Ethics & cybernetics: the ethical groundlessness of cybernetics

(ethics & efficacy I)

Cybernetics, understood as a discourse which seeks to find commonalities and means of synergy between and within highly complex systems, of whatever form or variety, is without ethical grounding. The effective application of cybernetics towards some goal does nothing to justify the goal towards which it is directed. Any system bereft of decent ethics will only be made more efficient in its wrongdoing if cybernetics is properly applied to it, which is demonstrated by its emergence from some of the most dubious subjects of enquiry.¹ The mere use of cybernetics has absolutely no impact on the ethical validity of a particular practice or project, and those who couch their work in the language of cybernetics can be considered no more worthy of trust than those who invoke whatever other vernacular to construct their models of understanding. The fact that cybernetics works, that it enables a system to satisfy its purpose, goes no way to justifying that purpose.

All this should be uncontroversial. Cybernetics concerns the conditions by which a complex system of whatever kind can be directed towards its goals more efficiently, whatever that goal might be. In this sense cybernetics is a catalyst for goals. It does not judge the ethics of the goal towards which it is put, but only seeks to manifest it more exactly. This constitutes the real limit of cybernetics. That is, cybernetics reaches its limit whenever it is put to work by (fallible and prejudiced) persons.

Yet this ethical ambivalence of cybernetics does not render it objective, neutral or impartial, but rather the opposite,² it leaves the ethics of one’s goals out of sight, which can (and has) led to some of the worst goals being achieved to greater effect, and therefore to the greater detriment of those who are its victims. Cybernetics is beyond good and evil, but we who think and practice it are not. It is put towards goals of our making (and those goals are embedded with an ethics), despite having no goal essential to itself. It is a means with no ends of its own.

In a word, cybernetics is amoral, and whatever moral consequences its users direct it towards are to cast judgement upon those users, not on any imagined essence of the tool(s) they use in its name.³ Any naive cybernetician who attempts to apply cybernetics ‘as it is’ – to apply it without first bringing into contention the grounding of the purpose towards which they direct it – tread a dangerous path towards monstrous ends, and render themselves blind to the purpose towards which they are directed. Cybernetics is consequently inherently political (it is directed towards fallible, contestable ends and within varying ideological boundaries), but it has no politics of its own (it is teleologically ambivalent, and is subservient to human ends).⁴

Before undertaking any cybernetic pursuit, we must first insist upon this: cybernetics is subordinate to ethics. Ethics and cybernetics are not simply two sides of a coin, instead, cybernetics must be held within the constraints of ethics, lest it becomes a means for death machines to become more efficiently deadly.

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1. It is no secret that cybernetics emerged (at least in its self-conscious forms) out of military research and invasive psychiatric experimentation (Pickering, 2010). It has been used to make the death machines of both the state and commerce more efficiently fulfil their malevolent purposes (Rid, 2016; Lafontaine, 2016; Tiqqun, 2020).

2. Since it cannot but have an ethics, yet its ethics is not its own, but that of its user.

3. It is for this reason that radical critiques of cybernetics, which accuse it of being the essential basis upon which the neoliberal capitalist machine is built, are as true as they are inconsequential for the ethical validity of cybernetics as a subject of enquiry (Lafontaine, 2016; Tiqqun, 2020; Deleuze, 2017). Cybernetics is effectively put towards many evil ends, but this goes no way to rendering it incapable of being put towards other (which is to say, emancipatory and egalitarian) ends. Cybernetics cannot be judged to be bad because it is used by our enemies, just as projects and worldviews cannot be judged to be good because they are pursued within a cybernetic framework.

4. It is for this reason that we must name the politics we wish it to embody.