enigmatic purpose of sexual liberation? The spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well-known. We know how they produce accidents of their own , put a brake on their own operation , in order to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles. All societies survive against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it and operate in opposition to it. Now , we live by at least two principles: the principle of sexual liberation and that of communication and information . But it is entirely as though the species were , through the AIDS threat, producing an antidote to its principle of sexual liberation, and, through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control. What if all this signified a rejection of the obligatory flows of sperm, sex, signs and words, a rejection of forced communication , programmed information and sexual promiscuity? What if all this were a vital resistance to the expansion of flows, circuits and networks - admittedly, at the cost of a new lethal pathology, but a pathology which would in the end protect us from something even more serious? With AIDS and cancer, we might be said to be paying the price for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form. ...more ”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

0 likes

More quotes...