Cybernetics “claims that the control of a system
is obtained by establishing an optimum degree of communication between the
parties to it.”

Cybernetic organisms are composed of protocols as sets of technical standards that sculpt
a network. Within a protocol, systems of distributed management merges
communication and computation to allow free-floating control. Free-flowing
control allows systems to work using autopoesis. Without a hierarchy to tell
the nodes what to do, the individual agents perform repetitive tasks on their
own to keep the organism at equilibrium based on positive and negative feedback
loops. Free-floating control is essentially anarchy. Control to the masses
become religion, government, banks, and markets
of capitalism.

The totality of control can be broken up into two aspects: UTOPIAN and DISTOPIAN.

In The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Tiqqun proposes that “for a physical, biological, or social system to have enough energy to ensure its reproduction, its control devices must carve into the mass of the unknown, and slice into the ensemble of possibilities between what is characterized by pure chance, and has nothing to do with control, and what can enter into control as hazard risks, immediately susceptible to a probability calculation.”A utopian system is self-organizing, self-reproducing system that will continue to thrive infinitely. It embodies the early beliefs of Ecology where nature and

ecosystems constantly tries to maintain homeostasis. This was eventually proved
false through more data collection and found that ecosystems are in constant
change. Individualism derived from the Enlightenment is present in using
machines to automate systems because within a distributed network information
is potentially present in the environment around any situation. With
hyper-individuality comes egoism and a thirst for power and control. We believe
machines to be neutral and unbiased, but sometimes we forget about the
individual that aims to use these helpful systems to maintain their status in a
social system. Situationism is a way of controlling what someone observes. It
is a “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” that are present in a drifters personality. People become drawn in by external attractions rather than internal beliefs. Then they get drawn into the
spectacle of commodities. Thus allowing themselves to be controlled by wants
and desires. The spectacle is both the goal and the means to the goal. Society
of the Spectacle by Guy Debord exemplifies the collection of his theses
juxtaposed with sequences of hyperfemininity and warfare. Some people may opt
out in panic and protest. “In panic situations, communities break off from the
social body, designed as a totality, and attempt to escape it.” 
During the counterculture movement of the 1960’s, many individuals left urban
areas and escaped to live in communes built using geodesic domes critiquing
hierarchical politics with elements of systems theory. Their objective was to
live as a cybernetic organism free of hierarchal command with free-floating
control. However these social experiments didn’t last longer than 3 years
because individuals succumbed to the illusion of egoic control. “Cybernetics as
the dynamics of self-control steersmanship turns out to be associated with
determinism”. Philosopher Alan Watts identified the connection between cybernetics, self-control and zen.

This would be a potential mindset for a sustainable future by keeping organic
power distinct from political power.

Great
quotes from the Stewart Brand article:

"What order obtained on
many communes depended less on systems of explicit social control than on
social resources and cultural habits imported from the New Communalists’ former
lives"

"Information theory also
exerted a tremendous pull on biological studies of organisms and their interaction.
Many shifted toward the study of populations and the principles of natural
selection in terms modeled on cybernetic theories of command and control."

"If the ministrations of
hierarchically organized governments and corporations had thrown the earth’s
energies out of balance, the dome’s ferociously efficient management of surface
tension modeled a world restored to energetic homeostasis."

"Bay area computer programmers
had imbibed the countercultural ideals of decentralization and personalization,
along with a keen sense of information’s trans- formative potential, and had
built those into a new kind of machine"