As the previous chapter highlighted, the idea of participatory and democratic self-organisation is at the centre of how radical left politics has developed in recent years, as witnessed both in how the Occupy camps and the related mobilisations of 2011 were structured, and in the role social media and other digital platforms have played in these and other forms of organising. And as we have seen, this type of approach already has an established position in anarchism's prefigurative account of politics and of self-organisation. It is through the concept of selforganisation that I want to draw a connection between anarchism, on the one hand, and the field of organisational cybernetics, on the other. In the introductory chapter, I briefly discussed the meaning of the term cybernetics (importantly, including a discussion of what it does not mean), and outlined some of the core features that make cybernetics sit particularly well alongside anarchism, even if that might initially appear to be an odd relationship. In this chapter, I will attempt to draw out these common features in more detail and ultimately present an initial picture of anarchist cybernetics, as a concept central to animating the discussions that follow in the book. This is a task that involves exploring aspects of the technical side of cybernetics, hopefully in ways that make its relevance for questions of social and political organisation obvious. At the heart of this conversation between anarchism and cybernetics is the idea of the Viable Systems Model as articulated by Stafford Beer, one of the key figures in the history of cybernetics I draw on in this book.

One possible history of cybernetics

In a book of this length, where the focus is on extrapolating the connections between cybernetics and anarchism and exploring what these might mean for radical forms of organisation, recounting the history of cybernetics in any great depth is not going to be possible. There are other books that do just that, and I will point the reader towards them at various points, particularly in this chapter. It is worth emphasising that there is not one agreed upon history of cybernetics; rather, cybernetics is best understood through multiple histories, each in their own way influenced by the contexts in which they were written, including the various influences of the social and political cleavages of the post-World War Two era.