A note on c/cyb and the existent

The work of c/cyb is the work of contributing, however microscopically, to raising the chances of bringing a better world into being. Such a world does not seem likely under today’s circumstances, it is barely even conceivable, but it becomes ever so slightly less impossible with each contribution made, whether in the form of ideas, organisations, tools, machines or whatever else (that might overlap or exceed a taxonomy of c/cyb).

“Creating the existent” From ‘Arcology: The Image of Man’ by Paolo Soleri. The image represents models which are radically imaginative and creative (though an inch progressed in reality is as good as a heroic leap in the mind’s eye, so long as the latter doesn’t distract from the former).

Thrthering of common goals is bound to relate to the world as it is, in one way or another. It works with the present in order to open up new future horizons. This relationship with the existent, as I see it, can proceed in three general directions.

• [1] Creating the existent: This refers to the creation of the new in order to supersede the unjust present. It refers to the invocation of new tools, organisations, ways of seeing, and so on, in order to produce and reproduce the common.

• [2] Adjusting the existent: This relates to the process of reappropriating, improving, reimagining or redirecting existing cybernetic tools for the purposes of the common. It steers that which exists towards common purposes, and endeavours to account for the aspects of those tools which are infected by the pathologies of the present.

• [3] Dismantling the existent: This refers to the hijacking, undermining, sabotage, or misdirection of aspects of the machinic hegemony. This, while being less hopeful, less utopian, less conducive to the creation of a new world, is increasingly proving to be the only way to ensure the survival of humanity. Dismantling machinism becomes increasingly obligatory as we accelerate ever more quickly towards an uninhabitable society and planet.

  

  “Adjusting the existent” The VSM from Stafford Beer’s ‘Brain of the Firm’. The VSM is a classic ambivalent cybernetic model: a powerful tool which must be brought into closer proximity to the common, if it is to make good systems great, rather than bad systems more efficiently bad.

Whether c/cyb is enacted through creation, redirection or sabotage, c/cyb must retain a posture of commonality - which is to put questions of organisational self-governance, democratic self-control, its limitations and flaws, fail points and limits to scalability - at the forefront of what it does. C/cyb centres the design of models, practices and machines around the common, in each of its 5 meanings. C/cyb must therefore prioritise the creation, protection, and circulation of [1] pooled resources to be shared, distributed and made accessible to [2] the commoners, the [3] community at large, in such a way that the common might be more [4] frequently observed and [5] easily understood. Manifestations of c/cyb, consequently, must produce what they produce in such a way that they can be taken up, forked, reproduced and improved by others, and must ensure that they are alluring, exciting, intriguing, so that their fruits might be popularised in the eyes of their beneficiaries.

“Dismantling the existent” From ‘To Our Friends’ by The Invisible Committee. What more needs to be said? Building a better world means dismantling that which keeps us in chains & protects hegemony through violence.

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