Cybernetic Futures: what we stand for
- The past teaches us, but it does not repeat. A hundred years after Stafford Beer’s birth, we honor his work the way good cybernetics treats any model: gratefully, and critically.
- The future cannot be predicted — but it can be shaped. Imagining futures, carefully and together, is our first act of agency.
- We argue our futures honestly. Every scenario we propose carries its strongest counter-argument within it. A future that cannot survive criticism does not deserve our work.
- For the first time, we share the work of thinking with something we built but do not fully understand. AI is alien enough to enrich our options — and human enough to mirror our fears back at us. Integrating it includes taming ourselves.
- We work for futures that widen agency — of individuals, of groups, of organizations. Viability without freedom is not our goal. That, too, is Stafford Beer’s legacy.
- A field and its community co-evolve. We are building both at once: the research of the future and the movement that carries it.
- We do not predict a bright future. We choose to work for one. Optimism is our decision, not our forecast — because pessimism forecloses the agency we just claimed.
News
Research Programme
Pure VSM Pure VSM is a book in preparation. Its purpose is to present Beer's Viable System Model as he stated it: every claim about the…
Ask Cyberdesk
Opening a theme — and the context around it
The first theme is open, with the context around it: an introduction for newcomers, the neighboring literatures and deep dives. What each theme will carry, and what we are asking researchers, students and curious readers for.
Research Opportunities: The Law We Quote Is Not the Law Ashby Wrote
The Law We Quote Is Not the Law Ashby Wrote Here is the work we would take part in and cannot do alone. Most of it…
Prologue: “That’s the way to do it”
The prologue to Punch and Judy: what the catchphrase admits, why this book examines the Viable System Model instead of commemorating it, and what it asks of the reader.
Part Two — Outside: the people who found it without us
Part Two: the literatures that reached the Viable System Model's insights without it — Simon, Koestler, Jaques, Galbraith, Boisot, Aulin, Friston, Trist, Herbst, Cherns, Boeke, Endenburg and Ostrom — and the objections that land.
Part Three — False Friends and Enemies
Part Three: the defences that cannot fail — the market test, usefulness instead of truth, the category error as shelter — and the criticism the model actually has to answer.
Part Four — What we lose
Part Four: the narrow claim the Viable System Model can defend, the six things nothing else does, the transducer as an object of design, and autonomy stated as a quantity.
Community Links
- a general overview what the project is about.
- a first view of the proposed research programme.
- an invitation to our WhatsApp group (public) and Discourse Community Forum (restricted).
Wiki
Put a question to the project’s assistant — it answers from the wiki, with sources.
Our Knowledge Base of growing content, basis for community discussions.
Pure VSM
Beer’s Viable System Model as the sources state it — every claim carrying a locator.