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Cybernetics Club is a learning group organized around the legacy of cybernetics and all the fields it has touched.

"Cybernetics" is difficult to define: an ambitious interdisciplinary science that sought to connect fields as disparate as astrophysics, biology, sociology, computer science, and more by considering systems, and the control and communication that run within them, as the objects of study. As a practice, cybernetics is a victim of its own success -- it is renown has faded, but its ideas have dissolved into the disciplines it aimed to unite, or seeded entirely new ones: information science, systems biology, and more.

In a world that feels intractable in scale and complexity, tensions of communication and control abound. Maybe by returning to the ideas of cybernetics can we find some help in making sense of the present.

The ethos of Cybernetics Club is: "I'm interested in this topic, let's learn and explore it together". Anyone can lead a session; there's no need to be an expert. The only requirement is some connection to cybernetics, or approaching the topic in a cybernetic way. Fortunately, cybernetics is such a broad discipline that its framing is applicable to many, many different subjects.

We meet roughly every other month in New York. Remote participants are more than welcome.

Cybernetics Club on the web:

  • GitHub - Past session notes and readings
  • Slack - Find us in #cybernetics in Learning Garden's Slack
  • Learning Gardens - Our parent meta-organization of learning groups
  • Google Group - List for official announcements (new sessions)
  • Are.na - Where readings for future sessions are organized

Past sessions:

  1. What is Cybernetics? I
  2. What is Cybernetics? II
  3. Complex & Wicked Problems
  4. Networks & Scale
  5. Games (Theory) & Behavioral Economics (w/ Karla Hoff)
  6. Design & Cybernetics (w/ Michael Yap)
  7. Cybernetics & Me (w/ Dan Taeyoung & Max Fowler)
  8. The Alt-Right (w/ Édouard Urcades)
  9. Organizational Cybernetics
  10. Affect Theory & Shame (w/ Rachel Rosenfelt)
  11. Cybernetics & Architecture (Intro) (w/ Dan Taeyoung, David Hecht, and Austin Smith)
  12. Cyber-Systemic Theories of Change (w/ Howard Silverman)

Have an idea for a future session? Add it here!

Thanks to Éd for the logo!