In the mid-20th century, cybernetics emerged as a radical rethinking of systems, observers, and the recursive loops that bind them. It was never a closed discipline but a method of inquiry—a tool for understanding how systems regulate themselves and how observers entangle with the phenomena they study. It cut across biology, engineering, psychology, and philosophy. It was never meant to be pinned down. And yet, that is precisely what has happened.
A recent institutional effort to resurrect cybernetics—this time as a school within a major university—has misfired in ways that reveal a tragic misunderstanding of its own intellectual ancestry. Instead of nurturing the recursive complexity that cybernetics demands, the school collapsed it into an ideological program built on fixed identity categories and a narrow historical frame. The result is not a renaissance but a recursive dead-end.
At issue is the strategic choice to encode race and gender politics into the very definition of cybernetics itself. This was not a mistake of moral concern—race and gender are critical domains of systemic injustice—but of conceptual framing. Cybernetics, properly understood, is about systems, feedback, control, adaptation, and the instability of meaning in observer-participant dynamics. It deals in second-order consequences, not first-order representation. When a system builds itself around fixed symbolic terms of inclusion rather than the open-ended dynamics of change, it loses its own cybernetic footing.
What has taken root instead is a theatrical feedback loop. Symbolic gestures stand in for systemic change. Institutional rituals—diversity statements, identity metrics, compliance audits—create the appearance of evolution while ensuring stasis. The school has become a machine for staging legitimacy rather than generating new insight. It cannot learn from the systems it studies because it has pre-decided what the system must mean. That is not cybernetics. It is orthodoxy wearing a name tag that says “radical.”
More troubling still is the strategic ineptitude. In mistaking politics for systems-thinking, the school has rendered itself intellectually inert. It cannot respond to criticism without triggering its own defensive logic. It cannot adapt because it does not believe it should. It cannot model complex systems because it has reduced its own complexity to a series of ideologically sanctioned slogans. This is not merely disappointing—it is structurally catastrophic.
The tragedy is that this could have been different. A cybernetics school grounded in recursive epistemology, reflexive design, and complex systems logic could have challenged not only academia but the political and technological systems it critiques. It could have embodied its own principles. Instead, it reified the very hierarchies it claimed to dismantle. The show changed costumes, but the script stayed the same.
Cybernetics cannot be reduced to representation. It is not a politics of identity but a politics of systems. Its failure at the hands of those who misunderstood this distinction should serve as a recursive lesson. Not a footnote. A feedback signal.
Daedelus Kite 