Cybernetics and Participation: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

A combination of recent cybernetic discourse provides guidelines for reconsidering our way of thinking about the relationship between government and the governed. With reference to contemporary understanding of natural biological systems and complexity, it is possible to reformulate a language that has tended to be dominated by notions of competition and survival of the fittest. Instead we can perhaps move toward reconsidering social systems in terms of a more dynamic and equitable understanding of the “fit” and structural “dance” of different systems, and postulate that the motor for progress is the coexistence of difference rather than “might over right.” This paper synthesizes the somewhat different insights of Stafford Beer and the “Santiago School of Cognition,” and reports on a real-world initiative that sought to instantiate governance as a phenomenon constituted by the governed. Technological developments of the “knowledge age” are proposed as supporting such democratic initiatives.