I participate in the Vol. 4, Núm. 2 (2016) of the Magazine Ausart dedicated to Artistic Practices, soft technologies and social machines with an article about the powers and threats of cybernetics as the new social science and its ontological presuppositions; the axiomatic of the system. You can read the full article here: Blandas Máquinas de Guerra (just spanish version).
ABSTRACT
Cybernetics has taken over from the technical and disciplinary social technologies that characterized the social machines in the productivist capitalism until the XVIII and XIX century. Through simultaneous control of the individual and the collective, singularizing the information and redistributing ubiquitously the control points, observation and surveillance throughout the social body, the new network era facilitates behaviors and prevent any accident in the same analytical and axiomatic operation that thus always justified itself, without the possibility of being at the same time controlled, analyzed. An all-one-machine threatens to be implemented as all-one-possible against chaos; for every body, affection, folk, singularity … The speech for the use and development of soft technologies only partly opposed to this logic; because otherwise it is also part of it. Perhaps to break this loop is necessary to clarify the issues that within the movement itself respond the problematizations already expressed in the criticism that precede us.