These People Are the Map
Reading Dubberly and Pangaro on how cybernetics connects computing, counterculture and design, one night, on my phone. Maturana, Pask, Nelson, Brand, Pickering and Rittel, and my head spinning.
Tonight's homework was one essay, read on my phone with a thumb on the screenshot button: Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design. I thought I knew most of the names. I did not know how they knew each other. By the end my head was spinning.
These are my notes as I went, kept close to how I wrote them, with the passage each one answers.
The observer
Maturana: anything said is said by an observer. Midway through I stopped and wrote a question to myself. Can we use AI to bring more objectivity to the observation of systems, and to the observer role itself? The observer is always subjective, and subjectivity is exactly what AI is not good at.
I do not think the answer is that a machine stands outside observation. It is built from what people noticed and named, so it is a different observer, not no observer. What it can do is show me what I did not see. I already work this way in my notebook pipeline: two readers take the same page, and where they disagree is the information. I still decide, because it is my page. I wrote about the same loop a few nights ago in Observe the Observer.
Maturana's lines from Metadesign were pure gold, and his words on agency were more gold. Roughly: we can choose, and that is where our behavior as socially conscious human beings matters.
Pask and Nelson
The link I did not expect. Gordon Pask and Ted Nelson had offices on the same floor in Chicago and started talking while Nelson was writing Computer Lib / Dream Machines. Nelson's verdict on Pask: "Pask is reducing a field to an extremely formal structure of relations." He meant it as praise. It complements hypertext, he wrote. Pask maps the field; Nelson lets you wander through it. Both put the person in charge of the path. I'm extremely interested in that link, and in that book.
Pickering
I love Andrew Pickering's thinking. I watched him with Paul Pangaro and Margit Rosen in a conversation at ZKM about Pask, and he reminds me of Gregory Bateson. Here he names the "enframing" culture, the habit of treating the world as a stockpile to be ordered, and sets cybernetics against it as something open to possibility. Nice.
Stewart Brand
The big new figure in everything. I knew the Whole Earth Catalog. I had no idea it went this deep, or that it carried so many connections to the early minds of cybernetics and AI. Brand moved between the cyberneticians, the computing people and the counterculture, and kept putting them in the same room. Then the page on the counterculture itself, the strobes and the communes and the rest. No surprise there.
Rittel and the symmetry of ignorance
A new person to learn from: Horst Rittel, from the design school at Ulm. Wicked problems cannot be solved by experts. Everyone involved is enmeshed in what he called a "symmetry of ignorance": nobody holds enough of the knowledge to decide for the rest. Wicked problems are political by nature, because defining one means choosing whose values count. The essay ends close to Pask: the hard problems are in how we deal with each other, and getting through them takes cybernetic thinking. Conversation is the instrument.
This is home ground for me. Situational Governance is my own attempt at the same kind of problem, and so is most of what I mean by Complexence.
A path not taken
Glanville studied under Pask, and Usman Haque under Glanville. The thread is alive. The essay also carries quiet warnings about computing. Many of the cybernetic machines pointed to another path, machines that act and adapt rather than think in symbols, and most of computer science did not take it. Do not veer too far off course. The work I keep building, loops and gates and readers that disagree and me in the conversation, feels like picking that path back up.
The map
Dubberly drew the field as a social graph: who worked with whom and who read whom. My family tree of cybernetics draws the same field as ideas. Looking at his graph of people, I thought: this is the map. I love these people. Ted Nelson has joined my tree tonight, and Brand and Rittel are next. The names on it are now the names I look for in books, films, talks and art.
The reading path this came from is Before I Open the Book, and the short audio primers for the second stretch, Pask and von Foerster included, are here.