Before defining and exploring what a meeting of anarchism and cybernetics might mean for radical politics, I need to first elaborate on the two central areas of interest of this book: organisation and communication. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Norbert Wiener (1961) defined cybernetics as the science of control and communication. As Chapter 3 will make clear, control, in this context, does not refer to top-down command but to a more horizontal process of self-organisation. As such, in this chapter, I will explore the question of control in anarchism by discussing how anarchism has developed as a theory of organisation and what this means for participatory and democratic structures of decision making in practice. For anarchism, organisation entails creating effective political structures that preserve both the autonomy of individuals and that of the different parts that constitute the organisational whole. Importantly, this is an attempt to respond to an anarchist analysis of the ills of society, which are understood as resulting from capitalist economic exploitation and centralised, authoritarian domination. Communication comes into this picture in so far as organisation and decision making within it necessitates platforms by means of which individuals and groups can share information and collectively shape the world around them. As I will highlight, horizontal, networked forms of communication, in which everyone can communicate with everyone else, are considered a necessary condition for the effectiveness of anarchist organisation. Over the last three decades, internet and digital media, such as social media platforms, have been increasingly linked to this conception of organisation and communication and will play a key role in how they are examined in this chapter and throughout the rest of this book.

Anarchism as a theory of organisation

The vision of anarchism predominant in the public imagination is often one of disorder and chaos. In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, the anarchist is depicted as a bomb-throwing assassin, a provocateur acting in the name of terror and mayhem. Across the mainstream political spectrum, it is common to see individuals being labelled as anarchists if they are seen to be disregarding appropriate behaviour, perhaps with a view to personal gain above all else.