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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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.

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As I slowly settle into 2023 — reflecting on the blur that was 2022 — I can’t help but think about the complex problems (aka big messes!) we face at every turn: from increasingly devastating manifestations of the climate emergency, to the ubiquitous homelessness crisis, to the perplexing challenge of accessing a family physician in prosperous regions such as British Columbia, Canada. At the same time I am buoyed by the promise of Systems Thinking. Systems practices can take many forms and have the potential to inform — and guide us through — sensible, comprehensive and creative problem-solving.

Here on this channel, we have explored some of the origins of systems and cybernetics by talking to knowledgeable experts from across the globe. Today’s systems thinkers and practitioners are building upon a rich tradition, and are activating systems lineages in incredibly interesting ways. I’ve recently been drawn to works that highlight the application of systems — especially those with intriguing connections to other disciplines. The book that is the subject of this episode does just that by exploring the intersection of systems and design thinking. Design Journeys for Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design (Bis Publishers, 2022) is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems.

Authors Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael describe how systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes. They describe the function of design as “system sensemaking” and using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.

A little bit about the authors of Design Journeys for Complex Systems:

Dr. Peter Jones teaches systemic design and health service design in the MDes programs at Toronto’s OCAD University, is a co-founder of the Systemic Design Association. Kristel Van Ael is a business partner at Namahn, a humanity-centered design agency based in Brussels, and is lead author of the Service Design and Systemic Design toolkits.

It was a pleasure to talk to Peter and Kristel. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies.

First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists who proposed a cybernetic computer system that claimed to predict conflicts before they happened. With this information, US policy makers could usher in a new age of peace and stability (and forever ensure a US-dominated global order). The project never accomplished everything it set out to do, but it is now being resurrected behind closed doors by Lockheed Martin. It's a techno-utopian dream of mathematical certainty in an uncertain world.

Then, why not cyber-socialism? In Salvador Allende's Chile, they were building a cybernetic computer network that connected factories to state planners. It seems technocratic, but these cyber-revolutionaries saw it as anything but. The short-lived Cybersyn Project promised using science to develop a more rationally-ordered economy. However, it also promised to guarantee the freedom and autonomy of workers. The project was destroyed in the brutal coup of 1973. However, did it work, and is it a dream worth resurrecting?

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International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond.

Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of human experts, the novel deployment of Ross Ashby’s theory of “ultrastability” to describe China’s supposed resistance to modernization, information aesthetics within a new rising tide of advertising and market activity, and much, much more.

All of this combines to a reveal a China after Mao, vigorously employing the theoretical tools of cybernetics to, not only re-configure its socio-political image on a national scale, but to actually craft a new post-socialist subjectivity at the scale of the individual citizen. Illustrating the profound impacts of, and reactions to, these efforts through provocative samplings from Chinese literature, film, and popular culture writ large, Liu manages, in the words of Oxford’s Margaret Hillenbrand to “entirely reconfigure our understanding of the media landscape in 1980’s China."

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Listeners who have tuned in to my most recent episodes here on Systems and Cybernetics will be familiar with what seems be a current running theme. So, as I grapple with what it takes to bring systems thinking to life, I couldn't help but be intrigued when I came across Systems Inspired Leadership: How to Tap Collective Wisdom to Navigate Change, Enhance Agility, and Foster Collaboration (CRR Global, 2021). The book's authors Marita Fridjhon and Frank Uit de Weerd start by acknowledging that today’s twenty-first-century leaders face tremendous pressure in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, where traditional leadership models have become outdated and ineffective.

Systems Inspired Leadership (SIL) is a powerful alternative for modern leaders. Instead of a top-down, leader-knows-all style that results in stress, pressure, and anxiety, SIL offers a fresh, proven approach for achieving optimal results for organizations. With meaningful collaboration at its core, SIL taps the collective wisdom of the system rather than telling people what to do, and builds shared leadership at all levels of the organization.

I recently had a chance to talk to Marita Fidjhorn, co-author of Systems Inspired Leadership, as well as co-owner and CEO of CRR Global and mentor to an ever-growing community of practitioners in the field of relationship systems work. We spent of most of our time going deep on what it takes to “create from the wisdom of the system rather than react”; this is much of what it means to practice systems inspired leadership. Marita is an expert in and is passionate about relationship systems—and asserts strongly that the kind of leadership needed to address today's "wicked problems' requires a deep Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI), including the vital acknowledgement that "relationship systems are in a constant state of emergence" (one of the 5 RSI principles described in depth in the book).

This episode could have been much longer—Marita and I barely scratched the surface. I encourage any listener interested in the intersection of systems and leadership to have a listen, then read the book for a deeper dive into areas we didn't have time to get to. Here's a little something from the book as an invitation:

“Part of the challenge of being a systems inspired Leader is to hold awareness of the nature and flow of systemic evolution. What wants to be left alone or to be put to rest? What is viable and wants to grow. These are the moments to remember that leadership is a role that belongs to the system".

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I recently caught up with the very busy David Erlichman, co-founder and coordinator of the Converge network (www.converge.net), about his fantastic book Impact Networks: Creating Connection, Sparking Collaboration, and Catalyzing Systemic Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). Solving complex problems like climate change or homelessness demands intense collaboration between diverse organizations and individuals. In his book, David argues that a network approach combines the strategic rigor and agility of modern organizations with the deep connection and shared purpose of communities.

Drawing on his experience working with over fifty impact networks over the past decade, David describes how to cultivate a network mentality. He then goes deeply into the five Cs of creating impact networks: * clarify purpose and principles * convene the people * cultivate trust * coordinate actions * collaborate for systems change. Given the increasing urgency of the issues we face, impact networks have never been more essential.

What I love about this book—and what I enjoyed so much about our conversation—is the opportunity for exploring the potential of human networks (and networks of networks!) to bring about significant systemic change. On the relationship between systems and networks, David writes that "the networks that underlie systems—organizational, social, planetary—have a huge influence on how healthy and effective these systems are". I enjoyed getting to ask David about his thoughts on network leadership—and what it means for this work to be grounded in the wisdom of living systems.

Throughout this rich and highly useful book, David points to some valuable resources within the Converge Network Toolkit. I've checked them out and suggest you do too! You can find them here.

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