In The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Bertrand Russell advises a certain class of unhappy intellectuals to stop circling their own unhappiness and “go out into the world,” even to the point where “the satisfaction of elementary physical needs” occupies almost all their energies. The qualification matters. Russell is not romanticising suffering as some universal moral disinfectant. Too much suffering does not ennoble people. It breaks them. But too little contact with difficulty can leave thought weightless, sealed inside its own cleverness, mistaking vocabulary for knowledge and institutional performance for life. There is a form of clarity that can emerge from hardship, but it is easily ruined by anger, grief, exhaustion, and the ordinary hormonal weather of being human.
My experience studying cybernetics left me inside that tension. I believe many of the intentions were sincere. I do not doubt that people thought they were doing something good. That is part of what makes the whole thing sadder. The place seemed to want to speak about systems, ethics, technology, power, culture, and humanity, yet increasingly appeared to reproduce the very institutional habits that cybernetics should have made visible. It felt less like an environment organised around difficult inquiry and more like one drifting toward consultancy, reputation, funding, and the careful production of professional identity. Somewhere along the way, the study of systems seemed to become another system optimising for itself.
The grounding in Indigenous knowledge, gender, and social justice was never the problem. These are serious matters. Indigenous Australians have endured centuries of dispossession, violence, erasure, and administrative cruelty. Gender, identity, and human difference are equally deserving of careful thought. My concern was something else. These subjects sometimes appeared to become institutionally coded, socially policed, and professionally performed. A culture can genuinely believe it is opening space while quietly narrowing what may be said inside it. It can mistake ritualised language for understanding. It can alienate people while congratulating itself for inclusion. That is precisely the kind of recursive failure cybernetics ought to notice first.
That was the deeper disappointment. A school of cybernetics should be unusually capable of recognising feedback, incentive, capture, drift, and self-description. It should be able to observe itself becoming what it claims merely to analyse. Instead, the environment often seemed strangely blind to its own behaviour. It spoke about systems while behaving like one that could not observe itself. It gestured toward humanity while becoming increasingly absorbed in its own hierarchies, committees, reputations, and professional incentives. The anger comes from that inversion. The sadness comes from the suspicion that many people genuinely could not see it happening.
This became entangled with the worst period of my life. The last professional environment I truly experienced before the black hole of stroke, disability, collapse, and recovery was that university. I then entered the PhD after nearly dying twice, and I remain genuinely grateful that I was given that opportunity. Gratitude does not cancel judgement. I can appreciate the chance while also saying that the experience often felt alienating, diminishing, and quietly brutal. I frequently felt managed rather than understood, tolerated rather than engaged, and surrounded by smiles that seemed more institutional than human. That is not an accusation against individuals. It is simply the atmosphere I experienced.
What remains is not resentment so much as grief. If a national university exists, in part, to strengthen the nation through knowledge, then surely one of its responsibilities is to think clearly about the future before everyone else is forced to. Cybernetics should have been central to Australia’s understanding of artificial intelligence, technological sovereignty, information warfare, institutional resilience, and the strategic consequences of increasingly autonomous systems. I found remarkably little of that urgency. Too much felt hand-wavy, performative, professionally convenient. This is my perception, my experience, not an objective verdict on everyone involved. But from where I stood, I kept finding myself looking at the label and thinking: I can’t believe it’s not cybernetics.
Daedelus Kite 