Feedforward_Paper2

FEEDFORWARD PAPER # 2 /5

A Cybernetic Approach

to Futures

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FEEDFORWARD PAPER #2/5

A Cybernetic Approach to Futures

“The purpose

of looking at

AUTHORS

Prof. Andrew Meares Dr Jessica Herrington Thomas Biedermann DESIGN BY

Eden Payne PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Prof. Andrew Meares

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is future the

to disturb the present”

Gaston Berger [1]

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INTRODUCTION

Cybernetics invites us to approach systems with attentiveness to the relationships between the technical, ecological, and social. These dynamic relationships are relevant to futures because they inform how we got here; what we choose to be attentive to, build and maintain in the 21st century; the questions we ask; the choices we conceive, enact, and their consequences; and what comes next.

Cybernetic Futures recognises that the linear chronological sequencing of past/present/future, where the past precedes the present, and the present precedes the future, is a cultural construct.

We also acknowledge, and have much to learn from First Nations people who assert a very different through and thought line [2]. Creative practitioner and academic, Ambelin Kwaymullina (Palyku), describes Indigenist Futurisms as hope in this way [3]:

“… Indigenist Futurisms are stories grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing being and doing and in our deep knowledge of injustice Like all our stories our futurist narratives are informed by the tales of our Ancestors which tell of realities that are holistic non-linear Pluralist and in which everything lives and is related to each other…”

Ambelin Kwaymullina

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[3]

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A call for a different type of futures thinking and doing Understanding how the future is, and has been theorised, described, discussed and visualised provides a diverse cultural and social landscape for Cybernetic Futures to both investigate, and learn from.

We asked if new approaches are really needed when so many already exist? Educator Jennifer M. Gidley’s book The Future: A Very Short Introduction, traverses evolving scholarship and attitudes toward futures studies and historical approaches to uncertainty.[4] Gildley provides a classification system to describe evolving and fragmenting futures studies approaches.

While not discrete or exhaustive, Gidley’s list includes: “Predictive / empirical, critical / postmodern, cultural / interpretive, participatory / prospective, integral / [and] holistic” [4]. Gidley concludes her overview with a call for “… more complex, self-reflective, organic ways of thinking […] so young people are better equipped for the complexity, paradox, and unpredictability. We urgently need new forms of education based on new thinking…” [4].

By introducing Cybernetic Futures, we seek to offer some new thinking and new ways for new audiences and practitioners to test, enjoy, and share this work.

Our consideration of historical and contemporary futures thinking and strategic foresight practice suggests a prominence of identifying and developing trends, scenarios, predictions, and the assertion of a technologically-determined inevitability [5].

While these methods and positions can be useful for building narrative awareness and affective capacity to sense, consider and critique change, we see an opportunity for something different. Whereas prediction seeks conditional certainty, and hypothetical scenarios offer constrained experimentation, Cybernetic Futures accepts uncertainty as an opportunity.

Futurists practitioners Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby likewise point to ineffectual outcomes and disillusionment with strategic foresight dating from the early 1970s. They argue “The reality is that most foresight doesn’t ‘work’ in the traditional sense, at

A CYBERNETIC APPROACH TO FUTURES

least if your definition of ‘working’ includes making a difference in decisions that really matter” [6].

Smith and Ashby point to the need to embrace the possibilities inherent in uncertainty rather than “treating uncertainty as a bad thing and seeking to eliminate it [because this] shrinks useful conversations about why it exists in the first place, and forecloses productive conversations about ‘What if’” [6].

The Cybernetic Futures thinking and tools we are introducing in the Feedforward papers embrace Smith and Ashby’s challenge to create the conditions for interaction and dialogue, to promote better questions, and to be attentive to and take iterative action.

Our work also responds to another approach to futures which has become increasingly dominant over the past decades. The use of ‘a future just around the corner’ is common in the current artificial intelligence hype and critique cycle.

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A CYBERNETIC APPROACH TO FUTURES

This discourse is often adopted by ‘big tech’ product and marketing launches, and can emerge in academia, media, advertising, politics, fiction, and commerce. This positioning of temporality, in which the future seems inevitable yet just out of reach, is a powerful form of denial, delay, and distraction.

Cultural anthropologist and futurist Genevieve Bell and computer scientist Paul Dourish describe this phenomena as a “proximate future… a future infinitely postponed; when we are continually about to enter a new age, when we are continually anticipating what happens next, and when our attention is continually directed over the horizon” [7].

Bell and Dourish warn that this description of an inevitable yet deferred future is not a solution to our problems in the present, as this framing assumes that “certain problems will simply disappear of their own accord” [7]. The messy and mundane social and cultural complications of implementation, adoption, and resistance become

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problems for someone else, or are merely irrelevant obstacles that technological determinism, scale, geopolitical asymmetry, revenue growth and shareholder value, and potential popular acceptance and dependency, can simply erase [8].

Proximate futures can be deployed to maintain the status quo or dissolve dissent. However, our Cybernetic Futures thinking and tools enable us to identify and describe how and by whom ‘the future’ is being imagined, displayed, and used, through which mediums, for which audiences; and to hypothesise and critique the conditions required for a particular future to come to be.

Cybernetic Futures build on the capacity for plural perspectives by not just seeking to engage with how to study and think about futures, but primarily towards enabling the capability for who gets to build futures and how those futures can be enabled.

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A cybernetic approach to futures Cybernetics provides us with a language to converse with, the capability to inquire into and iterate ideas, seek a wide array of voices and concepts to theorise, apply and share, in the service of others, in ways meaningful to them.

Exhibition organiser of the groundbreaking art, science and technology exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) Jasia Reichardt has shared [9]: Cybernetics is a language through which different fields and systems can communicate … whatever new fields, new ideas, new questions in science emerge, cybernetics was, is and will be there to comment, to communicate, to offer a language enabling scientists of every sort to connect.

We embrace the optimism of English psychiatrist and cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, who said: “cybernetics offers the hope of providing effective methods for the study, and control, of systems that are intrinsically extremely complex” [10].

Motivated to inspire hopeful futures we have turned to cybernetics as a generative field for interdisciplinary study, methods and tools.

Cybernetics, as a term, has a varied backstory.

In 1834, French scientist André-Marie Ampère sought to classify all human knowledge and designated the term “cybernétique” to describe the “science of civil government” or the “future art of governing” [11].

By 1843 Polish philosopher Bronislaw Trentowski had borrowed Ampère’s term and wrote “Cybernetyka”, subtitled “The relation of philosophy to cybernetics as the art of governing a nation” [12]. According to philosopher Michał Krzykawski, writing about Trentowski in 2024, Trentowski’s cybernetics “refers to a practical action depending upon circumstances” that is “responsible for making real decisions in [the] here and now” [12].

Just over a century later, in 1948, mathematician and polymath Norbert Wiener, who is credited with popularising

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“cybernetics offers the hope of providing effective methods for the study, and control, of systems that are intrinsically extremely complex”

W. Ross Ashby [10]

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the term “cybernetics”, published the book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” [13] . Wiener’s insights developed from the interdisciplinary dialogue among practitioners explored before and during the Macy Conferences (1946-1953).

While Wiener’s interests and applications were very much of his moment, his prolific media engagements, demonstrations, and writings were always focused on the future social and cultural impacts of humanmachine interactions.

Wiener’s cybernetics sought to explain how messages govern or steer a system, and after discarding “Angelos”, from the Greek ἄγγελος (ángelos), which translates to “messenger”, he chose “cybernetics” from the Greek κυβερνήτης (kubernētēs), which translates to “helmsman” or “pilot,” meaning “to steer a boat”.

Wiener later wrote his autobiography “I am a mathematician” in 1956, where he explained that a cybernetic view of agency can arise from connected perception and communication of pasts and futures coordinated in the present [14]:

The uptake and broad application of cybernetic ideas and applications spread from communication and control theory, automata, electronic computing, and artificial intelligence, to physiology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, and art and design and so many other fields beyond. These innovations, conversations, and their consequences helped create the connected world we now know and the systems we describe, build, and still struggle with.

To communicate with the outer world means to receive messages from it and to send messages to it.

On the one hand, it means to observe, to experiment, and to learn; and on the other to exert our influence on the outer world so that our actions become purposeful and effective. Experimentation in fact is one form of a two-way conversation with the outer world, in which we use outgoing commands to determine the conditions of incoming observations, and in which, at the same time, we use our incoming

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A CYBERNETIC APPROACH TO FUTURES

observations to increase the effectiveness of our outgoing commands.

In their own ways, in their own times, Reichardt, Ashby, Ampère, Trentowski, Wiener, and the many others who have made significant contributions to cybernetics help us to enquire, understand, and navigate a system in context [15]. Following these cybernetic foundations, management cybernetician Stafford Beer in 2001, offered the helpful heuristic: “the purpose of a system is what it does” [16].

Cybernetics simply gives us a language and techniques to not just observe and describe the system of interest (a judgment by a person or a group about a system in a situation with a purpose), but also recognise how we perceive, learn, adapt and change the very systems we observe. We are a dynamic part of those systems.

In examining the proliferation of the term “cyber” as the production, circulation, and operation of cybernetic culture, in the mid-1990s, communications scholar Sheryl

N. Hamilton recognised the power and influence of post-WWII North American cybernetics. She described the cybernetics of that period as operating not just as “technical knowledge” but also as “social knowledge” that, from the outset, was “concerned with, and helped shape, certain notions of temporality in general, and the future in particular. It seemed to offer the tools to know, or at least understand the future” [17]. Hamilton contends that “cybernetic futurology” had, and has, “implications for the kinds of narratives of the future, the kinds of futurologies we tell today” [17]. Through a “past tale of the future” to reveal the framing of ideas flowing from cybernetic concepts, Hamilton argues [17]: … we can see how existing notions of the future, and the future of the future, are not “new”, are not independent of their circulation in public and popular knowledge, and most important, are neither neutral nor merely the ideological position of particular institutional power structures deposited from the outside into culture.

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Following this reflective stance, Cybernetic Futures is an embodied praxis, that is, what we actually do, informed by what we think, is attentive to how our reflection is reciprocally linked to perception and intentional action.

This interactive learning and evaluating cycle, that a cybernetic approach provides, creates knowledge and agency - the capability to act - by the attentive commingling and dynamic animation of pasts/presents/ futures. Other theorists such as George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self, and Society, 1934) [18], John McHale (The Future of the Future, 1969) [19], Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (What is agency?, 1998) [20], and Denise Potosky and Wilfrid Azan (Leadership behaviors and human agency in the valley of despair: A meta-framework for organisational change implementation, 2022) [21] have explored iterative temporality, hope, and human agency in similar ways.

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Cybernetics simply gives us a language and techniques to not just observe and describe the system of interest, but also recognise how we perceive, learn, adapt, and change the very systems we observe.

We are a dynamic part of those systems.

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Thinking about futures as a system

Approaching futures as a system proposes:

We have suggested that Cybernetic Futures offers us generative and critical ways of thinking and doing to navigate future actions, informed by the past, by governing in the present. This requires thinking about futures as a system.

1. A view of what we describe as “pasts”, “presents”, and “futures” can act as interconnected nodes within a system linking the personal, our institutions, and societies.

2. Consideration of how these conceptual temporal nodes can act on one another, animated by subjective understandings of time, perspectives, and narratives.

3. Examination of how systems are constituted by collective imaginaries and supported by infrastructures, including communication channels.

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This reframing provides several significant insights: • Instead of a linear track, time can be thought of as a looped, responsive process. Systems unfold not in a linear fashion but in cycles of experimentation, feedback and adjustment.

• Multiple timelines can overlap and operate in parallel. Long-term climatic transitions, policy cycles of brief duration, and personal cycles of care and lived experience coexist and intersect simultaneously. Future design requires a working understanding of these intersections of timescales.

• Orientation to the future is not objective, it is filtered through the lenses of power, affect, worldview, and history. Therefore, designing with time takes more than data, it takes reflexivity.

• Futures are created through action in the present.

Narratives we share, systems we create and are part of, choices we undertake today all remake what is possible in the future.

French futurist Gaston Berger’s suggestion, we note in the epigraph, that we turn to the future in order to disrupt the present reminds us of the role that futures can play in changing systems [22-24].

This is not the escapism or enduring delay of Bell and Dourish’s proximate future, or a contingently dependent, and therefore incomplete, predictive future. Rather, approaching futures as a system reframes the here and now - taking space from master narratives and dominant voices and creating room so that other forms of possibility can be considered, heard, and come into being.

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A CYBERNETIC APPROACH TO FUTURES

What comes next?

While Feedforward papers one and two provided a contextual positioning of a cybernetic approach to futures, Feedforward papers three and four introduce two new tools to apply to help think about futures as a system. We have named them the Cybernetic Futures Framework and the Cybernetic Futures Compass. Feedforward paper five concludes by positioning hope as a necessary condition for systems change. Taken together, these Feedforward papers are offered as an introduction to a different type of futures thinking and doing by governing in the present.

We believe the future is an invitation, so please join us.

Sign up at cybernetics.anu.edu.au for updates from the ANU School of Cybernetics.

REFERENCES

1.

Berger, G. (1958). ‘L’Attitude Prospective’, Prospective, 1(May). Paris: Publication du Centre d’Etudes.

2.

Carlson, B., Day, M., O’Sullivan, S., & Kennedy, T. (Eds.) (2025). The Routledge handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures. London, England: Routledge.

3.

Kwaymullina, A. (2025). Indigenist Futurisms. In Carlson, Day, OSullivan & Kennedy (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures. London, England. Routledge.

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. Gidley, J. M. (2017). The Future: A Very Short Introduction.

United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

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Jungk, R. (1969). Human futures. Futures, 1969. 1(1), 34-39.

6.

Smith, S., & Ashby, M. (2020). How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page Publishers.

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Bell, G., & Dourish, P. (2007). Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision.

Personal and ubiquitous computing, 11(2), 133-143.

8.

Dourish, P. & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: Mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. MIT Press.

9.

Meares, A., McLennan, A., & Pegram, C. (2024).

Australian Cybernetic: A point through time. Canberra: ANU School of Cybernetics.

10.

Ashby, W.R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics.

London: Chapman & Hall.

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. Hui, Y. (2024). Why cybernetics now? In Y. Hui (Ed.) Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1. (pp. 11-220). Hong Kong: Hanart Press.

18.

Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Krzykawski, M. (2024). Cybernetics, Communism, and Romanticism: Cybernetic Thinking in the Polish People’s Republic and in the Pre-Cybernetic Era. In Y, Hui (Ed.) Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol. 1. (pp. 153170). Hong Kong: Hanart Press.

19.

McHale, J. (1969). The future of the future. New York: George Braziller.

20.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962– 1023.

21.

Potosky, D., & Azan, W. (2023). Leadership behaviors and human agency in the valley of despair: A meta-framework for organizational change implementation. Human Resource Management Review, 33(1), 100927.

22.

Sharma, S., (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.

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Environmental Philosophy, 9(1), 127-140.

24.

Miller, R. (2018). Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st century. Taylor & Francis.

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13.

Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. John Wiley & Sons.

14.

Wiener, N. (1956). I am a mathematician: The later life of a prodigy; an autobiographical account of the mature years and career of Norbert Wiener and a continuation of the account of his childhood in Ex-prodigy. MIT Press.

15.

Ison, R. (2008). Systems thinking and practice for action research. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury, The SAGE Handbook of Action Research, (pp. 139–158), SAGE Publications.

16.

Beer, S. (2002). What is cybernetics? Kybernetes, 31(2), 209-219.

17.

Hamilton, S. N. (1998). Incomplete determinism: A discourse analysis of cybernetic futurology in early cyberculture. The Journal of Communication Inquiry, 22(2), 177–204.

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We believe the future is an invitation, so please join us. cybernetics.anu.edu.au @anucybernetics