The discussion, thus far in the book, has focused on the functions of self-organisation in anarchist cybernetics. These discussions cover one major aspect of how control is understood in cybernetics (and the anarchist cybernetics I outline in this book), not as domination but as a way of understanding how self-organisation facilitates effective responses to complexity. In Norbert Wiener's original framing of cybernetics, control was one side of understanding how selforganisation operates. The other side was communication. Beer put it similarly when he wrote (1974: 26) that there are three basic tools for coping with complexity and variety: ‘the computer, teleprocessing, and the techniques of the science of effective organization’. It is to the former of these, covered under Wiener's use of ‘communication’, that I turn to in both this and the following chapter.

Earlier, I characterised the nature of communication in the kind of networks that are central to anarchist forms of organisation as many-to-many communication. This refers to the type of networks in which anyone can share information with anyone else. Instead of communication being about two actors speaking to each other in relative isolation (one-to-one communication) or a single actor or small select group broadcasting a message to a larger audience (one-to-many communication), the communication processes of interest in this discussion of anarchist cybernetics are ones that maintain a level of horizontality and equality in terms of opening up both opportunities to speak and to be listened to (many-to-many communication). Understanding communication in this way, as a web or network with limited structural hierarchies, is something that is closely linked to cybernetics. It is an idea that, as I discussed in Chapter 2, does not necessitate the kind of radial, anarchist organisation this book is concerned with, but that has nonetheless become intimately connected to how communication is understood in such organisational contexts, largely as a result of the potential it has for minimising structural hierarchy. As that earlier discussion illustrated, the concept of many-to-many, networked communication has also shaped how we understand the ways in which social media platforms might be able to assist anarchist organising.