The Blog
Entry #3 - Reflection on Baraka and Beer
02/02/2025This week, I read 2 different works: Amiri Baraka's “Technology & Ethos” and Stafford Beer's lecture "What is Cybernetics”. (This blog post is a little late because I was sick last week, sorry!)
Baraka’s essay explores Eurocentrism in mainstream technology and, similar to American Artist’s Black Gooey Universe, asks the reader to imagine alternative technology free from these Eurocentric values. One important point that Baraka makes is that “machines are an extension of their inventor-creators.” Even though this essay was written over 50 years ago, it is especially important to consider this as artificial intelligence models are developed and trained in the present day. Who is writing the code for these models? What data are they being trained on? Who produced that data? More often than not, these models project the eurocentric values and conveniences of their white creators and the data that the AI models were trained on.
Beer’s lecture at the University of Valladolid in Spain establishes a definition of cybernetics and how that definition is applied to systems in our society. Contrary to popular beliefs, the definition of cybernetics doesn’t specifically apply to complicated machinery or robots, but rather it is the study of how systems, mechanical or otherwise, are controlled and how the parts within that system communicate with each other.
Beer outlines the origins of the word cybernetics; it comes from a Greek word meaning to steer or to have complete, constant control over a ship’s rudder. One way to achieve this control is through the creation of ultrastability, which is the proactive organization of multiple, redundant failsafes within a system to keep it from stopping or failing. Ultrastability also means that the viability of a system is prioritized at all costs. One more statute that Beer establishes is that “A system is what it does.” With these definitions of cybernetics and ultrastable systems in mind, Beer examines the September 11th, 2001 attacks and how the cybernetic western capitalist system led to these attacks and the following retaliation from the West in the Middle East. The attacks actuated shock and awe across the entirety of the United States, and the fear this generated was used as the grounds for retaliation. In reality, the attacks were actually a result of prior western interference and capitalist exploitation in the Middle East (most notably the Iran-Contra affair and the Gulf War).
A system is what it does, and the ruling class’s active decisions that keep the capitalist system ultrastable and viable often comes at the expense of the working class and to those exploited in countries the system deems inferior. Again, ultrastability means keeping a system viable at all costs, and in this case, “all costs” includes the cost of countless lives and the exploitation of resources, mostly oil, for the benefit of western powers. September 11th, and the retaliatory war in Afghanistan that followed are both consequences of the capitalist system and the wealthy ruling class, who are in constant control of the system, doing what the system is designed to do: exploiting the poor as a means to make the wealthy exponentially richer.