I think the people for which Cybernetics will make the most sense are people who work in vulnerability research and exploit development. This systems theory fits very well with a lot of their findings and methodology.
I guess the fundamental difference from modeling is that even though you might try on occasion to reduce things to a formal model and reason about things in that formal model, you don’t really believe in it. You know the real thing is “alive” and that the information that is removed to model whatever process you are concerned with, will contain data that is essential and even more importantly: you know that there is essential data that has been removed that you don’t even know is essential.
Basically any field where you have acknowledged that the systems you are concerned with are complex and might never be fully understood, but where you still have stuff to do and you work with the knowledge that these systems are adaptive and might have emergent behavior. And that poking in one place might have unknown consequences. Where the primary tools are around monitoring and feedback to detect and diagnose new behaviors. And to manipulate these complex networks of stuff to do the thing you want, all the while knowing that it might very well also do something completely different and probably not desired.
As a programmer, it’s funny to read about people believing in their models. It’s a very junior developer thing to do. Senior folks don’t. They do their best and then they observe. And even more interestingly: if they don’t see unintended consequences of significant changes, they become suspicious.
I started reading “The Unaccountability Machine” which is actually quite interesting. I don’t know what I think about the subject matter, but it touches on a lot of things I’ve thought about over the years. It seems to describe a different economic model, not capitalism and not communism, but a systems theory field called “Cybernetics”. For some reason it’s like I asked someone: explain economics to me like I’m a programmer. And now my brain is slowly reworking itself to understand economics like I would understand a program. It feels very unnatural as a human having grown up in this *waves vaguely at the world* but it is the first time I am starting to feel that it makes sense. It’s still completely wrong, of course. I fundamentally disagree with some extremely axiomic parts of capitalism, but I suddenly might not end up with a parse error. https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112626658364328553
I guess everyone probably needs to get stuff explained in a way that ties in with the things they already know. I’m sure this probably is a whole field in pedagogy.
Also, even if I kind of grew up in this, I hadn’t really thought about it for years. But one of the big things Latin America saw in this period were dictatorships brought about by large international corporations (often backed by the US) that preferred a “strong leader” so that they could extract the country’s resources in peace without being bothered by the pesky people who lived there. Ref the expression Banana Republic.
I have been sidetracked into what is a side quest in the book. A strange electronic system set up in Chile under Allende before the dictatorship. I was looking on Wikipedia and found this podcast: https://the-santiago-boys.com/ imagine grafana dashboards and data driven decisions meets socialism and… Star Trek aesthetics.
The US had their hand in pretty much every single military dictatorship in Latin America, this included money (remember Iran-Contras?), military training and supplies (everything to equip your friendly military dictatorship) and running disinformation campaigns.
@forteller like others have said, to survive a reboot you need some way to come back up. That kind of mechanism is called “persistence” - these kinds of vulnerabilities have become progressively harder to find in phone OSs, so the price for a good one (with an exploit) can be in the millions of dollars range. But if they are found they could potentially be fixed by the vendor. So they are used carefully. Otherwise it’s money out the window. So unless you are a high value target they probably won’t risk using it for you. And without persistence, reboot will clear it. Of course you have all sorts of spyware you (or someone with access to your phone) might’ve installed on purpose, but that’s another matter.
@forteller tech people often forget about intimate partner abuse. But protecting against someone who is regularly in physical proximity to your devices is a whole other thing. Often requiring many layers of protection, because it might not be safe to refuse them access. Another reason why the Microsoft Recall thing is an absolute dumpster fire. And a reason to not have a windows machine if they do release it. “Opt-in” isn’t opt-in if you are not safe to refuse.
Me to my course attendees: As you can see iPhone/Android persistence vulnerabilities are the most expensive, so if you reboot your phone regularly you’ll probably be fine. They probably won’t waste that on you.
I hope Americans are making at least some preparations for living under fascism. I mean. Just in case. Bookies are apparently giving equal odds? Seems reasonable to be prepared.