New Books in Systems and Cybernetics

There is a growing need across social, environmental, and policy challenges for richer, more nuanced, yet actionable and participatory understanding of the world. Complexity science and systems thinking offer hope in meeting this need. But in their 2022 book Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra (Alex) S. Penn argue that ‘systems mapping’ is a necessary a starting point for understanding complex adaptive systems in practical, actionable, and participatory ways.

Their book explores a range of new and older systems mapping methods focused on representing causal relationships in systems. In a practical manner, it describes the methods and considers the differences between. Systems Mapping offers practical insights for causal systems mapping in real-world contexts, with tips from experienced practitioners, and a detailed guide on the realities and challenges of building and using these types of system maps.

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Recently I had a chance to sit down for a long overdue chat with Anthony (Tony) Hodgson. When we last spoke it happened to be for my very first episode of Systems and Cybernetics. We talked about his newest book at the time: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). That was in the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was seemed to be experiencing more turbulence than it ever had.

Fast forward to late 2023. The world, by all accounts—wars, climate chaos, mass shootings, and a lingering virus that will probably never go away—is turbulent beyond the tolerance threshold of the planet itself, not to mention its inhabitants. It seemed a fitting time to talk to Tony about his more recent Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World, 2nd Edition (Triarchy, 2021).

First published a decade ago, Ready for Anything starts by describing a 'global predicament', characterized by reductionist modes of thinking that are increasingly unsuited to what is really going on, and our fixation on short-term results—a pattern often referred to as shifting the burden. Hodgson writes that "complex messes are often the result of interactions between multiple complex adaptive systems, resulting in the emergence of unpredictable behaviours" (p. 18).

In Ready for Anything, Hodgson introduces 'The World System Model'. The model encompasses 12 nodes ranging from Dominant Worldviews, to Wealth and Power, to Climate Change impact, and aims to provide a much-needed platform for a design revolution that harmonizes humanity, ecology and technology by integrating knowledge across disciplines around the major systemic issues confronting our world. Hodgson brought the model to the International Futures Forum (IFF) where it was implemented as the IFF World Game (follow the link for a visual of the model and examples of how it's put to use), which makes the model accessible to any kind of group in a highly participative manner.

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Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. 

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory can help to better understand and describe developments of the 21st century. The contributors of Wallerstein 2.0: Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century (Transcript Publishing, 2023) address ways to reread Wallerstein's theoretical thoughts in the humanities and social sciences. The presented interdisciplinary approach of this anthology intends to highlight the broader value of Wallerstein's ideas, even almost five decades after the famous sociologist and economic historian first expressed them.

Frank Jacob is a professor of global history at Nord Universitet, Norway.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. Aaron is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We talk about what the science of science can contribute to your career in research.

Aaron Clauset : "In science, having good ideas is, in the end, the most important part. You can go a long way, in terms of surviving in the ecosystem of scientific research, on the basis of having really good ideas. Because those ideas can help you get to a good, resource-rich institutional environment. Your ideas can help you cultivate a rich, productive collaboration network that will enable you to be successful over time. For example, a paper that I wrote, looking at the composition and size of collaboration networks and how, once you control for differences between men and women in the way they construct and maintain these different kinds of collaboration networks, productivity differences and impact differences essentially go away. I mean, that's kind of fascinating — that the social network that underlies science ends up being the thing that creates many of the disparities that we superficially see in the ecosystem of scientific research."

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Today I interview Bob Falconer about his new book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Falconer’s book is the result of a decade-long journey to understand a phenomenon that raises questions not only about how we, as a contemporary Western culture, understand ourselves. It’s also a challenge to the limits of how we understand—the models of self and mind that we assume to be true. In The Others Within Us, Falconer offers a paradigm-shifting vision of what it means to be human and how therapists who work within the model of Internal Family Systems can help to relieve human suffering. Falconer offers both a methodology for therapists as well as an intellectual and transcultural history of the farther reaches of our inner worlds. Falconer himself is a long-time practitioner and trainer of Internal Family Systems (or IFS) and has previously co-written a book with the founder of the IFS model, Richard Schwartz, entitled Many Minds, One Self. Enjoy my conversation with Bob Falconer.

Show notes:

* Interview with Richard Schwartz

* Interview with Tanya Luhrmann

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In her groundbreaking and timely book Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (MIT Press, 2020), distinguished art historian Pamela M. Lee poses fundamental questions about how the rise of the “think tank” in the mid-20th century has challenged, and indeed must challenge, our understandings of aesthetics, political economy, scholarly knowledge production, and war. A conceptually rich and prolifically sourced work, Think Tank Aesthetics shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, and transporting the reader from Santa Monica, California, to Vienna, to Santiago de Chile, Pamela Lee maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today’s pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia’s science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee reflects on what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita and Professor of Managerial Communication and Work and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, talks about her classic and award-winning 1989 book, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Johns Hopkins University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. 

Control Through Communication tells the fascinating story of how corporations came to adopt modern communications systems, including typewriters, filing cabinets, card catalogs, memos, and reports. Over the past twenty years, the book has been hugely influential in history, communications, and media studies. Yates and Vinsel also talk about how Yates came to move from literature to business history and organization studies, what it was like working as a woman in a business school in the 1980s, how she managed to have a dual writing career in history and business school journals, and much more.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

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There is the common saying, “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Are there any discernible patterns in history, and if so, what are these patterns? These are the questions addressed in Dave LePoire’s Time Patterns in Big History: Cycles, Fractals, Waves, Transitions, and Singularities (2020). Among the issues addressed in this book are the various forms of patterns and dynamics that occur within history when examined at the most macro-level scale (the field of Big History) but also the importance of studying the nature of complex adaptive systems.

Dave LePoire researches, develops, and applies science principles in environmental issues, Big History evolutionary trends, and particle scattering. He has a BS in Physics from CalTech, a PhD in Computer Science from DePaul, and over 30 years of experience at Argonne National Laboratory in the development of scientific analyses, software, training, and modeling. His research interests include Big History synergistic trends among energy, environment, organization, and information.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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In this episode Chris Gondek interviews Ed Finn, author of the new book What Algorithms Want. Tune in for an interesting discussion on algorithm disconnect revolving around things humans regularly use, like Siri. And listen in for a definition of the phrase "culture machines".

We depend on--we believe in--algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations--the marriage vow, the shaman's curse--do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm--in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem"--has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.

Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.

If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

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