Talk of “the future of cybernetics” conflates several questions. The project distinguishes five horizons: the future of Beer’s specific models (notably the VSM); the future of cybernetic principles more broadly (variety, recursion, feedback regulation); the future of organizations as such; the future role of AI and machine intelligence; and the future of society itself. The horizons are related but come apart: the specific artifacts may date dramatically while the underlying principles become more relevant rather than less — or the reverse. Keeping the horizons distinct is what allows a scenario to be sharp instead of vaguely affirmative.
1. Method: scenarios, verdicts, working papers
The project’s unit of work is the standalone working paper: a concept, an argument, and its open questions, written so it can be examined — and rejected — on its own. Papers are organized as scenarios: plausible development trajectories, each argued for and against. Two devices keep the set disciplined. First, every scenario carries its strongest counter-reading inside it, so no chapter argues for an outcome. Second, disruption scenarios are read as perturbations to the VSM’s load-bearing assumptions (for example: that no single controller can match the variety of what it controls; that viability requires deliberately engineered functions; that the model must remain legible to humans), with an explicit verdict for each on the gradient absorbed → extended → transformed → obsolete. The method borrows its standards from the tradition it examines: claims should be specific enough to be shown wrong.
2. Work stream I – the scenario publications
This stream began as a single book-length examination, drafted as roughly thirty working papers. The single-volume structure failed in an instructive way: the material outgrew one book, and its parts made different promises to different readers. On 9 August 2026 it was set aside in favour of a publishing programme; the drafted corpus (frozen as snapshot v0.11) remains the raw material. Two tracks lead:
- Track 1 — Wild Futures (short book, ca. 60–100 pages): the future-facing vignettes and stories, combined with the catalogue of failure modes, out-of-scope failures, and explicitly dystopian scenarios. The design-fiction line continues here, currently developed under the motto Letters from 2126*.
- Track 2 — Punch and Judy (working title, academic book): the critique of received VSM practice — what has been misunderstood inside the model (System 4, the channels), and what was reinvented outside it without credit — closed by a research agenda. The research agenda itself has already been extracted as a separately publishable unit.
Further volumes are envisioned but not committed: cognition, ecology, and a rewritten VSM that addresses the System 4 and channel misreadings directly. Sequencing is deliberate: the stories first, to build engagement; the academic challenge second. The planetary-horizon and coda material remains in the corpus, awaiting its place in the programme.
3. Work stream II – the founding workshop
The near-term deliverable is a working session at Metaphorum 2026 under the title The Second Century of Viability — currently expected to be a 45-minute slot rather than the half-day originally envisaged. The design intent survives the compression: a working session, not a presentation, combining short provocations, structured dialogue and collective synthesis, seeded by a small selection of the project’s scenarios argued from both sides. The fuller syntegration-inspired discovery lab — rotating roles, timeboxing, parallel scenario groups with facilitator briefings and participant handouts — is deferred to a later, longer event; the prepared materials keep. Senior figures act as respondents and witnesses rather than agenda-setters; younger and practitioner voices contribute on equal footing. Particular attention goes to strengthening democratic structures and the agency of individuals and groups — a commitment inherited directly from Beer’s later work. Each group documents its work; the outputs are raw material for the book and the publication trail, so the workshop feeds the research rather than merely presenting it.
4. Work streams III–V – community, publications, synergy
The remaining streams extend the work beyond a single event. Community: the workshop is designed to seed a continuing “group for the future” that carries the questions forward between conferences.
Publications: selected working papers are to be developed toward submission-ready articles, alongside lighter-weight essays and social media that make the material public as it matures rather than after the fact.
Synergy: the project deliberately connects to neighboring communities — complexity science, collective intelligence, Earth-system governance, the wider systems movement — on the view that the interesting futures of cybernetics lie at its boundaries with these fields, not inside its own vocabulary.
5. What the project claims – and does not
The project claims that the questions Beer worked on — how systems remain viable under complexity they cannot fully model — are becoming more pressing, and that his conceptual apparatus remains an unusually precise diagnostic instrument for them. It does not claim that the VSM will, or should, survive the century in its present form; several of its own scenarios argue the contrary. It does not claim novelty for the observation that cybernetics can address societal scale — Beer did that himself, from Project Cybersyn to Designing Freedom. The contribution it aims at is narrower and harder: locating, scenario by scenario, where cybernetic concepts still carry load, where they must be extended, and where they should be retired.
6. State of play (August 2026)
The scenario corpus is drafted and frozen as snapshot v0.11; it now serves as raw material for the publishing programme rather than as a book manuscript. Track 1 (Wild Futures) has its constituent material — vignettes, failure modes, out-of-scope and dystopian scenarios — and needs curation, images and layout to reach its maturity. Track 2 (Punch and Judy) has a proposed three-part structure (inside the model, outside the model, research agenda) and an extracted, separately publishable research agenda; its central unresolved question is what replaces the VSM if the critique lands. Workshop preparation is scaled to the shorter Metaphorum slot; the half-day materials are retained for a later event. Open at the time of writing: curation of Track 1, the structure and possible co-authorship of Track 2, the order in which the tracks reach their audiences, and the design of the continuing community. These are decisions, not gaps in the material.
7. Invitation
The project is built to be argued with. Readers who think a scenario is wrong — or missing — are the intended collaborators, whether at the founding workshop (Metaphorum 2026 ?) or in the continuing group beyond it.