Here in The Ansible, Luke Hogg pointedly observed a few months ago that today’s momentous debates about the vector and purpose of technological development and control take place—often to the ignorance of participants on both sides—firmly within the analytical and conceptual frame of cybernetics, the study and practice of communication as organization kicked off in earnest in the wake of World War II by Norbert Wiener and his close colleagues. Hogg’s conclusion is that forward progress on these debates requires a recognition that “it’s cybernetics all the way down”—that is, observers and would-be regulators engaging with cybernetic systems and questions about their proper operation are themselves enmeshed within cybernetic systems.
It is, therefore, inevitable that we not stop at the insight that those who look “down” on cybernetic systems are themselves visible from “above” as being organized within cybernetic systems; paradoxically, we are led to ask whether in fact it’s cybernetics all the way up. For if everything in the down direction is cybernetics, the only way for not everything to be cybernetics (or to be helplessly vulnerable to, for instance, compulsory cyberneticization) is for a higher order of organization to supervene upon all organic and mechanical communicative organization.
Well, there is one other way. Consider the theoretical possibility that what actually supervenes upon cybernetics all-the-way-down is an ultimate disorder—a sort of vast propagative reservoir of mis-or mal-organization. This uncanny scenario is broached in the blockbuster horror film Backrooms, where a failed architect and his troubled psychiatrist are drawn into an upside-down world spawned by an ex-MRI manufacturer with secret government funding. Such an overarching source of crude material, out of which cybernetics must distill down the legible patterns and information from which communication and communicative organization must be forged and built, may or may not resemble Heidegger’s famous notion of a “standing reserve” of raw resources for technicity to work upon. Instead, it could be more akin to a veritable white hole, a cosmic fountain spewing forth its primal stuff incomprehensibly and inexhaustibly. In either case, but especially the latter, the possibility arises of an environment or a database that is both irresistible and fatal to cybernetics: something which is more than it can chew, yet which it can’t help but bite off.
In other words, cybernetics, which is supposed to do the “eating,” might at a certain degree of development or success encounter, or even create, conditions where it becomes more like the meal than the stomach. What sort of food would it become? Perhaps the equivalent of what is theorized to happen to people and things that encroach too closely on a black hole to stay outside its grasp: spaghettification, the irreversible distortion of a thing beyond all recognition.
The compelling question, then, is what conditions or environments could in that sense cause cybernetics to collapse, or die, of spaghettification. SpaceX’s recent Super Bowl ad boasts of its achievements and future potential with a voiceover taken from Arthur C. Clarke’s famous 1964 interview for the BBC’s Horizon. “The only thing we can be sure of,” Clarke intones, “is that the future will be absolutely fantastic. But let us remember this: one of the very few rules we can be sure of about the future is that whatever actually happens will be totally unimaginable to us today." Nevertheless, Clarke does venture a very specific prediction, the final note SpaceX leaves the viewer with: “The world will be reduced to a single point.”
It is, of course, instantly very difficult to say how cybernetics could possibly function, or even exist, in an environment reduced to a single point. One could fudge things and interpret Clarke to mean what he said only in a relative way, such that cybernetics becomes all-the-way-down in the mystic sense of 18th-century polymath Emanuel Swedenborg which so fascinated Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The unities of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their compound: the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts.” But even if we can now readily envision a form of cybernetic governance that penetrates down to recapitulate itself at the neurological or mitochondrial level of the human organism, we can’t wave away the problem of cybernetic progress communicatively concentrating or collapsing spacetime on Earth down to a scale and size far too small for incarnate humans to live (or even appear) in.
If indeed cybernetics entails the human use of human beings, in ways that ensure they remain in our mutual experience recognizably human, then we must accept that, as cybernetics progresses by increasing the volume, density, and speed of communication, it accelerates toward an event horizon—a tipping point at which its human substrate buckles and denatures under the pressure and pull of the system.
In that sense, the “death” of cybernetics—the spaghettification of cybernetic systems of governance—must be seen to accompany the technological transformation by human beings of the world into an environment that forecloses the spacetime incarnate people need in order to live properly.
Cybernetics demands environmental conditions sufficient for the ongoing existence of spacetime in which individual and relational human activity—such as the experience of communication and the feedback process that results—can play out more or less stably, cumulatively, and conducively to communicative purification, not corruption. Too much cybernetics—which ceases to be itself if living organisms have to be squeezed out of the equation—is an existential risk to the foundations of cybernetics. Wiener was unable to extricate himself and cybernetics from the pull of the white hole of singularity that is the immeasurably unlimited and total density and speed of information. The irony is bracing. In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener warned of an impending and catastrophic emergency where the application of technology to governance would result in a totalitarianism fatal to the human life worth living.
Superficially, he described this totalitarianism in the political terms of fascism and communism. But more deeply, in chapters that were expunged after the book’s first edition at the behest of Houghton Mifflin and editor Jason Epstein, Wiener associated the nightmarish totalitarianism of misbegotten technological governance with theocracy.
In the suppressed “Voices of Rigidity” chapter, Wiener links the Jesuits and the Communists as adherents to militant and totalitarian ecclesiologies. “In that moment in which the successor of Saint Peter compromises with Caesar, becomes an official of a public order which is parallel to that of the State, and shares the functions of the State by a mutual agreement, the Church becomes an organization offering advancement and a personal career. If such an organization is to survive, it must take its duty of survival very seriously, and the path to totalitarianism is short indeed.”
Likewise, “the Communists do not consider themselves servants of God, but they do consider themselves servants of a cause to which they are completely devoted, and which they believe to contain the ultimate duty of humanity,” Wiener laments. “There was a time when many of us hoped that the professed pro-scientific bias of this power group … would lead to … a less exclusive and more universal attitude to the world in general, to other countries, and to science.” Alas, “the Soviet policy has become progressively more doctrinaire and restrictive, and less tolerant and humane. In fact, the Soviet State has become a closed and rigid institution closely resembling the historical Church, even in the minute details of its attitude and organization.”
Wiener must have been far from ignorant of the centrality to Soviet scientific dogma of the “New Soviet Man,” the collectivist, technologically created Übermensch with which the communists sought to destroy once and for all the Christian Church and the visible and invisible bases of its anthropology. What Wiener was afraid of was not a merely political or ideological totalitarian regime dominating the world but one which forged cyborgs on a theocratic basis of the complete and compulsory unity and uniformity of all beings through the planetary unification of church and state.
Wiener’s proposed alternative and escape was a cybernetic system of free and open global communication among all persons. In a second suppressed chapter, “The Individual as the Word,” Wiener insists that technological advancement has revealed that “the mental identity necessary for the Church's view of the individuality of the soul certainly does not exist in any absolute sense which would be acceptable to the Church.” To the contrary, “there is no fundamental absolute line between the types of transmission which we can use for sending a telegram from country to country and the types of transmission which at least are theoretically possible for a living organism such as a human being.” The devout, Wiener claims, are now wrong that the soul is the mark of personal identity; Descartes, even, is now incorrect that thinking alone proves the thinker’s existence. To communicate is to be, says cybernetics, and to be is to communicate.
People in this unprecedented position are tempted either to compel totalitarian unity through incorporeal communication or to accept such forced unification—either to hyperactively foster cybernetic theocracy or hyperpassively accept it. As human individuality is now, Wiener avows, so clearly linguistic, the planetary escape from cybertheocracy must permit, encourage, and structure—in cybernetic fashion—the global remote communion of human individuals in the feedback loop of communication. In this way, he concludes, humanity learns recursively, a salutary mechanism not only from the standpoint of human flourishing but from the standpoint of our best resources to ensure life prevails against entropy.
As we have learned, unfortunately, the dream of global communication among humans whose identity is linguistic and cybernetic led on to the reality of an increasingly fanatical and desperate attachment to the white hole of comprehensive information at critical mass and terminal velocity. “When there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions,” as Jean Baudrillard foretold 40 years ago, “when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication … we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.”
A few years later, Baudrillard confronted the question of what could possibly follow this orgiastic singularity. “What,” he morbidly joked, “are you doing after the orgy?” Today, we have begun to recognize that what follows the mass consumption of the ecstasy of communication is the addiction to what we might call the fentanyl of communication: a dysphoric state of utter dependency on a fatal practice we can’t talk ourselves out of exacerbating. Backrooms dramatically illustrates the slide into this end-state. It’s a horror film, but what is the horrific and who are the horrified? One answer is the psychological hellscape and the heroine psychiatrist who stands in emotionally for the audience.
A better answer, I think, is that the cyberneticians of the film’s fictional Async corporation are horrified. At first glance, they are horrified that their work has unintentionally produced an inconceivably vast amount of anti-cybernetic matter. The titular Backrooms, according to the film’s lore, is a seemingly infinitely expanding and uncontrollable labyrinth made up our mutated memories of all things, accidentally opened to access by Async’s effort to solve the scarcity of living-space. But the film makes clear that the true horror for Async is their loss of hope that the Backrooms can be communicated about in a way that enables them to perform cybernetics by reestablishing systemic control. The very first thing anyone wants to do on returning from the Backrooms is to talk about it, to cognitively capture and linguistically optimize it in an ecstasy of communication. But the more it is shared in speech, the more it spreads and invades our world. It is precisely through the irresistibility of communication under its unintegrated spell that the Backrooms further colonizes, controls, and captures us. The resulting addiction is death for us, and death for cybernetics.
In other words, what we have learned since Wiener is that nothing internal and inherent to cybernetics itself seems capable of preventing even an otherwise optimal cybernetic system from tipping fatally toward either black-hole (entropy) or white-hole (singularity) failure modes. But we have also learned that cybernetic systems optimized against the risk of both modes fall toward a third failure mode of homeostatic stasis, in which new learning ends, the closed feedback loop regresses, and no new life is generated or allowed in.
If therefore both entropy and singularity are not cybernetics, but neither is stasis, we are returned to the question of how the new-yet-not-fatal enters from outside cybernetic systems into them. Emerson stresses that Swedenborg’s philosophy of fractal microcosms “is a key to his theology also. ‘Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man.’”
Yet it would be actually quite odd for God—or whatever one might call the source of new-yet-not-fatal organized life entering from outside cybernetic systems—to exist in ontological form radically at odds with cybernetics. For the self-insufficiency of cybernetics even in its most otherwise-optimal form does not indicate that life is not fundamentally communicative and relational in its character, but rather that cybernetics requires an input of such life from outside any cybernetic system in order for that system not to enclose itself and fail.
Science fiction and horror sometimes meet in visions of outside invaders that are not just destructive to life but are so in virtue of their not being organically or spiritually alive.
No God worthy of the name could be such a destroyer, and indeed the Triune God is recognized by the faithful precisely as the exemplar of life-givingly linguistic, communicative, and relational Being. Cybernetics must search in vain for any internal substitute for a commensurate source and measure of optimality in cybernetic architecture and maintenance. Believing churches to be fatally susceptible to totalitarianism, Wiener concluded that cybernetic systems must never be allowed to become churches. Now that they have taken on such a religious cast, amid the institutionalized worship of “know-how” that Wiener warned against, technologists and philosophers are thrown back upon the question of who can be trusted to sustain a spiritual order strong enough to resist the totalitarian temptation.
